Aline Gubrium

Promoting Positive Youth Development and Highlighting Reasons for Living in Northwest Alaska Through Digital Storytelling

Using a positive youth development framework, this article describes how a 3-year digital storytelling project and the 566 digital stories produced from it in Northwest Alaska promote protective factors in the lives of Alaska Native youth and serve as digital “hope kits,” a suicide prevention approach that emphasizes young people’s reasons for living. Digital stories are short, participant-produced videos that combine photos, music, and voice. We present process data that indicate the ways that digital stories serve as a platform for youth to reflect on and represent their lives, important relationships and achievements. In so doing, youth use the digital storytelling process to identify and highlight encouraging aspects of their lives, and develop more certain and positive identity formations. These processes are correlated with positive youth health outcomes. In addition, the digital stories themselves serve as reminders of the young people’s personal assets—their reasons for living—after the workshop ends. Young people in this project often showed their digital stories to those who were featured positively within as a way to strengthen these interpersonal relationships. Evaluation data from the project show that digital storytelling workshops and outputs are a promising positive youth development approach. The project and the qualitative data demonstrate the need for further studies focusing on outcomes related to suicide prevention.

Using Digital Stories to Understand the Lives of Alaska Native Young People

To better understand how young Alaska Native (Inupiaq) people are creatively responding to the tensions of growing up in a world markedly different from that of their parents and grandparents, the pilot study examined youth-produced digital stories as representations of their everyday lives, values, and identities. Two hundred and seventy-one youth–produced digital stories were examined and assigned descriptive attributes; of these, 31 stories were selected and subjected to a more rigorous coding and a thematic analysis. Findings fall into three main categories: self-representation, sites of achievement, and relationships. Participants’ digital stories overwhelmingly depicted positive self-images that included both codified cultural values and pop cultural images to construct novel forms of cultural identity. The gendered depictions of achievement signal a need for more varied, valued, and accessible avenues for success for boys. Lastly, relationships were prominent in the stories, but there was an absence of young adult role models, particularly men, in the stories.

Measuring Down: Evaluating Digital Storytelling as a Process for Narrative Health Promotion

Digital storytelling (DST) engages participants in a group-based process to create and share narrative accounts of life events. We present key evaluation findings of a 2-year, mixed-methods study that focused on effects of participating in the DST process on young Puerto Rican Latina’s self-esteem, social support, empowerment, and sexual attitudes and behaviors. Quantitative results did not show significant changes in the expected outcomes. However, in our qualitative findings we identified several ways in which the DST made positive, health-bearing effects. We argue for the importance of “measuring down” to reflect the locally grounded, felt experiences of participants who engage in the process, as current quantitative scales do not “measure up” to accurately capture these effects. We end by suggesting the need to develop mixed-methods, culturally relevant, and sensitive evaluation tools that prioritize process effects as they inform intervention and health promotion.

Old Wine in New Bottles? The Positioning of Participation in 17 NIH-Funded CBPR Projects

Influenced by Cooke and Kotharis (2001) suggestion that participation “remains a way of talking about rather than doing things” (p. 32), we question to what extent this is true in the public health funding process. Thus, the aim of this article was to investigate the ways in which recent National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded community-based participatory research (CBPR) projects discursively positioned CBPR in their grant applications. We collected 17 NIH-funded CBPR proposals, analyzed them using a grounded theory approach, and subjected the findings to critical analysis focusing on the definition of community, the type of community “participation” promoted, and the nature of the research proposed. We conclude that certain types of CBPR projects are privileged in the funding review process and discuss the implications of these findings for future CBPR praxis.

Writing Against the Image of the Monstrous Crack Mother

Anthropologist Lila Abu Lughods idea of “writing against culture” is the point of departure for deconstructing the image of the monstrous mother dominating portrayals of African American women who use crack cocaine. Aiming to “unsettle” the cultural stereotypes, this article presents the narrative of an African American woman who has used crack, illustrating how elements of Twelve-Step recovery discourse and Afrocentric spirituality differentially frame her story. The case shows that recovery and spirituality are as much narrative resources as they are narrative imperatives. Rather than simply reproducing either of these resources in her story, she alternatively constructs herself as a recovering addict on one hand, and a spiritually strong woman on the other, exemplifying how narrative obviates stereotypic representations.

