SMU Assistant Professor Bussarawan ‘Puk’ Teerawichitchainan is studying
the impact of societal and policy changes in Southeast Asia on its people.
In the last twenty years, a wave of societal and
policy changes have transformed many parts of Southeast Asia. The resulting
impact on the health and well-being of individuals and households in this
region has been profound.
Assistant Professor Bussarawan “Puk”
Teerawichitchainan from the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of
Social Sciences is particularly interested in the intersection of family
demography and sociology, population health, life course and aging, and social
stratification in the region.
Her early research focused on inter-generational
relations and family-related behaviours in Southeast Asia. In Malaysia,
Thailand and Indonesia, she looked at how economic development has affected
divorce trends. In Vietnam, she studied how policy unintentionally constructed
a new category of female household headship, and how the practice of marriage
payment (such as dowry and bride price) has changed in the past four decades.
The military’s influence on the Vietnamese population
An active area of interest by Dr. Teerawichitchainan
is the influence of the military on the Vietnamese population. The research was
motivated by her interest in how early life events and social institutions
shape life course trajectories. During a year-long fellowship in Vietnam in the
early 2000s, she found remnants of the American War (as it is referred to in
Vietnam) still lingering.
“Many of the middle-aged and older people I spoke to
told me anecdotal stories about hardship and their time in the military. The
evidence was based primarily on memoirs and narratives,” she said. “The
military is a potentially transforming social institution that tends to engage
people in their early adulthood and can have significant short- and
long-ranging effects on veterans’ social, economic, and health outcomes.
Vietnam provides a particularly illustrative setting to address this research
topic.”
With its involvement in continuous wars, Vietnam is
considered one of the most highly mobilised societies in contemporary history.
Yet, little empirical data is available on how the war has affected the
Vietnamese population. The paucity of research on the impact of war from the
Vietnamese perspective motivated Dr. Teerawichitchainan to focus on the
country.
“War has a long-term effect, and Vietnam has been
under-researched which is why I’m interested in studying it,” she said.
For her PhD dissertation, Dr. Teerawichitchainan
examined the extent to which military service affected the socio-economic
transition of northern Vietnamese men into adulthood. She pursued her studies
using statistical analyses and a mixed-method approach combining
population-level surveys with fieldwork and interviews.
In the summer of 2010, Dr. Teerawichitchainan
collaborated with Associate Professor Kim Korinek from the University of Utah’s
Sociology Department, as well as researchers from the Vietnam Academy of Social
Science, on a pilot study of the long-ranging impact of war on health and
well-being of northern Vietnamese population. Based on this pilot study, they
published an article in Social Science & Medicine that examined the
association between war involvement early in life and later-life physical and
mental health outcomes in northern Vietnam.
One interesting finding was that in northern Vietnam,
there was no significant difference in terms of health status at older age
between civilians and war veterans. This could be due to the all-encompassing
nature of war, in that even those who were civilians had a high chance of
experiencing trauma. Veterans may have also received a head start in social
mobility, as they were more likely to get state jobs during post-war years and,
through a variety of social networks gained during the service years, to become
entrepreneurs after Vietnam’s market reform. A forthcoming article by Dr.
Teerawichitchainan and Professor Korinek will delve into the effect of various
types of wartime trauma on health, and how individuals report their health
symptoms.
In collaboration with Professor Zachary Zimmer from
the University of California San Francisco, Dr. Teerawichitchainan and
Professor Korinek now plan to further the study by examining the dynamic
linkages between war, stress exposure and social relationships on health in
later adulthood within the ageing Vietnamese population. The longitudinal
dataset will couple social science and anthropometric measures such as blood
pressure, weight, height and grip strength.
“It is widely accepted that human behaviour is
influenced not just by the environment, but by one’s genetic programming as
well. With this in mind, we are interested in how stress exposure earlier in
one’s life course has long term health implications. Most of the existing
literature is based on developed countries. We need more understanding of how
people in developing countries adapt to trauma, and how they stay resilient,”
she said.
Health and wellbeing of Southeast Asia’s elderly
Dr. Teerawichitchainan’s emerging research agenda
involves cross-national comparative assessments of the health and wellbeing of
older persons in Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. She is collaborating with
Professor John Knodel, Research Professor Emeritus at the University of
Michigan’s Population Studies Centre, and Dr. Wiraporn Pothisiri, a lecturer at
the College of Population Studies at Chulalongkorn University, as well as
researchers from the three countries on these projects.
Dr. Teerawichitchainan notes that the survey of older
adults in Myanmar is the first of its kind.
“Because of the political situation in Myanmar, the
last census before the one to be conducted in 2014 was carried out in 1983.
Data from the last 30 years is not reliable. Our survey will help fill in gaps
of what we know of the population in Myanmar,” she said.
And it is her long-term goal to provide policy makers
in Southeast Asia with rigorous and comprehensive data-based evidence that
motivates Dr. Teerawichitchainan to carry out her projects.
“My hope is for my empirical work to help policy
makers when they design policies. That’s one of the contributions of social
demographers – to provide solid, evidence-based information that can guide
policy planning,” she said.
Dora Yip
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