Podcast Interview Transcript
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Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships’s latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscript podcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The Associate Editor who handles the featured article conducts our Beyond the Manuscript interview.
In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Associate Editor Erin Kobetz interviews Maghboeba Mosavel and Dwala Ferrell, authors of “House Chats as a Grassroots Engagement Methodology in Community-Based Participatory Research: The WE Project, Petersburg.”
Hi everyone, my name is Erin Kobetz and I am an associate editor for Progress and Community Health Partnerships and it’s my pleasure to speak to the authors of “House Chats: A Grassroots Methodology.” I’m hoping the authors can introduce themselves and give an overview of the work before I launch into my questions.
Hi, I’m Maghboeba Mosavel and I’m an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and I am one of the PIs on the Wellness Engagement Project in Petersburg.
And I am Dwala Ferrell and I was the CEO of Pathways, the community partner for this project and a co-PI on the WE project in Petersburg.
Thank you for the introduction. Would want of you want to provide a brief overview of your paper for some of our readers who may only be tuning into the podcast?
Yeah, sure, I’d be happy to do that. So, the paper talks about sort of a new method that we have termed house chats and basically it is a way to engage, at the grassroots level, residents who may not ordinarily come to sort of a more traditional focus group discussion but yet it’s very important to hear these voices. So the house chat methodology allows researchers to really hear those voices. And I think what’s great about this as well is that it sort of engages lay persons in the community to facilitate these house chats with members of their social network. So it’s a very engaged methodology and it’s a focused conversation. It occurs in the home or in another place in the community that people are comfortable gathering and it very much simulates an informal kitchen table conversation. You know, food is normally served and it’s in the community. Dwala, did you want to add to that?
The process is not a quick one and takes some time to build relationships and produces very good information that otherwise would be difficult to get, I think you said that earlier.
So I think the reason that I loved this article so much and why I advocated for doing a podcast is I thought the concept of house chats was an incredibly unique methodology, one that I knew very little about as a long standing community based participatory research [End Page 401]and thought that many readers would like to know more. So you know one thing that I garnered from the reading is that together the researchers and community partners selected members of the target community to be house chat leaders. And the leaders then in turn recruited members of their own social network to participate in a house chat.
And you note that this approach allows for the recruitment of individuals who might otherwise not feel comfortable participating in traditional research. The researcher in me challenges the notion that if there is relationships between the house leader and the participant, whether or not this could potentially influence the content of the discussion itself. And I’m wondering how you feel about that.
Yeah, I think that’s...