Bridging graduate education in public health and the liberal arts.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is part of Five-Colleges Inc, a consortium that includes the university and four liberal arts colleges. Consortium faculty from the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the university and from the colleges are working to bridge liberal arts with public health graduate education. We outline four key themes guiding this effort and exemplary curricular tools for innovative community-based and multidisciplinary academic and research programs. The structure of the consortium has created a novel trajectory for student learning and engagement, with important ramifications for pedagogy and professional practice in public health. We show how graduate public health education and liberal arts can, and must, work in tandem to transform public health practice in the 21st century.

Puerto Rican Latina Youth Coming Out to Talk About Sexuality and Identity

ABSTRACT Public health efforts focused on Latina youth sexuality are most commonly framed by the syndemic of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, a narrow and often heteronormative focus that perpetuates silences that contribute to health inequities and overlooks the growing need for increased education, awareness, and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth. This article presents findings from the project Let’s Talk About Sex: Digital Storytelling for Puerto Rican Latina Youth, which used a culturally centered, narrative-based approach for analyzing participants’ own specifications of sexual values and practices. The strength of digital storytelling lies in its utility as an innovative tool for community-based and culturally situated research, as well as in its capacity to open up new spaces for health communication. Here we present two “coming out” case studies to illustrate the value of digital storytelling in supporting the development of meaningful and culturally relevant health promotion efforts for LGBTQ-identified Puerto Rican Latina youth across the life span.

Digital Storytelling as a Narrative Health Promotion Process: Evaluation of a Pilot Study

Digital storytelling (DST) engages participants in a group-based process to create and share narrative accounts of life events. The process of individuals telling their own stories has not been well assessed as a mechanism of health behavior change. This study looks at outcomes associated with engaging in the DST process for vulnerable youth. The project focused on the experiences of Puerto Rican Latinas between the ages of 15 to 21. A total of 30 participants enrolled in a 4-day DST workshops, with 29 completing a 1 to 3-minute digital story. Self-reported data on several scales (self-esteem, social support, empowerment, and sexual attitudes and behaviors) were collected and analyzed. Participants showed an increase in positive social interactions from baseline to 3-month post workshop. Participants also demonstrated increases in optimism and control over the future immediately after the workshop, but this change was not sustained at 3 months. Analysis of qualitative results and implications are discussed.

Conflicting Aims and Minimizing Harm: Uncovering Experiences of Trauma in Digital Storytelling with Young Women

This chapter discusses a digital storytelling project that combined aims to gain fine-grained understanding of, and address, sexual health inequities among Puerto Rican Latinas in the project community. The authors begin by introducing digital storytelling as a culture-centered approach for use in public health research and intervention. They then trace two emerging ethical issues in research using digital storytelling, both related to key project findings of current and historical trauma among participants: (1) conflicting aims in the project and (2) the ethical standard to minimize harm. The authors conclude that these issues can be resolved if projects are guided by a sensitive ethical protocol, and that digital storytelling and other participatory, visual, and arts-based methods can be harnessed for the design of effective sexual health interventions.

S-T-R-8 Up Latinas: Affirming an Alternative Sexual Identity

For young women, being “aggressive” is generally viewed as a negative identity and associated with bullying and interpersonal violence. Especially in a heteronormative context, sexually aggressive identities are not commonly associated with young women. Resulting negative perceptions or silences surrounding this possible sexual identity are directly consequential in the development of comprehensive sexuality education curricula. Taking a narrative approach and applying a Photovoice elicitation strategy to prompt discussion, the data presented in this article show how young Latinas, when given the opportunity, critically construct aggressive identities in contrastive terms, affirming the identity to befit a counter-intuitive understanding. Implications of considering subjective complexities in sexuality education curricula are discussed in the conclusion.