Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Lost Value of Community

What role does community play in your life? Maybe you have a circle of friends or a supportive family. You may have a religious or professional community that is supportive, nurturing or helpful. Maybe your neighborhood nurtures strong ties, or a hobby group of yours feels like ‘your people.’ These networks can be invaluable in our lives, and yet they are rarely held up for the value they offer.

In the recent turmoil, with the uncertainty around government work and government contracting, my own networks began to take on a different character. My friends began sharing memes about the uncertainty and rapidly unfolding events and laughing together as we also supported each other through dramatic changes in our own workplaces. My LinkedIn network began more personable and supportive, and I began to follow updates to keep track of what was happening to my current and former colleagues.

In our local networks, we persistently asked, ‘what can we do differently to address the rapidly changing needs of the people in our network?’

This, my friends, is the core purpose of the Community Conversation series I’ve been building. In each session, participants have an opportunity to talk about the changes afoot, interspersed with grounding exercises that progressively relax us and help us practice skills for managing acute anxiety and distress. Once we are calmer, and we have had our say, and we have a better sense of what people are experiencing, we brainstorm together about how we can support each other differently at this time, ideally in ways that empower people in our networks that may feel as though they’ve had something stripped away.

In one professional group, this meant rethinking professional support in a more horizontal way. What if we formed learning communities for those who want to practice, learn or teach R or Python? What if we created networks for pairing mentors, build networks of lobbyists to speak on behalf of our field, or offer resume review from peer to peer? We spoke about how we embody the knowledge, skills and institutional history of our field, and it is important for us to remember that in our approaches to self and community care. We spoke about having potlucks and cooking for each other instead of just attending costly happy hours. The community conversation series is about collective healing and protecting that which we believe in- in new and exciting ways.

In one church group, the support looks differently. We learn more about each other as we express our experiences and fears, build some collective peace, and learn about what our community members need and have to offer in very different ways. We represent a mix of professions and backgrounds, and we find new ways to protect and support the church family.

These conversations blow my mind, because they involve a deeper level of connection than I have previously seen in these networks. They help people feel valued, empowered, supported, connected and ready for whatever comes their way. People arrive at the groups with the strong emotions they have been carrying on their own shoulders and leaving smiling, laughing and relaxed. This is, at its core, what it means to restore people.

And yet, building these networks further will require funding, volunteer labor or institutional help. The groups themselves need to remain free or close to it. But there are expenses; a zoom account, physical meeting spaces, food for meetings, possibly technological support, etc. Stay tuned in the near future for opportunities to assist.

In the meantime, I encourage you to join our mailing list, to hear about upcoming events and activities or to get involved. We are also available to answer any questions you may have about the initiative.

join our mailing list: https://forms.gle/usQPq46moTo3hmu58

attend a virtual event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/community-conversation-finding-our-footing-in-this-uncertain-time-tickets-1322116238259?aff=oddtdtcreator

You may see the need for these groups but not your place within them. I want you to know that there is room for everyone to come as you are. Experience some peace, and connect more deeply with others in your community. Together we can weather whatever comes our way. Alone, we may just be blown away in the breeze.

Something to believe in

At the beginning of Life of Pi, the main character says he has a story to make you believe in God. Does he? I suppose that depends on your belief system, but the story made for a great book and a gorgeous movie.

I am not someone who believed that things happen for a reason. It might have been true, but the potential truth of it offered no comfort to me. But this year has shaken my doubt. Let me tell you my story.

You know me as a researcher, fundamentally and to my core. I’ve been working in research since 1996, and it has been an adventure, a challenge, and a great love. I’ve had the pleasure of working on fMRI research in its early days, working in Neuropsychology departments at fantastic hospitals, getting to know the nonprofit space, doing research on and in the global and academic Physics and Astronomy communities, doing Usability studies in people’s homes and using eye tracking tools, working across a number of languages on study recruitment materials, working in HIV prevention and treatment, evaluating health communications materials and working with communities to cocreate research studies that serve them.

Oh, the places research can take you! The interest work! The amazing people I’ve met along the way!

This year, things began to change pretty dramatically for the research community around me. We’ve been seeing respected professionals and institutional studies let go and dismissed on a massive scale.

We all want to help support each other and the field in some way, but we’re being stripped of our collective voice. I began to obsess over what I could uniquely offer to help. For a solid week, the topic was omnipresent for me. I thought immediately of the community conversations I’ve led occasionally with my church community. But what could these conversations look like? The answer came in flashes from every corner of my memory. Things strung together in a way I never could have imagined prior.

