This class session, please view the program of "When the bough breaks" from Unnatural Causes. This segment on the interaction between society and individuals is an excellent example of how social problems can and must be interrogated from many different perspectives and also a fine example of exploratory research. As you watch the video, I'd like you to pay attention to how the research design goes through trial and error and how that stays in dialogue with the research question. Can you think of other factors and experiences that should be investigated from this video?
I'd like you to discuss the video with each other and post comments here so that I can also participate with you, virtually. Please do this during your discussion or directly after class.
You should also spend time in your writing groups, getting into a groove of working with each other with the primary goal of keeping each other writing and helping each other to think and communicate well via writing.
On September 25th we will focus intently on Indigenous experiences and perspectives on research. I recommend that your writing that week address the questions of Why this, why you, and why now. Those should be constant questions and ones that are revised, but it would be in keeping with your readings about standpoint and ethics that week to address it in your own writing.
I'll be on email so please don't hesitate to contact me with your questions,
leigh.
I just found this online and it reminded me of a conversation we had last week in class,
ReplyDeletehttp://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/number_of_researchers_per_million_inhabitants_by_country.jpg
It's a map of the number of resarcers, per million inhabitants, by country. You can actually 'see' where the researchers live around the world. This feel very related to the dangers of a 'single story', and making sense of our positionality and the effects on the work we do.
whoa. i just looked at that. thanks for posting.
DeleteExcellent connection, Shaun. Thanks for posting!
ReplyDeleteAlthough the video does not explain methodology as fully as a finalized research paper may have, I think we were presented with enough info to make some limited inferences.
ReplyDeleteThe video illustrates the importance of a researcher to remain open to many possible explanations after formulating a research question. With an issue such as the disparity in pregnancy outcomes between races in the United States, the researchers were wise to examine variables separately and systematically. Some of these aspects were not fully explained, so I am definitely making a few assumptions based on the video's presentation, but it seemed that this was the methodology.
The researchers within the video also looked at factors of both individual racism and institutionalized racism - clearly, an issue as complex as this one should be considered at all angles, and data collection can be difficult within many of these areas. Still, the researchers were open to the many possible explanations for the disparity, which was outlined within the short video.
In terms of other questions that could have been asked, it may have been interesting for the researchers to explore similar questions within other nations to potentially account for further variables. This might be of particular interest when conducting research in some nations with a history of limited racial disharmony and others of racial tumult/inequity.
I found the study very compelling, and as several of us noted in class, even if we have questions about the study it is hard to question the plausibility of the hypothesis, or come up with a better one.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I would like to see explored more is qualitative data regarding Black women who have positive birth outcomes. I wonder if there are qualitative patterns and guideposts that can be seen from the majority of Black American women who do not have premature births or babies with low birth weights (compared with qualitative data from women who do have premature and/or low birth weight babies).
It would also be helpful to see the quantitative data disaggregated in different ways - to compare urban vs rural, geographic areas, and, as Shaun suggested in class, to tease out (if possible) what the effect of segregation is by comparing more segregated groups with less segregated groups.
Overall I think this kind of study is powerful and relevant, and a good example of how to illuminate large social issues with research.
This was an interesting preview and video to watch for this week as I am in my 3rd trimester of pregnancy. In class, the decision was made to focus less on content of the video and more about a discussion of the design elements (both exploring and critiquing). We talked about evidence, biases that guided research questions, and what information we wanted to learn more about (e.g., sample characteristics).
ReplyDeleteFor me, I was struck about the conceptualization of segregation and how it might add another dimension to explore the research direction of better understanding why Black women have smaller/premature babies. I think that it is one way to explain why African immmigrant women and White women may be similar (if they both live in communities primarily composed of people like them). If chronic stress were used to explain differences (in a general chronic stress way- not race-specific way), then we might expect the initial findings to suggest that African women experience less general stress than Black women- which seems to bump against evidence that immigration-related stress is likely more of an issue for African women than Black U.S women. Additionally, we race-specfic general stress were the primary mechanism to explain differences, then we might expect Africans and African-Americans/Blacks to be more similar. Why? It seems to me that race, as conceptualized by skin color and other physical characteristics, is more salient that country-of-origin. Concepts about the separateness of ethnicity and race aside, it seems that people are more likely to see African women as a sub-category of Black women, then to see them as separate races. So, really, if this was just about race, those categories would be collapsed in that study, which may have produced slightly poorer (but nearly equivalent) outcomes. Homogeneity of groups and other types of assumptions aside....
There are multiple reasons why these disparities might be understood to exist. I am hopeful that we are able to stay curious about even more ways to approach and makes sense of the data, even if it introduces contradictions in the process.
Prima facie, I believe the claim made in the video to be true. It logically makes sense. Stress as converted into physical symptoms should rightly have an impact on phenomena such as infant births. I have some difficulty, however, in making some of the leaps that I think are made in the study as presented. How does one control for other factors? Might it be more appropriate to look as physical responses to stress and therefore cumulative impact of these physical responses, then link experience as a target of racism to stress?
ReplyDeleteI think what the research rightly accomplishes, however, is in demonstrating (or at least raising the question) that sociological phenomena (such as racism) can have physical effects. One may wish to divorce these, but rather than in the past, where these issues might have been attributed to race itself, it is more accurate to think of the effect of racism as having this impact. It is not as a result to some inherent physical difference. Race is a social construct, not a physical one.
