Q+A: Eric Griffith, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associate within the Duke Center for the Study of Aging Postdoctoral Research Training Program
Eric E. Griffith joined the Cook Center as a Postdoctoral Associate in 2021 before joining the Duke Center for the Study of Aging Postdoctoral Research Training Program in 2023. He completed his dissertation fieldwork in central Mexico, focusing on the experiences of familial caregivers for people living with Alzheimer’s disease. Eric’s research interests include biocultural anthropology, dementia, cognitive aging, health disparities, and mixed methods research. As a postdoctoral fellow with the Cook Center, Eric is working on the NIH-funded project “The influence of religion/spirituality on Alzheimer’s Disease and its related dementias (ADRD) for African Americans. In 2024, his writing on community-engaged research with people living with dementia received a Publication of the Year Award from the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.
Dr. Griffith recently accepted an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology position at Utah State University, where he will start in the fall of 2025.
In this Q&A with Cook Center research associate Lucas Hubbard, Griffith shares his research interests and takeaways from his time on the job market.
I know you’ll be moving on from Duke this fall, but could you briefly describe your academic journey to working with Duke and the Cook Center?
I did a Bachelor’s of cultural anthropology at Boston University. I got a staff job at BU, working in the IT department. And while I was there, I decided that I would take advantage of the tuition remission and do a master’s, and I figured psychology was still social science-y, but what I perceived as more scientific. I did a master’s in psychology, focusing on neuropsychology, at BU, but at that point I learned that my thing was not necessarily sitting in a lab. Most psychology labs, you bring someone in and you’re interviewing them, or doing eye motion detector tests and those kind of things. But I liked the field work component of anthropology a lot, and so I wanted to combine ththe psychology side of having that scientific, neural basis for behavior with the field work and the cultural relativism of anthropology, and so I applied for and took a spot in a PhD program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
We call it bio-cultural anthropology. What that means is examining how biology and culture overlap to create, to create outcomes in humans, essentially, so like how our health conditions are co-created by both biology and culture, and how you can’t disentangle those two things. In spring 2021 I did a dissertation on Alzheimer’s disease caregiving and symptoms in the United States and Mexico. From there, Keisha [Dr. Keisha Bentley-Edwards] hired me to work on the race, religion and health project.
She had an administrative supplement that was specifically looking at a secondary data analysis of Alzheimer’s disease, using some national survey data. And so she hired me for that, because I had the dementia knowledge to get that done. Also, part of her research was to interview and do focus groups with faith leaders and congregation members about how religion influences health decisions for particularly cardiovascular disease health for black people in the south. So I took a lead role in conducting those along with Paul [Dr. Paul Robbins], and conducting those focus groups and interviews, and then transcribing and analyzing those data. We did two publications with the secondary data that are out, and then there’s a third one using the interview data that’s under review.
In August 2023, I took an NIH T32 training grant at The Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. The T32 allows you to focus on your own research. So it gives you a little bit more freedom. I’m working with Dr. Maria Marquis, analyzing neuro-cognitive outcomes for Hispanic people living in the United States. And this fall I’m moving on to, all the way back to, cultural anthropology, where I started.
What inspired you to start investigating these questions in your research?
One of the reasons why I keep coming back to the social science and anthropology side of things is because I like understanding what contributes to human variability—what is the wide range of human variation and understanding what the extreme ends of human experience can be. I think that’s really interesting from an evolutionary, biological, and cultural perspective. I’ve always liked playing in the anthropology world, because it considers how humans are created by both their genetics and their culture and so I think it gives us a better understanding of people all over the world, which then improves our science. Because we know from a clinical perspective, if you take a health inequities lens: If we don’t have good representation in our clinical research of the full range of human variation, then our clinical procedures don’t reflect what’s going to be most effective for all different types of people, and it’s going to exclude some people from effective interventions. So I think just from a scientific perspective, it’s really fascinating to consider the limits of how culture and biology can interact to create different outcomes for humans, both individually and culturally.
And then, I think, from a pragmatic standpoint, from an NIH funding standpoint, it’s really important to understand these things so that we can improve inclusion in our clinical practices, and also policy in the United States. So that’s why I’m drawn to medical anthropology. I feel like examining the systemic-level view of what leads to health outcomes gives us a better understanding of where those outcomes are coming from, and also how we could work together to create community partnerships that then speak to ways of helping people live healthier lives.
We don’t have a lot of researchers with anthropology backgrounds at the Cook Center. How does your training in that field and its methods aid in, and enhance, the Center’s interdisciplinary research?
So what I talked about in my job talk was how I tied together the two different paths of research work I did with Keisha. We have a secondary data analysis looking at how religious participation, using survey data, is associated with dementia outcomes. What we found in both of the analyzes that we’ve published is that folks—and this is exclusive to black Americans in the Health and Retirement Study data set—who attend religious services more often are less likely to have a dementia diagnosis.
The nuance to that finding is that’s not directional. That’s purely correlational. It’s cross-sectional. You look and ask people, How often do you go to church? And then you look, yes or no, do you have a dementia diagnosis? And then you control for some other variables. But the bottom line was, the folks who were going to church, to services more often, tended to be diagnosed with dementia less often. That’s interesting, but it opens up some questions about what that relationship is really saying. You can’t get from purely survey-based data, because you don’t know if the folks who have been diagnosed with dementia maybe are not included in church services, and so [their absence] is actually a result of the dementia. But on the flip side, it may be that folks who are going into services more often are maybe receiving some kind of social support, or other type of support that’s significant enough in their daily lives that it reduces the likelihood that they’ll develop dementia at all.
