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  • Beyond the Manuscript Podcast Interview Transcript
  • Larkin Strong, Zeno Franco, and Mark Flower

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 Larkin Strong interviews Zeno Franco and Mark Flower, authors of “Community Veterans’ Decision to Use VA Services: A Multimethod Veteran Health Partnership Study.”

Beyond the Manuscript.

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Larkin Strong:

I want to thank everyone for joining us today. We’ll go ahead and get started with the first question. One thing that I felt that this manuscript really highlights well is the collaborative way in which Dryhootch and academic partners worked together to develop the survey and analyze the open-ended responses about the barriers to VA use. And so I’m wondering if you all could elaborate a little bit more on this process and share with us how you felt this unfolded and any particular challenges or contributions that came about as a result.

Zeno Franco:

You bet. So, first of all, this is Zeno. I’m the academic partner that has worked a lot with Mark Flower, who’s also a part of this conversation. Let me sort of answer the last part of the question first, and then I’ll actually ask Mark to comment on the generation of the survey itself. But when we analyzed the open-ended responses, we used some ideas from qualitative data analysis process on member checking, and really going back any point in the analysis process for those items that were open-ended where we didn’t understand a response, and pretty carefully checking with our veteran community partner to see what those things meant. And some of them were acronyms—military acronyms—that we didn’t know even though we had worked with veterans for quite a while or some ambiguity in the responses. And that really helped to clarify it.

I think one of the things that we did and also learned is that sometimes doing formal member checking, where you’re actually working with your community partners to kind of look at transcripts and stuff, felt kind of cumbersome for the veterans, and so we often would just send really brief e-mails saying, “Can you help us figure out what this means?” And that actually worked out a lot better for us. [End Page 45]

Mark Flower:

And this is Mark Flower, the community partner with Zeno. The process, I think, was cool on a couple of things in my mind. One was that we, as a veterans’ organization and people that do work in our veterans community, allowed us an opportunity to learn how academics, or academia, research works. And then on the other side of that is that we were able through this process, to actually teach our academic partners a lot more about what a veteran is and how we kind of think sometimes, and actually started the opportunity that allowed us to change language and kind of take the research language to bring it down to our level. I’m not saying that we don’t know a lot of big words; but transporting their language into our language, which then allowed us to communicate a lot better between our research folks and us as just folks that are trying to help veterans.

Zeno Franco:

So I think all the items were simplified based on feedback from the veteran community partner. And not only were the items simplified, but the responses were also simplified so that instead of using a 5-point Lickert scale or Lickert-type items...

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