I believe this article (http://unnaturalcauses.org/assets/uploads/file/ClosingTheGapBWBirthOutcome.pdf), in particular, makes an excellent claim that a "life cycle" approach may best address the issue. I believe the truth of the matter is that these issues are so dense and complex that it requires a holistic approach.
As suggested in the 12-point plan:
1. Provide interconception care to women with prior adverse pregnancy outcomes
2. Increase access to preconception care to African American women
3. Improve the quality of prenatal care
4. Expand healthcare access over the life course
5. Strengthen father involvement in African American families
6. Enhance coordination and integration of family support services
7. Create reproductive social capital in African American communities
8. Invest in community building and urban renewal
9. Close the education gap
10. Reduce poverty among African American families
11. Support working mothers and families
12. Undo racism
I think what struck me most powerfully about the video, outside the realm of methodology, was the compelling story the researchers and filmmakers told about an experience that is unique to African American women in this country. That this experience is discounted and considered by many to be a product of an previous era that no longer exists is striking. When we think about trauma, we think about very "obvious" stressors such as abuse, being a victim of a crime, or witnessing war, for example. But the idea of living with the experience of racism as having traumatic effects - not necessarily different than the traumatic effects one might have after returning from war or after surviving abuse - warrants attention. That a mother's history of trauma, particulary ongoing trauma such as racism affects the well being of her baby makes sense. I appreciated the woman in the film who likened living with the experience of racism as "gunning the engine of a car and never letting up." This is indeed traumatic. So I think that one way we might understand this is to either think about measuring quantitatively women's trauma symptoms (and understanding them in the context of racism), as well getting a sense qualitatively of her experience with racism and its traumatic impact.
ReplyDeleteI think the historical data was important as we got a sense of the trends that have occurred over time and how those trends might have mapped onto what was happening the broader societal context. There's a lot that was unclear in the film in terms of methodology that I'd like to understand better but I think the traumatic nature of racism is something that merits more attention in general.
Cumulative advantage/disadvantage is something I believe affects people in a number of ways over the course of their lives. The video achieved its goal in highlighting the fact that some health disparities can be "premised on second class citizenship." The importance of historical specificity in the studies exploring premature births and low-birth rates in African American women should not be underestimated. The video did a decent job of mentioning some historical events (i.e., Civil Rights movement in the 60s, the elimination/cutbacks of social and public services in the 1980s) to address how social changes could have affected Black Americans' experience of chronic stress due to discrimination. I think it is always important to contextualize a problem for study within time and history in order to have an understanding of why it's being studied and why it's being studied now.
ReplyDeleteI would have liked to know more about the samples. Brad pointed out that they were likely nationally representative, but I don't recall exactly what data were used and why they were originally collected.
I also totally agreed with Shaun's point of how segregation may affect outcomes-especially since white people are least likely to integrate with races other than their own. Her point about cultural, racial and spatial segregation made me think that it could absolutely play a role in health outcomes.
The set of studies presented in the video made me think about Tukey's reading and his statement that the question is more important than the answer. Also, the video made me think about Tuhiwai Smith’s book about the taken for granted assumptions in Western research and the limits of these assumptions to explore human experiences. The researchers set different questions that had inconclusive answers to explain the low-birth weight and premature birth of Afro-American babies. Therefore, they should go beyond these preconceptions and disrupt the traditional unit of analysis and time frame of Western research in health to obtain better answers.
ReplyDeleteIn their study, the researchers looked not only individual factors (such as women’s eat and activity behaviors) that affect the low-birth weight and premature birth of Afro-American babies. They set questions related to social conditions (SES and education), and then question related to structural factors, which affect woman health, such as racism. In this way, they realized that individual factors were not enough to explain the phenomenon and was forced to ask other kinds of questiosn. The researchers also disrupted in some way the idea of time frame for a research related to pregnancy, where is common understood that new born is only affected by what happened in the nine months of gestation and previous women’s experiences are not relevant. These kinds of questions and variables challenge the traditional way to explore human experiences and health by traditional research, where there is the belief that individuals’ health can be studied disconnected to their context and history.
There is, however, a lot of influence of positivist research in the research design. The researchers focused on finding THE variable, which affect the low-birth weight and premature birth of Afro-American babies. Issues of intersectionality are not discussed in the studies, assuming that the experience of racism is homogenous about black women in the U.S. Even though racism is a very important variable and a source of chronic stress in minoritazed populations, there could be other factors that make more complex how Afroamerican women experience, face, and copy with racism. For example, assuming that religious beliefs could be a good way to copy with chronic stress, are there differences in low-birth weight and premature birth amongst babies of Afroamerican women who have strong religious beliefs and community bonds and other Afroamerican women who experience racism?
I think that the researchers still try to isolate a variable, classify and predict human experience as traditional research does. However, I appreciate that they went beyond to the traditional questions and variables, and included structural and historical issues.
Shaun, you've actually keyed into one of the other slices of the experience of inequality that this documentary series highlights: immigrant ethnic identity and health outcomes. In another segment, the documentary explores how, over the course of generations and years in immigrant families, health outcomes worsen. This is due, in part, to the seepage of American lifestyle into families, meaning more time isolated, working long hours, and eating more low-cost, food-like products rather than actual food. So, while we might expect there to be worse birth rate data for black immigrant mothers, it turns that it takes some time for those immigrant women to start carrying the psychic load, the engine being revved up, similar to the ways that is pervasive throughout life stages for many Black women.
ReplyDeleteThis is a compelling series, and one could do a whole lot worse than to watch all the episodes.