Adapting to Context in Community-Based Participatory Research: “Participatory Starting Points” in a Chinese Immigrant Worker Community

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is increasingly being used to better understand and improve the health of diverse communities. A key strength of this research orientation is its adaptability to community contexts and characteristics. To date, however, few studies explicitly discuss adaptations made to CBPR principles and processes in response to community context and partners’ needs. Using data from our CBPR study, the San Francisco Chinatown Restaurant Worker Health and Safety Project, and drawing from literature on immigrant political incorporation, we examine the links between the contexts of the Chinese immigrant worker community, adaptations made by our collaborative, and study outcomes. In particular, we explore the concepts of contexts of reception and participatory starting points, which may be especially relevant for partnerships with immigrant communities whose members have historically had lower rates of civic and political participation in the US. We discuss contextual findings such as worker partner accounts of language barriers, economic and social marginalization, and civic skills and participation, as well as subsequent adaptations made by the partnership. We also describe the relative effectiveness of these adaptations in yielding equitable participation and building partners’ capacity. We conclude by sharing lessons learned and their implications for CBPR and partnerships with immigrant communities more broadly.     

Lucy's dividing family: My discovery of the person in the subject

Abstract

This essay is excerpted from a larger project the author conducted with adolescent and preadolescent children of divorce. It tells the personal story of the author's first interview experience with her first participant in this project, here called Lucy. At the time of the interview, she was 11 years old and her parents had been divorced for 3 years. In the effort to engage the reader as an outside interpreter of her story, this essay invites the reader in, to the “raw data” of Lucy's experiences, as described in her words. Presented here in dialogue are the two voices of participant and researcher, as well as researcher reflections and recollections of this memorable experience.     

Mental contrasting turns positive feedback on creative potential into successful performance

In two studies employing a creativity test (i.e., solving insight problems), we hypothesized and observed that mental contrasting of a desired future with present reality (Oettingen, Pak, & Schnetter, 2001) transforms positive feedback into strong performance. Participants received positive or moderate bogus feedback on their creative potential and then engaged either in mental contrasting, indulging in the desired future, dwelling on present reality, or irrelevant contrasting with respect to taking a creativity test. Mental contrasting participants who received positive feedback performed better than those who received moderate feedback. They also performed better than indulging, dwelling, and irrelevant contrasting participants, regardless of the feedback received. By manipulating expectations of success through bogus feedback, the present research adjusts for confounding variables and validates previous findings showing that mental contrasting produces expectancy-dependent goal commitments and performance. Implications for designing interventions to enhance people's creativity are discussed.     

Aerodynamic control in apraxia at three intraoral pressure levels

Five neurologically normal and five apractic subjects were required to develop and maintain target intraoral pressure levels during 5-sec. trials. The apractic subjects showed increased latencies in gaining the target and reduced maintenance time and increased variability in attempts to stay at target. Results suggest that physiologically based assessment tasks provide sensitive indices of the degree of oral apraxia in patients with left-hemisphere brain damage.     

ALCOHOL AND DATING RISK FACTORS FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT AMONG COLLEGE WOMEN

American societal norms frequently link alcohol, dating, and sexuality. This cross-sectional study examined the role of alcohol and dating risk factors for sexual assault among a representative sample of female students at a large urban university. Over half of the 1,160 women had experienced some form of sexual assault. Ninety-five percent of these assaults were committed by someone the woman knew and almost half of these assaults involved alcohol consumption by either the man, the woman, or both. Discriminant function analyses indicated that dating, sexual, and misperception experiences and alcohol consumption during these experiences predicted assault group status. Furthermore, alcohol consumption during consensual sex and sexual misperceptions were positively related to alcohol consumption during the sexual assault. The predictors of assault group status were similar for African American and Caucasian women. Theoretical implications are discussed and suggestions are made for combining alcohol and sexual assault prevention programming.     

A comparison of the codeswitching patterns of aphasic and neurologically normal bilingual speakers of English and Spanish

Conversational discourse samples were obtained from four aphasic and four neurologically normal Hispanic bilinguals in monolingual English, monolingual Spanish, and bilingual contexts to identify codeswitching patterns. Analysis of the samples based on the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) Model (Myers-Scotton, 1993a) revealed consistent matching of the language context by the aphasic and normal subjects. The aphasic subjects demonstrated a greater frequency of MLF constituents and codeswitching patterns not evident in the speech samples of the normal subjects. Results suggest an increased dependence on both languages for communication following neurological impairment.