Beyond the Manuscript: Podcast Interview Transcript
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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 editors who handled the articles conduct our Beyond the Manuscript interviews. This edition of Beyond the Manuscript features Nancy Winterbauer and Kathy Garrett authors of A Communications Tool to Recruit Policymakers to a CBPR Partnership for Childhood Obesity Prevention, and PCHP Editor-in-Chief Darius Tandon.
Good afternoon and thanks for taking the time to talk a little bit more about your manuscript that’s being published in Progress and Community Health Partnerships.
The first question I have for the two of you is if you could a talk a little bit more about why the partners that you were working with felt that a video was the right approach to take to reach policy makers? You write in the article that you thought a video would be effective for communicating the voice of the community, but there are probably other ways that you could have done that beyond the video. I’m interested in hearing a little bit more about why you gravitated toward the idea of developing a video?
We state in the article that we wanted a product that would reach a large number of policy makers but take-up a very little bit of their time, but also something that would appeal to their emotions and in that way draw them into the project. That was the motivation for the video.
I’ll build on that a little bit Nancy. I think one of the challenges that we had getting in front of the policy makers as Nancy mentioned was the time aspect. There were a lot of other ways this could have been achieved. We could have used brochures or fact sheets to tell the story of those who live in food deserts and are food challenged. We could have had them meet with the representatives and policy makers and that would have been effective, but number one that’s a timing and scheduling nightmare sometimes.
I think what we really wanted to do is bring a voice to the individuals who were food challenged. We wanted them to tell the story in their own words knowing that would be the most compelling. In addition to being able to tell it in their own words, we were able to go to various places within the community to demonstrate that this just isn’t in one little pocket. We actually shot in various different locations to demonstrate needs and what the issue were affecting the constituents in those food deserts and challenged [End Page 451] areas. So we were able to tell the story in a very compelling way in the own voice of the people that we were representing in an emotionally compelling way that reached across a lot of geographically dispersed areas.
One of the other things that struck me in reading the article was how actively your different community partners were contributing to the creation of the video. We publish a lot of different examples of community university partnerships and don’t always see as much active engagement from community partners. Do you think that there’s something unique about working on this video that perhaps fostered this strong engagement from your different partners?
Going back to that storytelling aspect the video was a representation of the people who were involved and they knew that their community and their constituencies were going to be visually represented. That really fostered a lot more ownership and active contribution as a result. Again, the article refers to the number of iterations we went through in terms of viewing and first shooting, but then viewing and editing the video and I think that that really speaks to again the idea that these communities were going to be represented and our members...
