Duke University Press Metrics: What Counts in Global Health (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)

This volume's contributors evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and consequences of using quantitative metrics in global health. Whether analyzing maternal mortality rates, the relationships between political goals and metrics data, or the links between health outcomes and a program's fiscal support, the contributors question the ability of metrics to solve global health problems. They capture a moment when global health scholars and practitioners must evaluate the potential effectiveness and pitfalls of different metrics—even as they remain elusive and problematic.   Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Susan Erikson, Molly Hales, Pierre Minn, Adeola Oni-Orisan, Carolyn Smith-Morris, Marlee Tichenor, Lily Walkover, Claire L. Wendland Review "[T]his volume is insightful, engaging and impressive. . . . I highly recommend this enlightening and ethnographically rich book. It is a must read for both medical anthropologists and global health practitioners, and would make an excellent addition to the reading list for graduate classes in medical anthropology or global health." Author: Lauren Wallace Source: Anthropology Book Forum "[T]his volume will hopefully help stimulate policymakers and researchers to think seriously about whether playing the numbers game is sufficient, either for patients or their clinicians." Author: Thomas Christie Williams Source: LSE Review of Books " Metrics is a thoughtful book that powerfully maps some of the problems that accompany the effort to ground GH in metrics. It is obligatory reading for anyone trying to understand contemporary world health." Author: Tobias Rees Source: Bulletin of the History of Medicine "Metrics offers a lucid, revealing, and sometimes unnerving tour of global health’s quantitative terrain. Its authors take pains to emphasize that they are not opposed to measurement. Rather, they argue for the need to recognize the limits of numbers and the continuing significance of other forms of knowing. From the perspective of medical anthropology this is a vital book." Author: Peter Redfield Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly "Adams’ edited book makes a crucial contribution not only to those debates but also to the anthropology and sociology of evidence and measurement and to the social studies of science and medical humanities. Quite importantly, Metrics opens up a new field of inquiry and prompts us to think about how other kinds of metrics and ‘storied numbers’ are produced, experienced and valued and how they could be (re)imagined in the future." Author: Angela Marques Filipe Source: Sociology of Health and Illness "Taken together, this volume offers a useful primer on the role of metrics in shaping the work of global health actors at the macro, meso, and micro levels. The individual case studies offer theoretically and empirically rich examples that would be useful for scholars working in this area and for inclusion in an upper-level undergraduate class." Author: J. Lynn Gazley Source: Contemporary Sociology Review "A stunning benchmark volume, in measured tones of 'applause and caution,' about the statistical methods that increasingly govern and provide investment opportunities for health interventions, poverty reduction, and much else in the postcolonial world. These new biopolitical economies displace national decision making and often their own humanitarian goals, using tropes of 'suffering individuals' as 'residuals' as symbolic capital to be reinvested and to give numbers affective credibility. But such stories can also expose the fabrications and distortions that the drive for statistical certainty produces, and explain why so many well-intentioned 'evidence-based' interventions fail. Lucidly explaining global health financialization, the volume calls for alternative metrics, complementary methods, and less reliance on abstracted indices and proxies."   Author: Michael M. J. Fischer, author of Source: Anthropological F