I’m hearing about the stress and distress we’re suffering through, and I thought of the grounding activities I’ve honed with someone very close to me who’s been battling severe anxiety and depression. I thought of the community gatherings that Iyanla Vanzant used to host on Saturday mornings and the grounding exercises she taught. I thought of my love of meditation and the methods that have been useful to me. I thought of the Nap Ministry and the idea of restoring people to their optimum humanity. I thought of Rachel Cargle and Adrienne Marie Brown and their teaching about the importance of imagination and play.

I wanted to use my qualitative research skills, experience with facilitation, and these principles to create something new, grounded in principles of Community Based Participatory Research.

The goal is to create a space for people to listen and be heard, to heal and to learn healing skills, to dream of a different future and to understand what the community needs and how the community can best support each other. The sessions can be singular for a group or they can become a community building and nurturing series for that group.

I began collecting resources and developed a resource sheet for participants, and I developed a discussion guide that asked few questions and allowed mostly for listening, discussion, and progressive relaxation. These resources are intended to be flexible enough to work with any group.

The next step was to find communities who were interested. To date, I have conducted groups with my church community and a local professional group. The groups blew my mind. People entered with strong emotions, listened and supported each other, relaxed to the point of smiling and laughing and spoke about supporting each other and building community. The groups were very different from each other, each becoming what it needed to be. One group opted to make this into a series, with a second session planned for later this month. The other left me with a full page of ideaa that our professional councils can bring to fruition.

As the communities around me are increasingly affected, I’ve wanted to focus on expanding- but it’s been difficult to balance with a full time, intense job. Well, dear readers, after seeing the last of my clients RIF’d last week I was laid off this week. For me, this was a gift, because this community conversation series is my passion and my purpose.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to focus on ways to find more groups to facilitate, online and in-person. I’m working on designs as well, to raise funds for the project in some kind of way.

How can you help? If you’re interested, you’re welcome. I need support in locating and planning groups, developing a funding strategy and a plan for the merch. Let’s work together to build community, restore peace and purpose, and support and listen to each other.

Thank you for listening ❤️

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.”


Octavia E. Butler

Communicating effectively about health disparities on #worldAIDSday

Today is World AIDS day. For me personally, it represents my second year leading qualitative research on HIV prevention and treatment. Last month, I attended two conferences that dealt with HIV in very different ways, and something began to weigh on me heavily.

In the past month, I have realized that people talk about HIV and AIDS in terms of health disparities, but laypeople and researchers alike can struggle to grasp or explain the meaning of a disparity.

I first realized this at the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting, when I heard a seasoned researcher mispeak. This researcher, likely fueled by adrenaline and nerves, represented HIV as a disease that primarily affects young, black men who have sex with men. This is not quite the truth. Men, African American or black people, and gay or bisexual people are all more likely than their counterparts to contract HIV. But once you look at the overall distribution of HIV cases, you see that this single, intersectional group, while at the highest risk, is not the dominant face of the disease.

After hearing a few other researchers make similar mistakes, I looked for a graphic to show the overall prevalence or incidence of HIV and found myself in a rabbithole of information about health disparities. In my opinion, disparities are far more meaningful when coupled with population level statistics that offer some overall perspective. Coming home from the conference, I tried to explain to friends, family and colleagues what I had heard and why I was frustrated, and it struck me that many could not easily grasp the meaning of a disparity. This called to mind a common catchphrase in statistics education: “Human beings are horrible at understanding probabilities.”

This phenomenon was given increasing significance in the following days. First, I heard another researcher at APHA ask why HIV prevention messaging always targeted black MSM (men who have sex with men), and I realized that it is not because of a social need so much as because the data is reported in this way. For the African American community, which can be more prone to homophobia, this cobranding of queerness and HIV has likely slowed the involvement of community institutions, such as churches, that could serve a bigger role in HIV prevention and treatment.

A couple of days after APHA, I attended the Stigma conference Howard University. APHA is a more research focused event, while the Stigma conference bridges researchers, practitioners and community members. The Stigma conference is emotional and cathartic. At this conference, I heard testimony after testimony from people who didn’t know they were at risk, people dealing with assumptions from others about how they got HIV, people treated unfairly for the level of risk associated with them, and ultimately people struggling to balance their HIV concerns with the rampant judgement placed on being HIV positive. It struck me that a lack of understanding of the full shape of HIV has had very direct consequences in these people’s lives.

As the Stigma conference went on, participants complained about the consistent targeting of HIV messaging, including messaging from research studies, for creating a constant stream of visual portrayals of the disease as one that affects only black, gay men.

