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.
My name is Suzanne Grieb. I’m a research fellow at the Center for Child and Community Health Research at the Johns Hopkins School and Medicine and I’m an associate editor with the journal.
Today we will be discussing your paper Storytelling and Community Intervention Research: Lessons Learned from the Walk Your Heart to Health Intervention published in the Works in Progress in Lessons Learned section of the journal. So welcome. Could you please both introduce yourselves?
Sure so this is Alana. My name is Alana Lebron and I’m a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in the Health Behavior and Health Education Department. And my research focuses on social, socioeconomic, racial and ethnic inequities in health. And as part of my training, I’ve been working with the Healthy Environments Partnership to kind of better understand the contribution of social and ________ environments to racial, ethnic and socioeconomic healthinequities with a particular focus on factors that affect the health of Latinos.
Hi, this is Cindy. My name is Cindy Gamboa and I’m the project coordinator for the Healthy Environments Partnership, which is a community-based participatory research project in Detroit that focuses on understanding the cardiovascular disease inequalities that are happening in our city. And I’m also a resident in Southwest Detroit.
Cindy, would you please orient our listeners? Or to orient our listeners, would you please provide us with a brief summary of the project, both the overall Walk Your Heart to Health intervention as well as the storytelling component described in the manuscript?
Sure so this is Alana. What we thought was – perhaps I’ll just provide a brief overview of the project and Cindy can provide some more detail.
So the Healthy Environments Partnership or HEP, as Cindy mentioned, is a community-based participatory research partnership. And this partnership really consists of community-based organizations, representatives from health services and academic institutions. And it began in 2000 with the goal of understanding and addressing features of the social and physical environment that contribute to the patterning of cardiovascular disease risks for residents in three neighborhoods of Detroit that have the greatest risk of disease. [End Page 487]
And so early on in the partnership, HEP engaged community residents in focus group discussions and town hall dialogs to identify factors that residents prioritized in addressing these factors as they relate to cardiovascular disease and to really help identify opportunities for intervention to reduce these inequities. So through this process, HEP’s steering committee identified addressing physical activity through walking groups as a promising intervention strategy. And the intervention is called Walk Your Heart to Health Walking Group Intervention, which was designed jointly by community health service and academic partners in the Healthy Environments Partnership with a lot of community input along the way. And this walking group intervention was really part of a multilevel intervention to improve physical activity. So the intervention began in 2008 and completed in 2013.
Hi, this is Cindy and I just would like to add that over the course of the intervention, the project staff provided regular reports about the walking group to the steering committee and identified that participants in the walking group tended to drop off a little bit after the first eight weeks of the intervention. The project staff, including the community health promoters that led the walking group who were also members of the communities where the walking groups were held, identified social support and other barriers to physical activity as being the main factors that contributed to the challenges in maintaining the improvements in physical activity for the participants.
So the steering...
