The analysis and elimination of health disparities has reached the national
priority level. Calls for multilevel, multidisciplinary studies that integrate
biological, small-group, and system-level processes are common across the
National Institutes of Health (National Institutes of Health, 2000; Office of Behavioral
and Social Sciences Research, 2001). Research such as this is challenging because
it is difficult to grasp the mechanisms by which the phenomenon of culture (which
is system-level processes) becomes incorporated into community-, family-, and
individual-level patterning of illness experience and help seeking. To further complicate
this integration, these multiple levels are examined from different fields of
study. One recent initiative has suggested a new field called clinical social science
(Kleinman, Eisenberg, & Good, 2006), which synthesizes and translates social