Beyond the Manuscript: Public Participation in Air Sampling and Water Quality Test Kit Development to Enable Citizen Science

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.

In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Associate Editor, Suzanne Dolwick-Grieb, interviews Erin Haynes and Rusty Roberts, two of the authors of "Public Participation in Air Sampling and Water Quality Test Kit Development to Enable Citizen Science."

Suzanne Dolwick Grieb:

Hi and welcome to the Beyond the Management podcast for the journal Progress and Community

Health Partnerships. I am Suzanne Dolwick Grieb and I'm a research associate faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Center for Child and Community Health Research. And I also serve as an associate editor for the Journal.

Today I'm talking to Dr. Erin Haynes and Mr. Rusty Roberts, co-authors of the manuscript, Public Participation in Air Sampling and Water Quality Test Kit Development to Enable Citizen Science. Welcome to you both and could you please introduce yourselves.

Erin Haynes:

Excellent. Well hello. This is Erin and I'm delighted to be a part of this podcast so that we can further, you know, describe the study that we did together. I am a professor at the University of Kentucky. I'm the Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Interim Chair of the Department of Preventative Medicine and Environmental Health. And I've been conducting environmental health research in collaboration with community members for well over a decade.

Rusty Roberts:

Hello. My name is Rusty Roberts, and I am a retired health educator. I taught 40 years in the Rolling

Hills local school district, also former County Commissioner and a school board member and we really appreciate the opportunity for you to ask us some questions as a follow-up to all the great research that we've done here in Guernsey County.

Suzanne Dolwick Grieb:

Great. Well thank you again so much for joining me today to share about your work. And first just to help orient the listeners, will one of you just, you know, give a brief overview of the project that is the focus of the manuscript.

Erin Haynes:

So our study was a direct outpouring, out-product of what the community was interested in understanding, which is air quality and water quality in baseline assessment prior to development of a solid waste facility for related to the fracking industry. So together we measured VOCs, volatile organic compounds, also looked at some water indicators.

Suzanne Dolwick Grieb:

Okay. Great. And as you mentioned this was really initiated by community concerns and you describe that Mr. Roberts is the one that reached out to the researchers regarding this project. And so I'm curious if you two worked together before and if not how you, Mr. Roberts, kind of began looking for someone in research and you know as you were doing that what were your goals or your hope in doing that.

Rusty Roberts:

Well let me give you a little bit of background of how I met Dr. Haynes because I think this is kind of interesting and this will lead us up to presently where we are now. Over ten years ago, Dr. Haynes came to our schoolboard meeting and at that particular time I was the board president.

She came in and was talking about a program in which they implemented. It was a partnership between Marietta College, which I think is Marietta University now and the University of Cincinnati, and the research program was called CARE. CARE stands for Community Actively Researching Exposure Studies.

And in this study what she was trying to do is to number one, kind of point out to us their goals and objectives on what they wanted to do throughout the study. And...