In an age where there are daily medications to prevent HIV transmission as well as daily pills to help HIV positive people live full, healthy lives, where consistent daily use of the medications usually ensures that a person is both undetectable and untransmittable (a fancy word for not contagious), stigma is one of the biggest reasons why people dont receive necessary medical attention, and ultimately an important reason why so many continue to be sick or spread the disease.

Because of misunderstandings about the full shape of the disease, some put themselves at risk unknowingly and others are unfairly labeled. This disease affects all, despite varying risk levels. Ultimately we can’t guess the status of others, nor can we guess their mode of transmission. We can only know that with proper treatment, people who are positive can lead long, healthy lives and stay undetectable and untransmittable.

Bridging Research, Community and Practice

I want to share a call for abstracts for a very special conference. It is rare that an event bring together researchers, practitioners and community members:

 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

9th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STIGMA

Conference Theme: “Bridging Research, Community and Practice”

 

Howard University, Washington, DC, Friday, November 16, 2018 (8 AM– 5 PM)

Deadline for Submission: Friday, September 14, 2018 by 5:00pm (EST)

 

The overarching goals of this conference are to increase awareness of the stigma of HIV and other health conditions and to explore interventions to eradicate this stigma. The conference also serves to educate healthcare providers and the general public about stigma as both a human rights violation and a major barrier to prevention and treatment of illnesses. We are looking for original work that addresses HIV or other health-related stigma (such as mental illness) to be presented as a POSTER during the conference poster session.  The Best Scientific Abstract Award recipient and the second-place scientific abstract will have the opportunity to provide a BRIEF PRESENTATION of their work in addition to the poster session. Monetary prizes will be given for the top three scientific abstracts. The Best Scientific Abstract Award recipient will receive a $500 prize, the second-place scientific abstract will receive a $200 prize, and the third-place scientific abstract will receive a $100 prize.

 

Abstract Guidelines:  Submit an abstract, with a maximum of 300 words, to Victoria Hoverman at vicki.hoverman@gmail.com and Shirin Sultana at shirin.sultana@bison.howard.edu, by 5:00pm (EST) on Friday, September 14, 2018.  Please include the full name, position/job title, affiliation and email address of each contributing author at the top of the page along with the abstract title.  Author information and the abstract title are not included in the 300-word count. First author or presenter must register for the conference if the abstract is accepted.  Notifications will be sent by October 15, 2018. These are poster presentations only, with the exception of the Best Scientific Abstract Award winner and the second-place scientific abstract winner, which are also brief oral presentations.  The first author of the winning abstracts must attend the conference to receive the prizes (or be willing to let an attending author or other representative accept the prize). Students are welcome!

 

For questions about abstracts, contact Victoria Hoverman at vicki.hoverman@gmail.com and/or Shirin Sultana at shirin.sultana@bison.howard.edu.  For general questions about the conference contact Patricia Houston at phouston@howard.edu.

The Role of Gratitude in Research

Research, as most things in life, is best approached with gratitude. In this post, I’ll share a bit about what I’m grateful for, an exercise in gratitude, and some food for thought about the role of gratitude in research.

First, here is a window into what I’m feeling grateful for.

Grateful for the challenge of research

Research can provide a challenging career. While it is possible to find positions in research that are more repetitive, most positions afford many opportunities for learning about new subject matter and new methods. Each new research question provides fresh challenges to implement. And with the body of literature and informal sources available, there is always the ability to read more deeply about the work that others have done. I am grateful for the perpetual learning experiences that research has brought.

Grateful for the versatility of research

One of my favorite aspects of a career in research is the versatility. I’ve been able to work in neuropsychology, physics education, sociolinguistics, social media research, media measurement and in public health using a great variety of research methods.

Grateful for my colleagues

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working with people that I respect, learn from and genuinely enjoy. I’m grateful for their help, their wisdom, their curiosity, their enthusiasm, their support, their friendship, and their comforting awkwardness.

Gratitude for the research opportunities

I am grateful for the opportunity to study people. I am grateful for the people who agree to participate in research and who honestly share what is in their hearts or on their minds. Some opinions and experiences are easier to share than others. I am grateful for all of it. The qualitative work that I am currently involved with is often built on individual and group interviews that can be a powerful experience for the participant and the interviewer, and I am so grateful to the participants and the process for bringing this to fruition.

 

Now, let’s take a minute to Go Beyond the Gush. It is easy to get swept up in the everyday grind of research, whether because the research approval process seems unnecessarily repetitive or cumbersome, or data needs more wrangling than predicted, or the meetings seem endless and the emails, texts and phone calls seem constant, or the people working on a project are particularly difficult to corral, or the behavior that you need to observe in your research is particularly difficult to isolate, or… We can all get caught in the slog of research. But gratitude can help.

