Podcast Interview Transcript
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In each volume of Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, the PCHP editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript podcast interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides authors with the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. Beyond the Manuscript podcasts are available for download on the journal’s web site ( www.press.jhu.edu/journals/pchp ). The following Beyond the Manuscript podcast features Caree Jackson, a Kellogg Health Scholar at Morgan State University whose research focuses on obesity in the African American community. Jackson is the author of “Development of a Theater-based Nutrition and Physical Activity Intervention for Low-income, Urban African American Adolescents.” Associate editor Chandra Jackson conducted the interview. The following is an edited transcript of the Beyond the Manuscript podcast.
Thank you, Dr. Jackson, for agreeing to be interviewed for this Beyond the Manuscript podcast. We found your manuscript to be quite interesting and are pleased to have the opportunity to discuss it a little further with you.
In hopes of reminding the audience of the manuscript, would you please begin by providing a summary or synopsis of the project?
Certainly, and thank you so much for having me, Chandra. The Healthy for Life project is a 6-week, nutrition and physical activity pilot intervention that was conducted in an after school setting. The objective was to develop an interactive, theater-based intervention that conveys health messages to low-income, urban, African American youth, and it engages them in learning ways to adopt a healthy lifestyle.
The students were engaged in learning health messages through theater, dance, and music, and the program culmination was a dinner theater performance that showcased the health messages that the student learned during the program.
The theater-based curriculum consisted of 6 health or theater-based health lessons, and we found that each of the learning objectives for the health sessions was achieved and each participant contributed to and performed in our final performance.
All of the participants were highly satisfied with the theater-based method of learning health messages, and we believe that is a viable medium for teaching low-income urban youth about health messages overall.
Great, what are the implications of this type of work in terms of health education, public health policy or future research?
Well, the use of the arts is an acceptable and engaging way to teach messages to low-income, African American youth, and that is one of the things that we learned through using theater to teach youth about health. [End Page 99]
The implications of the research are that researchers and educators should use innovative methods to engage youth in health education. The mundane lecture method is no longer capturing the attention of our youth, and middle school-age children especially are in a learning phase that should foster peer involvement, abstract thinking, and self-expression.
Future research should focus on studies with larger samples and a variety of populations and settings. This may substantiate the effects of art-based research and improve the efficiency of running these type of interventions.
Policy should also be written that give researchers and educators the time, training, and funding needed to engage in creative forms of teaching youth.
Do you believe that this type of research—theater-based nutrition and physical activity intervention—is suitable for other racial or ethnic groups other than African Americans?
I certainly do. I think that the theater-based interventions are suitable for many racial and ethnic groups, and the use of theater for health promotion has its foundation grounded in developing countries with a variety of ethnic backgrounds and cultural practices such as India and Nigeria, and it has been used more in developing countries than it has been in the United States.
Although the research literature is limited, the theater-based method has been successfully used in African American, Latino, and Caucasian populations.
That is excellent. In hopes of providing recommendations for those interested in engaging...
