This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Psychiatry  • World Health  • Violence and Human Rights  • War  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: I would like to raise some questions about the methods used by Drs Pham, Weinstein, and Longman in their valuable study of the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.¹ Burundi has been described as Rwanda’s "twin neighbor."² In 1994 that country also suffered ethnically based violence with mass killings, displacements of populations, and major disruption.³ During a 1994 fact-finding mission in Burundi for Physicians for Human Rights,⁴ the level of insecurity was still considerable. We attempted to assess the perception and impact of past and current violence among ordinary citizens, using a short ad hoc questionnaire administered to 68 mothers in various areas of the country.

Our field experience showed that the administration of a questionnaire is not as straightforward in Burundi—and presumably also in Rwanda—as in the United States or Europe. Language is a first, obvious complication. As most people in Burundi and Rwanda only . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Benoit Nemery, MD, PhD
ben.nemery@med.kuleuven.ac.be
Departments of Toxicology and Occupational Medicine
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Leuven, Belgium

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Trauma and PTSD Symptoms in Rwanda—Reply
Phuong N. Pham, Harvey M. Weinstein, and Timothy Longman
JAMA. 2004;292(17):2082-2083.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Trauma and PTSD Symptoms in Rwanda: Implications for Attitudes Toward Justice and Reconciliation
Phuong N. Pham, Harvey M. Weinstein, and Timothy Longman
JAMA. 2004;292(5):602-612.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT