Podcast Interview Transcript
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Welcome to Beyond the Manuscript. 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. In this edition of Beyond the Manuscript Associate Editor Hae-Ra Han interviews Amal Killawi and Aasim Padela, authors of “Using CBPR for Health Research in American Muslim Mosque Communities: Lessons Learned.”
Miss Killawi, good morning. Thank you for your time today. We also have another author of this paper titled “Using CBPR for Health Research in American Muslim Mosque Communities: Lessons Learned,” Dr. Padela. Thank you for joining us today.
To give our audience an orientation to your project, would you please provide a brief summary of your project, highlighting its purpose and the main points you address in your paper?
Sure. Good morning. Thank you so much for inviting us. My name is Amal Killawi and I worked as the project coordinator for this particular project and our goal primarily was to develop a CBPR-based project involving American Muslim community stakeholders in order to understand the healthcare beliefs, behaviors, and challenges of this community. And the reason being is that even though American Muslims are growing in number they are often misunderstood in health research and understudied.
We published a number of papers summarizing our results but real quickly, just to give your listeners some perspective, we found that Muslims across racial and ethnic backgrounds share values regarding health informed by their faith. So there was consensus about the importance of health systems providing halal food, providing same gender providers, and a space to privately pray.
And we also found that religious leaders in the American Muslim community play a number of roles in community health. For example, encouraging healthy behaviors or performing religious rituals around life events and illnesses, and advocating for Muslim patients as well as assisting in healthcare decisions for this community.
And we also learned that CBPR has great potential in this community but we have to deal with serious capacity issues and be more realistic with our expectations during the process.
Thank you. I find your paper particularly intriguing in that it offers this Muslim community [End Page 75] perspective as you rightfully pointed out, which has not been well addressed in the literature. So perhaps, I think, we can talk about how the health partnership described in the paper was started in the community. So either Dr. Padela or Miss Killawi can talk to us about that, I believe.
This is Aasim Padela. Basically, the project started from meetings in the community itself. I moved to the University of Michigan and I was part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program where I was funded to do projects related to community health. We had a specific CBPR focus and being from the Muslim community myself, I started to attend some social gatherings and events at mosques and tried to introduce myself as someone who was interested in the health of the community. And through those sorts of meetings I brought together a few individuals who felt that we should do some project together. So it started in an organic way in that sense. It was not that I had no experience in American Muslim health research, but I wanted to get a sense of what the community prioritized.
And so the project incorporated some community stakeholders, individuals who are involved in some aspect of health with their organizations and volunteered their time towards the Muslim community service. And then some also quasi-healthcare institutions or institutions that served the Muslim or Arab community in greater Michigan.
We came together and had some deliberative meetings and talked about what we should do or we can do. And the idea was we had to start from the ground up, basically...
