Podcast Interview Transcript
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Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships’ 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 Jess Holzer interviews Thoai Nguyen, Giang Nguyen, Rorng Sorn, and Taehoon Kim, authors of “Differential Role of Social Connectedness in Geriatric Depression among Southeast Asian Ethnic Groups.”
First off, I’d like to thank everybody for taking time out of their Friday to have a chat with us today. My first question is asking you to talk a little bit about the partnership. You mentioned in the manuscript how important the partnership was and how partners equally contributed to the process of the research. And I’d just love to hear an example or two about how that showed in the work and how that improved the work.
This is Thoai from SEAMAAC. To me, I really think that the partnership started in 2005 when I was first appointed as CEO of SEAMAAC. Very soon after that, I met Dr. Nguyen, Giang Nguyen, from University of Pennsylvania and immediately we felt that there was a lot of synergy. I think Dr. Nguyen being, I think, a refugee like me in a very different field of health and health research and for me as an advocate and community organizer on behalf of Southeast Asia.
I think very early on that I recognized and talked to Giang about the lack of accurate information that was out there about the Southeast Asian refugee community. Not only were the data aggregated but the data didn’t really look into the subgroups within the larger Asian American monolith; or at least that’s what I think the outside community would think of us.
And when we would make a case for more funding or funding period, we would be asked to supply data. And because of the dearth of this type of data, it was a fairly frustrating exercise. You would give anecdotal examples of things that you know were actually happening in the community, were actually happening with families and individuals, and you can provide many of them but the funders would inevitably say, “well these are anecdotal information and we really can’t use them. We need to have real good scientific data that has both academic and scientific rigor.” [End Page 495]
So that, to me, was a challenge. So I think at some point very early on in my tenure at SEAMAAC, Dr. Nguyen and I sat down and we discussed different ways, and in fact, I think we submitted several proposals together. And I think – and they were eventually rejected, but the process really honed our partnership in the way that we would describe the community and figuring out, from my point of view, the trust and relationship that SEAMAAC has with the community and the scientific and medical knowledge that Dr. Nguyen has and also the personal experience that he carries. So I think it was a very good partnership in that sense.
This is Giang. I just wanted to add to that initial description that Thoai had that SEAMAAC and Penn had worked together on collecting some of the data that Thoai had identified that was missing and some of that work has actually also been published in this journal so maybe we can provide that information separately. But that was really the beginning of this partnership. And it was also through all the work that Thoai and I do in the communities where we also were able to meet Rorng and connect with the type of work that her organization has done because we all shared a similar vision and a similar mission with these...
