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Team-Based Research Collaborations as Venues for Novel Health Interventions
Abstract
This chapter presents three case studies of community health intervention from an ongoing ethnographic research collaboration in Brazos County, Texas, and explores how novel health interventions can be facilitated by research design and methodology. Each case study was motivated by undergraduate student involvement in the broader research collaboration and represents a strength of the collaborative model. Specifically, the emphasis on intersectional, ethical, and reflexive epistemology can create an environment in which researchers are able to expand their impact and role freely, rather than be limited by traditional research parameters.
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In 2020, Texas was overrepresented in food insecure households. One avenue many food insecure households take to subsidize their food intake is the use of food pantries. Previous literature has identified many efforts to incorporate nutritional information and foods at pantry sites. However, few have considered how religious affiliation can impact organizational structure and agents in regards to nutritional focus. The purpose of this paper is to investigate perceptions of nutritional information, behaviors, and policies of the volunteers at our research sites and the how pantry operations impact the deployment of that information to clients. Our research question asks how do the religious elements of our research sites impact nutritional policy and concerns of food pantries? Using analysis of field notes generated from participant observation at 5 of the religiously-affiliated food pantries in Brazos County, TX, and a verbal survey on organizational nutrition policy administered to food pantry volunteers, we find that religious cultures at these food pantries create barriers to nutrition complementary to hegemonic nutrition. Our findings suggest that interventions targeting the improvement of organizational nutrition policy at local food pantries must consider organizational culture more critically, particularly religious elements.
Despite evidence of mentoring's importance in training researchers, studies to date have not yet determined which mentoring relationships have the most impact and what specific factors in those mentoring relationships contribute to key outcomes, such as the commitment to and persistence in research career paths for emerging researchers from diverse populations. Efforts to broaden participation and persistence in biomedical research careers require an understanding of why and how mentoring relationships work and their impact, not only to research training but also to promoting career advancement. This paper proposes core attributes of effective mentoring relationships, as supported by the literature and suggested by theoretical models of academic persistence. In addition, both existing and developing metrics for measuring the effectiveness of these attributes within mentoring relationships across diverse groups are presented, as well as preliminary data on these metrics from the authors' work.
Ethnography has often been seen as the province of the lone researcher; however, increasingly management scholars are examining global phenomena, necessitating a shift to global team-based ethnography. This shift presents some fundamental methodological challenges, as well as practical issues of method, that have not been examined in the literature on organizational research methods. That is the focus of this article. We first outline the methodological implications of a shift from single researcher to team ethnography, and from
single case site to the multiple sites that constitute global ethnography. Then we present a detailed explanation of a global team-based ethnography that we conducted over three years. Our study of the global reinsurance industry involved a team of five ethnographers conducting fieldwork in 25 organizations across 15 countries. We outline three central challenges we encountered: team division of labour, team sharing and constructing a global ethnographic object. The article concludes by suggesting that global team-based ethnography provides important insights into global phenomena, such as regulation, finance and climate change among others, that are of interest to management scholars.
This article explores the path of methodological and epistemological negotiation travelled by a team of four geographers conducting research among people with transnational connections between northern New Jersey and El Salvador. Having illustrated that all data are contextual, feminist scholars have explored the power relations in which data collection is embedded in order to situate knowledge. The relationship between the dynamics of research teams and the broader political struggles with which they engage, however, remains a blind spot within feminist field methods and writing strategies deployed to 'see accountably'. The authors argue that there is an undertheorised relationship between the politics of academic research projects and the broader political movements with which they engage that may serve as a fertile intersection for feminist research. They explore relationships between team, field, and institutions in the context of negotiating difference among team members and their aspirations for the project. The article contributes to discussions of power, knowledge construction, and the politics of conducting fieldwork as a team by relaying experiences both from the perspective of individuals on the team and the team as a whole. The authors depict their objectives, successes, failures, and research politics; all part of a process of methodological becoming.
The article is an analysis of the methodology used to study a community spawned from an Internet website devoted to a television serial. In the five and a half years the site was in existence, its real-time, linear, archived Posting Board spawned a community. Herein, we discuss how our work at the site offers insights into significant concepts in the practice of ethnography. In particular, we are concerned with such questions as: How much distance is necessary between the ethnographer and her site/subjects? Is distance necessary? Who is inscribing whom? We also discuss the generative problem of anonymity and how this concern has opened up our perceptions of ourselves and our field site.
