Abstract
Like many applied anthropologists who have worked for 20 or so years in public health and drug addiction research, I have sat in more than my fair share of overly quantitative presentations on the "behaviors" of drug users that dominate conferences in the field. Like my peers in these circumstances, I am often frustrated not because the models, tables, graphs, figures, correlations, p-values, or odds ratios presented are difficult to understand or because I have an aversion to basic science, epidemiology, or survey research. Rather, it is because the numbers rarely reflect the histories, concepts, relationships, interactions, and other nuances that have shaped my fieldwork experience. The highly personal narratives of participants framed by equally complex social environments are not visible in the numbers. To epidemiologists and other like-minded health researchers, the numbers are the narrative and all that is required for informing and evaluating theories, models, interventions, treatment programs, or policy.
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