Following environmental health disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Oil Spill, U.S. Gulf residents expressed concern regarding air quality. Women with children make many decisions that mitigate household air quality risks; however, research examining culture’s influence in their risk perception and the influence which this has on their behaviour is limited. In this article we examine the cultural connection between low-income women with children along the U.S. Gulf concerning the local threat of air quality. We used cultural consensus analysis to examine the perceptions of low-income, first-time pregnant women. We undertook an interview survey of 112 women living in Southeast Louisiana, USA between May 2014 and March 2015. In this article we examine if there was a shared (cultural) understanding among these women on how to manage air quality threats, evaluate what determined cultural sharing in the group, and explore what role cultural beliefs played in their intended household strategies. We found that although air quality was rarely discussed by the women in our study, we were able to identify two multi-centric cultural models of how these women sought to make sense of air quality issues. In one model they relied on their immediate social network of family and friends while in the other model they were willing to make use of official sources of information. These two models helped explain what measures these women planned to take to address air quality issues in and around their household. Our findings show that cultural norms permeate the assessment of risk in a community and that programmes designed to improve public health need to take into account the cultural context of the population.

继卡特里娜飓风和墨西哥湾溢油等环境健康灾难之后，美国墨西哥湾居民对空气质量表示担忧。有子女的妇女做出许多减轻家庭空气质量风险的决定；但是，研究文化对他们的风险感知的影响及其对行为的影响的研究是有限的。在本文中，我们探讨了美国海湾沿岸低收入妇女与儿童之间的文化联系，涉及当地的空气质量威胁。我们使用文化共识分析来检验低收入首次怀孕妇女的看法。我们对2014年5月至2015年3月间居住在美国路易斯安那州东南部的112名妇女进行了访谈。在本文中，我们研究了这些女性之间是否对如何应对空气质量威胁有共同的（文化）理解，评估了决定群体中文化共享的因素，并探讨了文化信仰在其预期的家庭策略中所起的作用。我们发现，尽管在我们的研究中女性很少讨论空气质量，但我们能够确定出两种多中心的文化模式来说明这些女性如何理解空气质量问题。在一种模式中，他们依靠家人和朋友的直接社交网络，而在另一种模式中，他们愿意利用官方的信息来源。这两个模型有助于说明这些妇女计划采取哪些措施来解决家庭内部和周围的空气质量问题。