L'A. analyse la situation des religions au sein de la societe americaine qui tend a prendre un caractere volontariste. Il envisage la pratique religieuse individuelle dans ce pays. Il examine l'organisation des communautes religieuses. Il evoque les pratiques sociales organisees liees a la religion que l'on peut observer aux Etats-Unis
Although there are increasing examples of collaborative ethnography, there are few explicit reflections on its process. The authors systematically juxtapose their jointly collected but separately recorded observations in a neighborhood recreation center in Chicago to examine points of similarity and difference. They find that collaborative ethnography can be useful for providing a richer description, highlighting perceptual inconsistencies, and recognizing the influence of ethnographers’ personal and intellectual backgrounds on the collection and recording of data. The authors’ reflexive analysis also illustrates that the choice of collaborators is key for influencing the depth or breadth of the data collected. Finally, they show that there is neither one truth, nor one reality, nor one stable social world to observe.
Three studies examined the role of leader consideration in diverse teams. Based on the categorization-elaboration model, we argue that leader consideration can address the negative group processes that result from categorization processes in diverse teams as well as influence the perceptions of the team’s diversity. Studies 1a and 1b focus on the leadership preferences of members of heterogeneous versus homogeneous teams. Results show that participants faced with the prospect of working in a diverse team had a higher preference for considerate leadership than participants expecting to work in a homogeneous team. In Study 2, we examined whether diverse teams indeed function better with a leader who scores higher on considerate leadership, and whether this can be explained by changes in the ways in which the leader and followers perceive the team’s diversity. An interaction between group diversity and consideration shows that highly considerate leaders improved team functioning for heterogeneous (but not homogeneous) teams, and that leader individuation, or the ability of the leader to see members as unique individuals, explained the positive effects of considerate leadership on the functioning of diverse teams.
This article extends arguments that seek to account for the paucity of research on “studying up,” suggesting that to foster a more congenial climate in which such studies can he undertaken, received discourses in educational research that assume fixed/stable identities for researcher and subjects need to be rethought. I argue that poststructuralist perspectives help us “think otherwise” on matters of power and subjectivity in research. By allowing for an inquisitorial rather than an adversarial stance to studying the workings of power, such perspectives allow a different conceptualization of research that could ease the process of doing ethnographic research with the powerful and broaden the approaches currently available to studying up in educational research.
This ethnography examines the hopes, frustrations, and activist strategies of American evangelical Christians as they engage socially with local communities. Focusing on two Tennessee megachurches, it reaches beyond political controversies over issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and public prayer to highlight the ways that evangelicals at the grassroots of the Christian Right promote faith-based causes intended to improve the state of social welfare. The book shows how these ministries both help churchgoers embody religious virtues and create provocative new opportunities for evangelism on a public scale. The book challenges conventional views of U.S. evangelicalism as narrowly individualistic, elucidating instead the inherent contradictions that activists face in their efforts to reconcile religious conservatism with a renewed interest in compassion, poverty, racial justice, and urban revivalism.
Food banks served a record of 60 million people in 2020, but little is known regarding sources and quality of foods distributed, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic’s widespread disruptions. This mixed-methods study examined changes in food bank sourcing in 2020 relative to prior years. Findings highlight food bank-led purchases and federal commodities were used to meet increased food needs. While the inventory of fresh produce decreased proportionally in 2020 versus 2019, it increased in overall poundage by over a million pounds (p < 0.01). These findings have implications for nutritional food ranking across and within food banks.
To address the food assistance crisis during the Covid pandemic, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a multi‐billion dollar “Farmers to Families Food Box program” (Box program) by working with approved suppliers (or distributors) to purchase fresh produce, dairy, and meat directly from farmers and package them into boxes. Recognizing that food banks did not have spare capacity to support the Box program, how should these food boxes be distributed to people who are in need?
The USDA developed a novel solution by asking: (a) suppliers to distribute food boxes directly to agencies (shelters, food pantries, and soup kitchens); and (b) food banks to serve as “virtual intermediaries” to coordinate supply and demand between suppliers and agencies. However, as food banks were overwhelmed with their regular operations for distributing donated food during the pandemic, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank (LARFB) found it difficult to develop and deploy a Decision Support System (DSS) to support the Box program with limited manpower and expertise.