And in our analysis, we tied together some work by Tom Kitwood and John Swinton that speaks about personhood and people living with dementia, about the importance of being around others who share a common cultural framework with you—like a belief in a higher power and being in a community that could theoretically give you social ties that are strengthened.
But looking at cross-sectional, thousand-person surveys does not tell us about what’s going on in the churches. What I like about doing the interviews and focus groups to complement the surveys is that we find out a lot about how the church congregation and leadership are treating health questions for individuals, which can then give us insight into what that mechanism is, possibly that creates that correlation between church attendance and dementia. What we found, and this was not a dementia finding, but what we found related to mental illness, was that within the church, the individual congregation members are defining who is suffering from mental illness based on what is a cultural norm for them. We have quotes from congregation members saying, when you’re in a phone call with someone, you can really tell if they’re struggling more than the rest of us, if it’s not just they’re having trouble at work and their kids are misbehaving, but they’re having deeper problems. What that tells us is that individual congregation members are using interpersonal relationships to identify those folks, and then they are recommended for intervention from the faith leaders or from other congregation members.
In short, we can take those big picture views using survey data and also the on-the-ground, more culturally-engaged view from the interviews, and then we can draw parallels between the two.
What is one insight, or understanding, you’ll take from your time with the Cook Center?
I appreciate that it really fosters true interdisciplinary, intellectual conversation. I could see on the back end once we started having more events again, and you can see it now, when you walk around, there are postdocs and faculty members from a number of different departments. I’m the only anthropologist, and that speaks to the diversity of perspectives, because you have psychologists, economists, sociologists, and so forth. And so what I really appreciated was every time I went to a Cook Center event or a talk, there were questions coming from multiple different perspectives. Professor Darity is, of course, an economist, and so many of the Cook Center activities are based in economics, but I feel like the intellectual impact is extended well beyond economics. And they actually value those interdisciplinary collaborations. Those often get lip services at other institutions, but at the Cook Center, that’s a real thing when you walk around and talk to people.
It forces you to communicate better. If an economist asked me about my experiences doing field work about dementia in Mexico, and that how that could improve health policy in the United States, I can’t spend a lot of time talking about habitus and liminal states and all these, you know, all the social theory and heavy anthropology jargon that I might have in an anthropology journal. So it challenges me to create a common vocabulary. And I like to imagine it then challenges folks I’m talking to, also to drop their jargon.
I think that’s the value of those interdisciplinary conversations. You can spend some time making sure that people from different perspectives are finding effective ways to communicate, so that then you can have a better understanding of, in my case, of systemic influences on health.
As someone who has been a postdoctoral researcher for a few years, and has just navigated the postdoctoral job market, what advice do you have for recent PhDs and early-career researchers?
The publish or perish thing is true. I started getting interviews as soon as I had more publications on my CV. So spend your time writing. I think there’s a book, I forget what it was called, but the entire book can just be boiled down to: set aside a X number of minutes per day where you actually are writing something. I have trouble with focus sometimes, so I found that helpful for completing manuscripts, because there’s so much work and there’s so many hours, but 15 minutes is better than zero minutes. So don’t be afraid to work in 15-minute chunks.
The other thing that I think about is I didn’t ever go into this expecting to become a university professor. These cultural anthropology jobs are far and few between. It was not something I wanted to bank on, and so I made a conscious choice to make sure that I had a solid methodological toolkit. I do have experience writing quantitative papers, but I also have experience with feet-on-the-ground ethnographic methods, including interviews and focus groups. I was hired at Utah State, and the two classes they wanted me to teach were medical anthropology and introduction to ethnographic methods. So I think the fact that I took time learning how to use Stata, how to use NVivo, how to do qualitative data analysis, learning what grounded theory is, even if I don’t quite ever get to use real grounded theory, Having that methodological tool kit available to me made it so that, even if it wasn’t a tenure-track job, there would have been a job somewhere in the academy for me, because I would have the skills to do different types of analyzes, and there would be labs that are interested in those types of analysis.
What is a book, article, or idea that has significantly influenced your thinking, something that you would want to recommend to our readers?
The Comfort of Things by Daniel Miller. He’s a cultural anthropologist, but I’ve always found him really fascinating because he does a lot of writing about challenging you to make sure that you are not bringing your political perspective into your interpretation of the cultural value of objects. He writes about things like finding the significance of greeting cards. I think in the academy, it’s very easy to look at Hallmark greeting cards and say, What the heck are we doing here? These are just consumerist pieces of paper.
But he’ll write about how people go to the grocery store and they spend this amount of time looking for them and really, really think about what they’re choosing. And even though it’s formulaic, the formula then adds value, because everyone understands and has a common ground that you spent some time looking for the exact right card from this person, even if it’s a mass-produced, you know. piece of capitalism. That does not negate that there is emotional value for both the giver and the recipient of the card. And so that challenges someone who maybe take sa purely anti-consumerist view of culture, to see the value in culture in ways that maybe we would not anticipate, depending on what our overarching view is.
So that’s the type of researcher he is. The Comfort of Things gets into perspectives like that. He does an ethnographic study, and he includes a lot of object elicitation, which is when you pick up an object and ask someone in the household, Why is this important to you? What does this mean to you? And then he explains what he learned by asking people in their own houses what the objects that they keep mean to them, and why they keep those objects.
It’s more or less a book describing how and why people make meaning out of everyday household objects and how we shouldn’t overlook them how important those meanings are to people and to the cohesion of culture.
