Strategic Authenticity and Voice: New Ways of Seeing and Being Seen as Young Mothers through Digital Storytelling

This paper presents the Ford Foundation-funded Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice project, which explores the subjective experience of structural violence and the ways young parenting Latinas embody and respond to these experiences. We prioritize uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. Existing programs and policies focused on these women fail to use relevant local knowledge and rarely involve them in messaging efforts. This paper offers a practical road map for rendering relevant and modifying notions of voice as a form of knowledge with the potential to disrupt authoritative knowledge. We present the context and method behind the four digital storytelling workshops that served as a venue for transforming assumptions about young parenting women and producing novel understandings of teen pregnancy and parenting. We end by suggesting an intervention for what we call “strategic authenticity” as it plays out in storytelling, meaning making, and voice, and implications for policy concerned with social justice and equity

Development and content validity of a patient reported outcomes measure to assess symptoms of major depressive disorder

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Although many symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) are assessed through patient-report, there are currently no patient-reported outcome (PRO) instruments that incorporate documented evidence of patient input in PRO instrument development. A review of existing PROs used in MDD suggested the need to conduct qualitative research with patients with MDD to better understand their experience of MDD and develop an evaluative instrument with content validity. The aim of this study was to develop a disease-specific questionnaire to assess symptoms important and relevant to adult MDD patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The questionnaire development involved qualitative interviews for concept elicitation, instrument development, and cognitive interviews to support content validity. For concept elicitation, ten MDD severity-specific focus group interviews with thirty-eight patients having clinician-confirmed diagnoses of MDD were conducted in January 2009. A semi-structured discussion guide was used to elicit patients' spontaneous descriptions of MDD symptoms. Verbatim transcripts of focus groups were coded and analyzed to develop a conceptual framework to describe MDD. A PRO instrument was developed by operationalizing concepts elicited in the conceptual framework. Cognitive interviews were carried out in patients (n = 20) to refine and test the content validity of the instrument in terms of item relevance and comprehension, instructions, recall period, and response categories.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Concept elicitation focus groups identified thirty-five unique concepts falling into several domains: i) emotional, ii) cognitive, iii) motivation, iv) work, v) sleep, vi) appetite, vii) social, viii) activities of daily living, ix) tired/fatigue, x) body pain, and xi) suicidality. Concept saturation, the point at which no new relevant information emerges in later interviews, was achieved for each of the concepts. Based on the qualitative findings, the PRO instrument developed had 15 daily and 20 weekly items. The cognitive interviews confirmed that the instructions, item content, and response scales were understood by the patients.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Rigorous qualitative research resulted in the development of a PRO measure for MDD with supported content validity. The MDD PRO can assist in understanding and assessing MDD symptoms from patients' perspectives as well as evaluating treatment benefit of new targeted therapies.</p

Embodied Heritage: Obesity, Cultural Identity, and Food Distribution Programs in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

This research examines obesity among Oklahoma Choctaws at the intersections of issues related to historical trauma; structural, symbolic, and everyday violence; and the social processes of heritage, identity, and meaning-making. Unique to Native Americans is an historical reliance on food assistance, from rations in the 1800s to the more recent Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). Participation in FDPIR is linked with increased risk of obesity, with foods historically high in fat and sugar, and is the primary food source for more than 60% of Native Americans. Spanning more than six months of ethnographic research, this dissertation explores the socio-cultural, economic, political, and historical influences, as well as tribal citizens’ own meaning-making in relation to obesity, identity, and cultural uses of food. I use food-centered life history interviews, participant observation, quantitative data, and anthropometrics to investigate the ways shifting patterns of participation in the FDPIR have shaped Choctaw foodways, how these foodways are linked to Choctaw bodies and health – particularly obesity and diabetes – and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with historical trauma, contemporary forms of violence, heritage, and identity. What emerges is an historical and contemporary dependence on the FDPIR that influences food tastes, preferences, eating practices, distinctions between cultural and traditional foods, and notions of health and wellbeing. Food plays a major part of cultural survival and affirmation, and for this population, the demise of traditional foodways and dependence on FDPIR are recognized as specific experiences that inform what it means to be Choctaw today. Further, obese bodies are associated with Indianness, identified by poor food environments, obesity, and dependence on food assistance. Adding the perspective of meaning-making to illuminate how larger structural factors figure into social processes and individual health – and how people make sense of these connections in construction of cultural identity – I developed the concept of embodied heritage, arguing that health is contingent on one’s social, economic, historical, cultural, and political position and the structures of meaning that make sense of this personal and embodied experience

Indigenous Virginia Digital Storytelling Project: A Creation Story

Indigenous ways of knowing and being are invested in creating and maintaining relationships, respectful and equitable exchange, and collective but particularistic knowledges that are practical, useful, and helpful in extending meaning-making within communities. In this paper, we describe the ways that university faculty and tribal citizens come together to build meaningful relations through storytelling and counter-mapping. Focusing on what is currently known as Virginia (and the surrounding regions more broadly), the project aims to center Indigenous-created accounts of places and spaces as being infused with stories, memories, and life to reveal living histories layered into the fabric of these lands and waters. This paper details the careful, enjoyable, and challenging-at-times processes of relation-building between a university and local tribal citizens (which continues to take shape) for this project to become the Indigenous Virginia Digital Storytelling Project

Bodies as Evidence: Mapping New Terrain for Teen Pregnancy and Parenting

Predominant approaches to teen pregnancy focus on decreasingnumbers of teen mothers, babies born to them, and state dollarsspent to support their families. This overshadows the structuralviolence interwoven into daily existence for these young parents.This paper argues for the increased use of participatory visualmethods to compliment traditional research methods in shiftingnotions of what counts as evidence in response to teenpregnancy and parenting. We present the methods and resultsfrom a body mapping workshop as part of ‘Hear Our Stories:Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice’, a project thatexamines structural barriers faced by young parenting Latinas andseeks to develop relevant messaging and programming tosupport and engage youth. Body mapping, as an engaging,innovative participatory visual methodology, involves youngparenting women and other marginalised populations in drawingout a deeper understanding of sexual health inequities. Ourfindings highlight the ways body mapping elicits bodies asevidence to understand young motherhood and wellbeing

Strategic Authenticity and Voice: New Ways of Seeing and Being Seen as Young Mothers through Digital Storytelling

This paper presents the Ford Foundation-funded Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice project, which explores the subjective experience of structural violence and the ways young parenting Latinas embody and respond to these experiences. We prioritize uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. Existing programs and policies focused on these women fail to use relevant local knowledge and rarely involve them in messaging efforts. This paper offers a practical road map for rendering relevant and modifying notions of voice as a form of knowledge with the potential to disrupt authoritative knowledge. We present the context and method behind the four digital storytelling workshops that served as a venue for transforming assumptions about young parenting women and producing novel understandings of teen pregnancy and parenting. We end by suggesting an intervention for what we call “strategic authenticity” as it plays out in storytelling, meaning making, and voice, and implications for policy concerned with social justice and equity