Here is an exercise:

Let’s take a minute to get very basic with this. First, think of the reasons why you enjoy your work. Then let’s take it back even further.

  • Be grateful to have a topic to research or to have the ability to find one. Be grateful for the ability to be curious and to find unanswered questions.
  • Be grateful to have the support to pursue this topic as a professional or as a student. Research costs time, money and many other resources.
  • Be grateful to have the skills to approach the topic. Think of all of the training that provided these skills. Think of the resources that are available to you to help you learn what you need.
  • Be grateful for your strength. You have the ability to tackle what comes your way.
  • Be grateful for the people who must come together to make this work happen. Sometimes we get stuck thinking of one person’s habits or quirks or in finding fault with the people around us. Some groups are more cohesive than others, and each person brings a different set of skills. Take a step back from that. Let go of it for a minute and take a fresh look. First see yourself as someone with strengths and weaknesses. Then see your colleagues in this light as well. Allow yourself to forgive yourself and others.
  • Be grateful for the challenges your work brings. Sometimes it seems to bring too many challenges. But those challenges are keeping you sharp. And in some way, they will offer you the opportunity to learn and grow.
  • Be grateful for research participants. These are the people who make our work possible by letting us into their world in some way. That is a privilege.

 

What do exercises like this gain you? A few things, really. Peace of mind. A break from the stress and an opportunity to just feel grateful. Perspective. A chance to put challenges that seem constant or insurmountable into a smaller box. The opportunity to see the people around us from a fresh perspective and hear them more clearly. A better insulation against the instability that affects us all. And an opportunity to see our research in context and think more broadly about the affect it has. The work we do affects peoples’ lives, but these basic mechanisms can become lost to us when we lose perspective. With fresh perspective and gratitude, we can better see these mechanisms in action and produce work that better respects all involved. No research exists in a vacuum, and the better we can understand the role our research plays in a wider context the better stewards we can be over this tremendous privilege we’ve been granted.

Thanks for listening.

The future doesn’t belong to big or small data. It belongs to the disruptors.

Research is evolving fast. There is less support and more doubt for traditional methods, a fast- changing set of expectations from end-users, and a fast-evolving field of nontraditional methods and approaches. The future of research does not belong to big data or small data. It belongs to the disruptors. It belongs to those that can recognize and challenge the assumptions underlying their methodologies. The future belongs to creative approaches, connected data, and collaboration.

 

Research requires listening and understanding.

In order to create research that is useful, there needs to be a deep understanding of end-users, clients, and the context of the products we create. This requires listening, understanding, and creating opportunities to learn more, both by representing end users and clients more directly in the development process and by qualitative research methods. Qualitative research provides methods of collecting and analyzing information about people, in-person, virtually and through behavioral data sources, and it must provide a vitally important role in evolving research methods.

 

Research requires ever-changing analytic capabilities and creative, open minds.

We live in an era when data is plentiful. But the data looks different from what we saw in the past. We need capable and versatile technical workers who are able to process data. And we need the creativity to put the data to use in ways that benefit end-users.

 

Research must embrace diversity.

Creative strategy and good user-focus can’t spring from echo chambers. We need to connect to divergent experiences and views early and often in order to create good products. People with divergent views can raise questions earlier in the development process and allow us to integrate holistic solutions for problems we could not have thought of alone. Diverse experiences allow us to be more creative because they provide more material to inspire us. And diversity is crucial for us to successfully compete in the global marketplace.

 

Research design must be iterative.

If we want to create new ways of analyzing and connecting data, we have to be free to experiment with new methods, test new methods, and allow end-users to test proposed solutions. Often what we create doesn’t function the way that we expect it to. In an era where data does not need to be designed and collected, we have the flexibility to find creative ideas (“ugly babies”), nurture them, test them out, and tweak what doesn’t work.

 

Silos no longer make sense in research

It no longer makes sense to separate end users from developers or quantitative from qualitative. The best disruptive, creative potential lies in the mingling of methods and people. The most useful products are the ones that can be created collaboratively.

 

Research can be agile.

Agile development has become standard practice in much of the software development world, but it makes sense for research as well. Agile teams can involve end-users, UX researchers, quantitative methodologists and qualitative methodologists. Research can be built by agile, creative teams that feel free to question and inspire each other.

 

Creating high performing teams has never mattered more.

