I’ve been continuing with my project and embracing the uncertainties that have come along with this process. At the end of June, I had the opportunity to pitch my idea to a reputable institution within the immigrant health space. The meeting went well and I’ll now be working with them on this project. I’ve viewed this as a significant step in this research journey as I’m excited to be able to work with an established immigrant working population and with the experienced team at this institution. With this collaboration in the works, I’ve had to convert IRB applications and do some editing to fit our shared goals for this project. Because of this, I’ve also had to push back my start date for fieldwork to the latter half of the summer. I anticipate that I will continue to do fieldwork into the fall semester.
I’ve also continued to read the books and articles I was planning to use to ground my research. Particularly, I’ve found Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon and Bodies at Risk by Elizabeth Wheatley to be informative. These two books are ethnographies and have given me a lot of ideas on how I’d like to format and frame my findings. Pelto’s Applied Ethnography has also helped me significantly in the editing of my IRB application, and the planning for the fieldwork phase. In addition to this, I’ve created structured guides for my interview and focus group discussions. Using the books and articles to help me frame and format these questions has been helpful. Again, these foundational texts have also been useful for the development of a preliminary coding scheme which I will be testing out with the initial interviews I conduct. The coding scheme includes around 12-15 items.
I also had the opportunity to speak with three researchers involved in the MASALA study. I was able to ask key questions to a physician, a nutritional epidemiologist, a community health worker (CHW), and a research coordinator. I enjoyed my conversation with the CHW as she has extensive experience working with South Asian populations in NYC. She affirmed several of my assumptions with her first-hand experience. Some include the gap that exists between doctors and patients, the importance of the joint family household, and the unique mental health challenges individuals face as immigrants in the city. I discussed several other topics of interest with the other researchers as well including differences in cultures of health between second generation and immigrant populations and the harmful nature of the model minority myth within this particular context. I also found it interesting to talk about topics I saw in the literature, as there have been some studies that have suggested correlations between the use of spices (ex. Turmeric, cumin, etc.) and cardiovascular health. Both researchers who I spoke with on this said that it is important to be wary of these correlations as the nature of this type of research does not lend itself to providing significant causal connections. In other words, we cannot simply say that 1 gram of turmeric daily will reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. This just reminded me of the importance of speaking to others about research and thinking critically about the literature we see.
