A valid and reliable anthropological measurement must be culturally appropriate for a particular social setting. Justifying the appropriateness of a measurement often depends on the skill of the researcher in describing the ethnographic setting. This has resulted in valuable research, but it is difficult to systematize and lacks transparency.Here the authors present a measurement model for anthropology that links structured ethnographic methods-cultural domain analysis and cultural consensus analysis-to the assessment of individual behavior and personal beliefs. These procedures are illustrated with the concept of cultural consonance, or the degree to which an individual approximates in his or her own behavior or belief the shared cultural model in some domain. The concrete steps taken to develop measures of cultural consonance in four domains (lifestyle, social support, family life, and national characteristics) are described, and the reliability and validity of these measures are evaluated. This describes a measurement model for anthropology. This article describes the measurement of individual beliefs and behaviors relative to a particular cultural context. Formal hypothesis testing in anthro-

Cultural consonance is the degree to which individuals, in their own beliefs and behaviors, approximate widely shared cultural models. In previous research in Brazil and the United States we found that higher cultural consonance in the cultural domains of lifestyle and social support was associated with lower psychological distress. The aim of this paper is to expand on these results in two ways. First, the measurement of cultural consonance has been improved through a closer link of cultural domain analyses and survey research. Second, the number of domains in which cultural consonance has been examined has been expanded to include-along with lifestyle and social support-family life, national identity, and food. We found that cultural consonance in these five domains can be conceptualized as two latent variables of generalized cultural consonance, and that this generalized cultural consonance is associated with lower psychological distress. These results continue to support the usefulness of cultural consonance as a theoretical construct in the explanation of human social suffering.

The association of socioeconomic variables with poor health status has been widely observed, if not well understood, and cultural dimensions of socioeconomic differences have rarely been incorporated into research models. In this article, a cultural dimension of socioeconomic status is examined in a Brazilian city through the use of ethnographic and social survey techniques. It suggests that lifestyle, defined in terms of the relative ability to accumulate consumer goods and the adoption of associated behaviors, is an important component of socioeconomic differences. Further research using cultural consensus analysis, a structured ethnographic technique that may be used to study shared cultural knowledge, demonstrates significant consensus regarding the definition of the successful lifestyle. Then, using that culturally defined model of the successful lifestyle as the central tendency, an individual-level measure of approximation to that lifestyle was developed for a representative sample of 250 persons. This culturally defined measure of lifestyle was inversely associated with arterial blood pressure (beta = -.216, p < .01), depressive symptoms (beta = -.236, p < .01), and globally perceived stress (beta = -.358, p < .01); furthermore, it absorbed the explained variability in these outcomes that is associated with conventional socioeconomic variables (occupation, education, income). For arterial pressure, cultural consonance explained almost 10 percent of the differences in blood pressure between individuals; for the psychological outcome variables, cultural consonance explained between 10 percent and 20 percent of the differences between individuals. Finally, its statistical effects were independent of other socioeconomic, dietary, anthropometric, and psychosocial variables. These results suggest that an individual's approximation to the cultural ideal of lifestyle, his or her "cultural consonance," mediates the observed effects of socioeconomic variables on health status.

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