May 22, 2020

Assessing individual and community stress in Latinx communities

By Elaine M. Faustman (faustman@uw.edu)
Professor, Institute for Risk Analysis and Risk Communication, School of Public Health, University of Washington

Coauthors: Jill Falman, Marissa Smith,Bill Griffiths, Beti Thompson

The author will give this presentation at the Pandemic Urbanism Symposium in the closing plenary session, from 4:30 – 5:30 PM on May 29, 2020.

We have been working with communities using Community Based Participatory Research approaches (CBPR) for research based in the Yakima Valley in Eastern Washington for the past twenty years and we would like to share with you several of our observations and lessons learned that are relevant for our sessions focusing on Pandemic Urbanism.

First, because of the complexity of urban-rural gradients in the dynamic communities along the Yakima Valley one of the first issues we faced in establishing our community relationships was how do we talk about and define cities. Example of urban- rural gradients that we defined with our communities during our initial studies in the valley will be shared as will how these communities informed our intervention studies.

Second we will share our experience in using multiple stress assessment tools with our communities of Hispanic farmworker populations in the Valley. These lessons learned will include examples with WHO perceived stress questionnaires as well as community tailored assessments that are linked with geographical, community as well as biochemical changes associated with stress. Our third type of lessons learned will be on community engagement, translation and action.