In this paper, we describe a DSS co‐developed by LARFB, Salesforce, and UCLA. Unlike other DSSs developed in normal circumstances, the development and deployment of the DSS were conducted virtually within 45 days. Without this DSS, it would have been impossible for LARFB to support the Box program. Because this DSS was developed in a record time, we discuss several limitations and suggest future research opportunities for managing food bank operations during a pandemic.
In 1984, President Reagan signed a bill that created the Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday Commission. The Commission was charged with the responsibility of issuing guidelines for states and localities to follow in preparing their observances of Martin Luther King's birthday. The Commission's task would not be easy. Although King's birthday had come to symbolize the massive social movement that grew out of efforts of African-Americans to end the long history of racial oppression in America, the first official observance of the holiday would take place in the face of at least two disturbing obstacles: first, a constant, if not increasing, socioeconomic disparity between the races, and second, a hostile administration devoted to changing the path of civil rights reforms that some believe responsible for most of the movement's progress.
Organizational theory scholars typically see organizations as race-neutral bureaucratic structures, while race and ethnicity scholars have largely neglected the role of organizations in the social construction of race. The theory developed in this article bridges these subfields, arguing that organizations are racial structures—cognitive schemas connecting organizational rules to social and material resources. I begin with the proposition that race is constitutive of organizational foundations, hierarchies, and processes. Next, I develop four tenets: (1) racialized organizations enhance or diminish the agency of racial groups; (2) racialized organizations legitimate the unequal distribution of resources; (3) Whiteness is a credential; and (4) the decoupling of formal rules from organizational practice is often racialized. I argue that racialization theory must account for how both state policy and individual attitudes are filtered through—and changed by—organizations. Seeing race as constitutive of organizations helps us better understand the formation and everyday functioning of organizations. Incorporating organizations into a structural theory of racial inequality can help us better understand stability, change, and the institutionalization of racial inequality. I conclude with an overview of internal and external sources of organizational change and a discussion of how the theory of racialized organizations may set the agenda for future research.
Atlanta Community Food Bank (ACFB) recently adopted the Choose Healthy Options Program (CHOP). CHOP uses a simple algorithm that designates a 1 (choose frequently), 2 (moderately), or 3 (infrequently) to foods based on nutrient profiles. Food orders of 402 partner agencies (PAs) in Atlanta and northwest Georgia were analyzed for the 6 weeks prior to and following CHOP implementation. Additionally, 9 PAs participated in in-depth interviews to explain purchasing motivations, impact of CHOP, client feedback mechanisms, and perceptions of clients’ needs. Agencies increased their pounds of CHOP 1 foods by nearly 43% during the study period. PAs indicated that CHOP was useful for deciding between food items of the same food category that had differing CHOP rankings.
Background:
In many affluent countries, food-insecure households use food pantries to keep their family fed. The long-term dependence of many users on these programs calls for a systematic review of studies on the nutritional quality of food provided by food pantries.
Objective:
The purpose of this systematic review was to summarize the current scientific evidence about the nutritional quality of food bags distributed by food pantries.
Methods:
A systematic literature search was conducted in the electronic databases PubMed, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, and Psychology Behavioral Sciences Collection to identify cross-sectional, cohort, and intervention studies reporting baseline data conducted in high-income countries and published between 1980 and 2015, which reported the nutritional quality of food bags distributed by food pantries. Identified citations were screened in two stages and data were independently extracted by two authors using a predefined data sheet. The quality of included studies was evaluated using criteria of an adapted Ottawa Scale. The systematic review was reported in accordance to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement.
Results:
Applying the two-stage screening, 9 of 1,546 articles were identified for inclusion. Nutritional quality of food bags varied widely between and within studies. Milk products, vitamins A and C, and calcium were provided in particularly low amounts. None of the studies were nationally representative and only a few studies controlled for the household composition of the recipients of food bags.
Conclusion:
Food pantries likely have a strong influence on users' diets, but the food pantries examined in the selected studies were largely unable to support healthy diets. The distribution of more perishable foods would increase users' diet quality and may have an immense potential to address malnutrition in vulnerable population groups.
