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We review ethnographic methods that allow researchers to assess distress in a culturally sensitive manner. We begin with an overview of standardized biomedical and psychological approaches to assessing distress cross-culturally. We then focus on literature describing the development of reliable and valid culturally sensitive assessment tools that can serve as complements or alternatives to biomedical categories and diagnostic frameworks. The methods we describe are useful in identifying forms of suffering—expressed in culturally salient idioms of distress—that might be misidentified by biomedical classifications. We highlight the utility of a cognitive anthropological theoretical approach for developing measures that attend to local cultural categories of knowledge and experience. Attending to cultural insider perspectives is necessary because expressions of distress, thresholds of tolerance for distress, expectations about stress inherent in life, conceptions of the good life, symptom expression, and modes of help-seeking vary across cultures.

Cultural consonance, or individual enactment of cultural models, is associated with lower depressive symptoms. This article incorporates individual agency into the cultural consonance model. Data were collected using mixed methods in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. Brazil is a unique setting for this research, given that personal agency is institutionalized in the practice ofo jeitinho(a distinctively Brazilian way of circumventing rules). Cultural consonance was measured relative to cultural models of life goals. A measure of a sense of personal agency combined scales of locus of control and frustration tolerance. Cultural consonance had a stronger association with depressive symptoms than individual agency. These results are also consistent with cultural consonance as a mediator of the association of agency and depressive symptoms. The implications for the conceptualization of culture and its role in mental health, and for the influence of psychological factors on culture, are discussed. [Brazil, agency, cultural consonance, depression]

The goal of assessing psychosocial stress as a process and outcome in naturalistic (i.e., field) settings is applicable across the social, biological, and health sciences. Meaningful measurement of biology-in-context is, however, far from simple or straightforward. In this brief methods review, we introduce theoretical framings, methodological conventions, and ethical concerns around field-collection of markers of psychosocial stress that have emerged from 50 years of research at the intersection of anthropology and human biology. Highlighting measures of psychosocial stress outcomes most often used in biocultural studies, we identify the circumstances under which varied measures are most appropriately applied and provide examples of the types of cutting-edge research questions these measures can address. We explain that field-based psychosocial stress measures embedded in different body systems are neither equivalent nor interchangeable, but this recognition strengthens the study of stress as always simultaneously cultural and biological, situated in local ecologies, social–political structures, and time.