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Assessing key considerations for burial practices, death and mourning in epidemics

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World
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SSHAP
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This Practical Approaches brief highlights key considerations for rapidly appraising burial/funerary practices and beliefs around death/dying during an epidemic. It provides guidance on the relevant social science knowledge required to adapt epidemic preparedness and response to the local context. By using this tool, an overview of local knowledge, meaning and practice will be gained, which can help inform programming related to death and burial.

Local social scientists or those in operational research roles embedded in an epidemic response should use this tool to gain a background understanding of the contextual aspects that shape vulnerability to a particular disease. This background can then serve to support the design of more specific social science research questions and tools for primary data collection as part of the epidemic response (e.g. community feedback mechanisms; Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices surveys).

Please note that these are guiding questions.
Beliefs and practices vary widely across cultures, so some questions may be more relevant than others in different contexts. Additionally, the nature of the disease itself will make some questions more relevant than others, for example the transmission pathways (contact, airborne, vector, etc.) of the pathogens will make particular issues, such as burials, more salient. Questions should be tailored to a particular context and disease.

Methodologies for use during remote context analysis

The following methods can be used for the rapid assessment of burial practices, death and mourning in the context of epidemic response:

• Desk review of relevant anthropological/ sociological literature to assess what we already know and provide critical evidence of knowledge gaps.

• Interviews with local relevant social scientists and humanitarian/development agencies to provide up-to-date information about social science research and community engagement initiatives.

• Stakeholder interviews in affected communities, community meetings and focus group discussions according to relevant social dimensions (age, gender, ethnicity, religion, income, etc.).

• Where possible, community walk-throughs, observations and other rapid ethnographic techniques.

This assessment should be used in tandem with exploring, together with stakeholders and communities, appropriate ways to adapt and react to the disease. It is not a mere analytical exercise, but rather an action-research one.
This assessment should be an integral part of an ethnographic context analysis (see SSHAP Practical Approaches briefs Rapid Remote Context Analysis Tool (RR-CAT) in Epidemics and Rapid Anthropological Assessments in the Field), which focuses on rapidly gathering information around an operational context (including population movement, livelihoods, and trade patterns)