Few studies have empirically investigated the specific factors in mentoring relationships between undergraduate researchers (mentees) and their mentors in the biological and life sciences that account for mentees’ positive academic and career outcomes. Using archival evaluation data from more than 400 mentees gathered over a multi-year period (2005–2011) from several undergraduate biology research programs at a large, Midwestern research university, we validated existing evaluation measures of the mentored research experience and the mentor–mentee relationship. We used a subset of data from mentees (77% underrepresented racial/ethnic minorities) to test a hypothesized social cognitive career theory model of associations between mentees’ academic outcomes and perceptions of their research mentoring relationships. Results from path analysis indicate that perceived mentor effectiveness indirectly predicted post-baccalaureate outcomes via research self-efficacy beliefs. Findings are discussed with implications for developing new and refining existing tools to measure this impact, programmatic interventions to increase the success of culturally diverse research mentees and future directions for research.
Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action.
To increase the numbers of underrepresented racial minority students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), federal and private agencies have allocated significant funding to undergraduate research programs, which have been shown to students' intentions of enrolling in graduate or professional school. Analyzing a longitudinal sample of 4,152 aspiring STEM majors who completed the 2004 Freshman Survey and 2008 College Senior Survey, this study utilizes multinomial hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) and propensity score matching techniques to examine how participation in undergraduate research affects STEM students' intentions to enroll in STEM and non-STEM graduate and professional programs. Findings indicate that participation in an undergraduate research program significantly improved students' probability of indicating plans to enroll in a STEM graduate program.
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
A nonprofit policy advocacy organization and an academic research center convened a one-day meeting of 20 key stakeholders from the emergency food network (EFN) to develop policy and practice recommendations that were vltimately crafted by the advocate-researcher team and aimed at improving the nutritional quality of emergency food. The convening was informed by recent studies of food bank inventory trends and aspects of food bank culture, capacity, and practices relating to nutrition. Recommendations were developed to establish nutrition standards for government-sourced emergency food and to review tax benefits for commercial food donations. Recommendations were also developed for EFN agencies to establish organizational nutrition guidelines, adopt metrics that incorporate the nutritional quality of distributed food, and advocate improvements to federal safety net programs.
This article is based on the findings of a 2-year study that examined the nature of effective faculty/student undergraduate research (UR) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) relationships. The study site was a large urban public college where three fourths of all incoming freshmen receive need-based aid; and although not a historically Black college or university (HBCU), 85% are students of color. The college offers 2- and 4-year STEM degree programs. Utilizing cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) as both a theoretical and methodological framework, this phenomenological study employed semistructured interviews, written surveys, and member checking to understand four paired faculty/student UR mentoring relationships over 2 years. The findings not only concur with the bulk of UR research, indicating UR's promise for addressing the low enrollment and retention rates of students of color in the STEM disciplines but also raise issues around the emotional, financial, and professional costs to UR faculty. It is these costs that are the focus of this article that concludes with ideas, for university and college administrators and all others concerned, about on how we might support faculty in UR's crucial work toward the goal of retaining students of color in STEM. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:527–542, 2012
Objective:
Examine relationships between food security, diet quality, and body mass index (BMI) among food pantry users.
Methods:
Convenience sample of 212 food pantry clients in Hartford, CT from June, 2010 to May, 2011. Main outcomes included food security (United States Department of Agriculture module), fruit and vegetable consumption (Block Screener), and BMI (stadiometer and digital medical scale). Chi-square tests, Spearman correlations, and logistic regression models were analyzed.
Results:
Over half of the sample (50.5%) had very low food security. Mean BMI was 29.5 kg/m(2). Age was positively associated with food security (P < .01). Food-secure participants were twice as likely to eat fruit, vegetables, and fiber as food-insecure participants (P = .04). Women were 4 times as likely to be obese as men (P < .01), yet food insecurity was not associated with obesity in this sample.
Conclusions and implications:
Ensuring the nutritional adequacy of donated food is an important consideration for food donors and pantry staff.
The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to
have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust
consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional,
conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I
propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an
interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social
processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of
production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate
operations of structural social processes that extend widely across
regions of the world.
The end of racism” as the new doxa
- C A Gallagher
Assessing the likelihood of internet information-seeking leading to offline drug use by youth
- S N Gatson
Studying the role and impact of mentoring on undergraduate research experience. Paper commissioned for the Committee on Strengthening Research Experiences for Undergraduate STEM Students
- C Pfund
Why diverse teams are smarter
- D Rock
- H Grant
Collaborative ethnographic teams in community food security
- M Cisneros
- S Emmanuel
- A Mcneely
- T Young
- S N Gatson
Culture to culture: Ethnography and cultural studies as critical intervention
- B Hooks