Street PAR Health Project

The Street PAR Health Project is a street participatory action research (Street PAR) project designed to explore to what extent health and structural opportunity is predictive of experiences with and attitudes toward physical violence in a community sample of street identified Black youth and adults ages 16-to-44 in the Northside, Westside, Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods of Wilmington, Delaware. Street PAR is a methodological framework that organizes individuals formerly involved with the criminal justice system to empirically document and do “action” or activism on a topic of their choice in local neighborhoods. This project will organize eleven Street PAR members along with university faculty, medical researchers or doctors as well as graduate and undergraduate students to build on and enhance a previous Street PAR study entitled, The People Report’s (Payne, 2013), which was conducted exclusively in the Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods of Wilmington. The Street PAR Health Project will train another set of Street PAR members to more aggressively test to what extent health and structural opportunity is predictive of violence as a public health issue in four low-income Black neighborhoods in Wilmington. The Street PAR Health Project aims to collect community-level data in the following forms: (a) 2,000 community survey packets  (500 surveys per neighborhood); (b) 800 blood pressure tests; (c) 60 individual interviews; (d) 16 group interviews (5 participants each); and at least (e) two dozen field observations of street identified Black youth and adults in these four neighborhoods. It should be noted that this Street PAR project is already underway in two of the neighborhoods listed above and/or funded by a major hospital system in Delaware. Carnegie support will help to expand the project to a citywide study and allow us to collect more data in all of the four neighborhoods. Additionally, we aim to organize a robust “action” or activism agenda that will run concurrent with and complement the empirical study. Action programs will include organizing a health festival, art exhibition and a street outreach campaign to not only bring attention to violence and structural opportunity, but also to educate local residents about the prevalence of “food deserts,” hypertension, diabetes, exercise as well as dental and health care. Participatory action research as intervention has been found to reduce the negative effects of just about any phenomenon in which it is used to study. If funded, the proposed study will be the first on-the-ground city-wide intervention and analysis of violence on a large-scale community sample of street identified Black men and women in Wilmington, Delaware.

Required Skills

Interest working in community of Wilmington, DE

Time-management

Organization

Recommended Skills

Data entry

Interview skills

Organizing and cleaning quantitative and qualitative data