Gubrium and Valdez to Present at NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Festival

Health Promotion and Policy faculty members Luis Valdez and Aline Gubrium, along with Men of Color Health Awareness (MOCHA) lead facilitator and outreach ambassador Albert Hubert, will present their research on “Participant Engagement and Ethical Digital Storytelling: The MOCHA Moving Forward Study” at the NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Festival on Nov. 18. Their presentation will be part of the two-day research festival’s session on “New Rules of Engagement in Behavioral and Social Sciences.”

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The three researchers describe and analyze ethical issues that arose in conducting participatory digital storytelling workshops in an NIH-funded study focused on analyzing and addressing stressors experienced by African American men in the community, and will discuss potential ways to resolve these issues.

Hubert joined MOCHA in 2011 and has been actively involved since that time. As he puts it, “MOCHA saved my life. I began as a participant, volunteered to do community outreach, got trained to be a MOCHA Mentor, and I was then offered a regular staff position. When the NIH research project began, I was offered a position as one of three trained community interviewers. As part of our CBPR process, I was involved in the analysis, write-up, and dissemination of the results of the exploratory phase of the research. These themes were then incorporated into a new version of the MOCHA curriculum, a version that emphasized personal storytelling and narrative exchanges, in a process in which I was deeply involved.  With the new ‘Stories Matter’ version of MOCHA, I became the lead facilitator in running the new 12-week program.”

Valdez specializes in using community-engaged, multilevel perspectives, and mixed methods approaches to understand and address the impact of systemic processes that perpetuate racial/ethnic disparities in historically marginalized and minoritized populations. He is a key collaborator on the five-year MOCHA study, and also served as the lead investigator on its affiliated study of “MOCHA Latino: An Investigation of Stress and Chronic Disease Prevention in Low-Income Latino Men.”

Gubrium is an internationally renowned expert on the use of participatory, visual, narrative and ethnographic methods to study the sexual and reproductive health knowledge and decision-making of marginalized women, youth and families. She is a lead investigator on a five-year, community-based participatory research study, funded by the NIMHD, with Springfield’s MOCHA group and is also a co-lead investigator on a four-year, Massachusetts Department of Public Health-funded award to examine adolescent sexual and reproductive health inequities in Massachusetts.

The annual NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (BSSR) Festival is organized to inform the wider community, stakeholders, and NIH Institutes and Centers about the latest BSSR funded by the NIH and its overall impact and importance across the entire field of biomedical research. The festival highlights exciting research results, emerging areas, and innovations in health-related BSSR.

For more information and to register, visit the NIH website.