Stephen Eyre, PhD
is a psychological anthropologist
with methodological specialization in exploratory interviewing and ethnography.
His research focuses on population-specific cultural knowledge related
to sex and romantic relationships and on the role of such knowledge in
determining sexual risk taking. Dr. Eyre has sought to document cultural
knowledge related to sex and romantic relationships in African American,
Chinese American, and Mexican American as well as gay, bisexual, and transgender
adolescent populations. Dr. Eyre is currently Principal Investigator of
an NICHD R01 study seeking to identify cultural models of sexual and romantic
relationships among African American and Mexican American adolescents,
examining differences associated with race-ethnicity, gender, and social
context. Dr. Eyre is also currently Principal Investigator of two studies
developing and evaluating interventions that utilize discussion of youth-authored
videos to delay sexual onset of 13 to 14 year old adolescents and to reduce
sexual risk-taking of 16 to 17 year old adolescents. Dr. Eyre has also
conducted ethnographic studies of gay/bisexual youth in the Castro District
of San Francisco and of African American gay/bisexual as well as transgender
youth in Oakland, California. The long-term objective of Dr. Eyre’s
research is to design AIDS interventions based on sociocultural knowledge
which will reduce HIV infection among the highest risk adolescent groups
such as African Americans, Latinos, and gay males. Dr. Stephen Eyre is
an Associate Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics and an Associate Adjunct
Professor of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at UCSF. He received
a B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from Yale University, a Masters and
Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, and
was a Fulbright scholar in Papua New Guinea before joining the UCSF faculty
in 1991.
Dr. Eyre’s current research with African American and Mexican American
adolescents is based on the construct of the cultural model. A cultural
model defines procedures for behavior in and/or offers explanations of
social situations, making the behavior of others intelligible.. In Dr.
Eyre’s approach, cultural model data is gathered using Vernacular
Term Interviewing (VTI). In VTI a general domain (e.g. – sexual
and romantic relationships) is set but the informant has freedom to introduce
specific topics and to elaborate these topics without being led by the
interviewer. VTI seeks to elicit theorization of topics by asking informants
directly about terms and concepts they have introduced. The techniques
of VTI aim to stimulate generalization and abstract reasoning, bringing
culture into focus. Once VTI interview data is gathered, Vernacular Concept
Analysis (VCA) is used to describe the cultural models of members of a
specific social group. These methods are of particular value as health
science research tools because they can render explicit the theories that
adolescents of a given social group use to interpret their social world
and to guide their behavior, including their health behavior.
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