There is a growing body of great research about what makes a highly effective team. Effective teams are empathetic and open. They consider each other’s interests. They are practical and focused on the end product. They are comfortable asking questions and brainstorming solutions. They work collaboratively, and they celebrate their accomplishments.

 

The future of research is bigger than any one person or silo. It requires us to come together in new ways. I already see some firms moving in this direction- kudos to them. A new era is here, and I’m excited for us all!

Academic register: Are we smarter than a 5th grader?

Another important area of study in Linguistics is register. Among other things, register refers to the degree of formality with which we communicate. We speak differently with our friends and family than we do at work. We speak differently in a courtroom than in a courtroom lobby. And we speak differently in academia than we do elsewhere.

In an interview about Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ Naomi Wolf discusses the groundbreaking impact of Friedan’s classic work. She praises Friedan for having the courage to release countless hours of research to a wider audience, rather than an academic audience. To do this, Friedan sacrificed the academic recognition that could have accompanied her work in order to reach a broader population who could potentially benefit from her work. The choice to write in a less respected register opened Friedan to criticism from academics, but led to a broad, longstanding appeal.

Wolf takes this point a step further by suggesting that academics write in such a way that we don’t even understand each other (!!).

This was a surprising admission to see from an academic. Academics often really embrace the large words and complicated nature of their findings. They manage to encode large amounts of information and complicated ideas in relatively small amounts of space. But are the conclusions and information that we publish limited in their usefulness by the academic register itself?

I’ve mentioned before that Linguistics is a very broad area of study. Coming to the field with absolutely no prior background, I was really struck by the different definitions of terms I used regularly in my profession, like reliability, validity, sampling, representative sample, … It took a while for me to adjust to the different context of those terms, and to the different lexicon and areas of focus in linguistics. And the more areas of linguistics I study, the more I find words and concepts from fields I have little experience with. I remember reading and rereading papers in my conversation analysis class, trying to understand what they were doing and why- and it took the whole semester for me to be able to imitate that academic genre and understand its power.

Clearly, the more experience we have with specific words and methods, the more easily we can understand a specific genre of academic writing. This is the academic genre at its best, and it enables us to reach complicated conclusions that we might not be able to make otherwise. But it is also quite restrictive. Nobody can be an expert in all fields, and research could potentially benefit from feedback from a much wider variety of fields than it often receives. This enforces a linguistic segregation represents is the academic genre at its worst.

Yesterday I attended a talk that involved areas and methods of study that I had never encountered before. I heard a talk about textual features that evoke emotion. The talk was heady, showing logical expressions and cognitive space diagrams, and involving some of what I believe is called semantic formalism. The text examples were mostly poems, which naturally add to the complexity of the analysis. The main points were that the use of complexity and negation in text add to the emotional wallop of a body of text. He used hypotheticals as an example of constructed negation that evokes emotion. After trying and trying to wrap my head around his points and their wider applicability, I thought of funerals and memorial services. I thought of how we use hypotheticals to make us cry and help the grieving process. I mentioned to the speaker that, as difficult as it is to wrap my head around his talk, I realized that we use these devices as tools to evoke emotion regularly in those situations.

In my mind, research is of the best quality when it is anchored in something palpable or readily accessible. As a poet, I have a distinct sense of trying to create contrasts and develop layers of complication as poetic devices. But that sense isn’t as visceral or accessible as grieving communication is.

I wonder what his research would have gained by borrowing from other registers. In my own research, I believe that explaining my work to my family or friends is a critical part of my research process. It helps me to make grounded conclusions, and it guides my research questions and methods. For yesterday’s speaker, surely it would help him to generate better, more wide ranging feedback from a wider variety of people?

At the end of the day, I went out for dinner with my kids. I mentioned the talk to my 10 year old, who loves to discuss emotions. I was surprised to see that not only did she ‘get it’ in one or two sentences of explanation, but she was able to generate some really excellent examples of these devices in a 5th grade register.

Calling Respondents Stupid

From a Politico article titled “How much do voters know?” by Alexander
Burns:

“The first lesson you learn as a pollster is that people are stupid,”
said Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm. “I
tell a client trying to make sense of numbers on a poll that are
inherently contradictory that at least once a week.”

Full article at:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73947.html

Message to Tom Jenson:
It’s not so much that people are stupid as it is that Tom Jenson is ignorant of the cognitive underpinnings of response methodology and filling in his gaps with unnecessary condescension. Truly, all survey researchers deal with these contradictions. We might be able to garner more consistency in our response sets if we could instead survey computers or robots, but, alas, that’s not why we conduct surveys.