Cultural concepts of distress in Khoekhoe: A corpus of interviews on mental health issues and recovery

Abstract

This corpus includes 26 interviews with Khoekhoe speakers in November 2020 collected in six different towns in Namibia. Three ‘idioms of distress’ were identified by the research team. To answer our research question, we employed an exploratory qualitative study design. Understanding explanatory models, or culturally determined beliefs about illness and suffering, has been determined to be a critical aspect of culturally sensitive assessment and treatment and many researchers have used explanatory models to explore idioms of distress. Items in the semi-structured interview guide were loosely based on Kleinman’s work on explanatory models of illness focusing on participant’s perceptions about the etiology, course, and impact of Tsûsa !Nae!khais xa hâ!nâ/mâ! nâ/=/gâ!nâhe hâ. Moreover, Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological framework was used to conceptualize the influence of meso-and macro-level contexts on mental health and therefore, inspired questions about stigma or how community members perceived people suffering from Tsûsa !Nae!khais xa hâ!nâ/mâ!nâ/=/ gâ!nâhe. We chose syndromes of interest to explore further. Because terms for the syndromes were not translatable into Khoekhoe, and because we were interested in local, emic, conceptualizations, we identified commonly-used idioms in Khoekhoe that appeared highly related to the content of interest. We then used semi-structured interviews with Khoekhoe speakers from around the country to then explore the conceptualization of these syndromes, including symptoms, etiology, course, community reactions and treatment approaches. The repository includes files in thee formats: .docx, .eaf, and .txt. .docx files are edited versions of the interviews. .eaf and .txt files both contain unedited versions of the interviews. The .eaf file format. It is the native annotation format used by ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator), a tool for annotating audio and video recordings. It is an XML-based file that stores time-aligned annotations linked to specific segments of audio or video. .txt files ontains an export of the ELAN/.eaf files, they include unedited transcription of English and Khoekhoe interview segments and a translation into English of the interview segments in Khoekhoe, as well as a time stamp of each segment. In all files Speaker A is the interviewed participant, Speaker B is Interview 2/Interpreter (Sylvanus Job), and Speaker C is Interviewer 1 (either Prof. Amber Gayle Thalmayer or Dr. Elizbeth Shino, as indicated in the .docx files)