Medicalization in Nepal: A Study of the Influence of Westernization on Defining Deviant and Illness Behavior in a Developing Country
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One point of debate in discussions of the modernization of developing societies concerns the effects of Westernization on how people in these societies see the world and develop a sense of meaning in light of rapid and often broad-sweeping social and cultural changes. Where Western culture has little influence, traditional and religious based ideologies that define “why people misbehave” dominate modes of thinking, and medicalized definitions of deviant behavior are absent (Conrad 1992).This study of 276 Nepali teachers investigates if definitions of deviant behavior may be influenced by encroaching Westernization. Subjects were presented with a scenario of a 12-year-old girl engaging in deviant behavior. Results indicate that those who were in agreement with certain Western values and cultural tastes were more likely to label the girl’s behavior as a mental illness and to refer her to a Western-style social agent for treatment rather than to a traditional Nepali helper. These findings lend tentative support to the notion that medicalization is a function of Western culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".