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Abstract

Native American communities are disproportionately affected by a number of behavioral health disparities, including higher rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. As mobile health (mHealth) interventions gain traction as methods for addressing these disparities, they continue to lack relevance to Native American youth. In an effort to explore the design of relevant behavioral mHealth intervention for Native American communities, we have developed ARORA (Amplifying Resilience Over Restricted Internet Access), a prototype behavioral mHealth intervention that has been co-designed with Native American youth, a community advisory board, and a clinical psychologist. In this paper, we qualitatively analyze our co-design and focus group sessions using a grounded theory approach and identify the key themes that Native American community members have identified as being critical components of relevant mHealth designs. Notably, we find that the Native American youth who participated in our focus groups desired a greater level of didactic interaction with cultural and behavioral health elements. We conclude with a discussion of the significant challenges we faced in our efforts to co-design software with Native American stakeholders and provide recommendations that might guide other HCI researchers and designers through challenges that arise during the process of cross-cultural design.Native American communities are disproportionately affected by a number of behavioral health disparities, including higher rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. As mobile health (mHealth) interventions gain traction as methods for addressing these disparities, they continue to lack relevance to Native American youth. In an effort to explore the design of relevant behavioral mHealth intervention for Native American communities, we have developed ARORA (Amplifying Resilience Over Restricted Internet Access), a prototype behavioral mHealth intervention that has been co-designed with Native American youth, a community advisory board, and a clinical psychologist. In this paper, we qualitatively analyze our co-design and focus group sessions using a grounded theory approach and identify the key themes that Native American community members have identified as being critical components of relevant mHealth designs. Notably, we find that the Native American youth who participated in our focus groups desired a greater level of didactic interaction with cultural and behavioral health elements. We conclude with a discussion of the significant challenges we faced in our efforts to co-design software with Native American stakeholders and provide recommendations that might guide other HCI researchers and designers through challenges that arise during the process of cross-cultural design.

Citation

Morgan Vigil-Hayes, Ann Futterman Collier, Shelby Hagemann, Giovanni Castillo, Keller Mikkelson, Joshua Dingman, Andrew Muñoz, Jade Luther, and Alexandra McLaughlin. 2021. Integrating Cultural Relevance into a Behavioral mHealth Intervention for Native American Youth. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW1, Article 165 (April 2021), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449239

@article{10.1145/3449239,
author = {Vigil-Hayes, Morgan and Collier, Ann Futterman and Hagemann, Shelby and Castillo, Giovanni and Mikkelson, Keller and Dingman, Joshua and Mu\~{n}oz, Andrew and Luther, Jade and McLaughlin, Alexandra},
title = {Integrating Cultural Relevance into a Behavioral MHealth Intervention for Native American Youth},
year = {2021},
issue_date = {April 2021},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
volume = {5},
number = {CSCW1},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3449239},
doi = {10.1145/3449239},
abstract = {Native American communities are disproportionately affected by a number of behavioral health disparities, including higher rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. As mobile health (mHealth) interventions gain traction as methods for addressing these disparities, they continue to lack relevance to Native American youth. In an effort to explore the design of relevant behavioral mHealth intervention for Native American communities, we have developed ARORA (Amplifying Resilience Over Restricted Internet Access), a prototype behavioral mHealth intervention that has been co-designed with Native American youth, a community advisory board, and a clinical psychologist. In this paper, we qualitatively analyze our co-design and focus group sessions using a grounded theory approach and identify the key themes that Native American community members have identified as being critical components of relevant mHealth designs. Notably, we find that the Native American youth who participated in our focus groups desired a greater level of didactic interaction with cultural and behavioral health elements. We conclude with a discussion of the significant challenges we faced in our efforts to co-design software with Native American stakeholders and provide recommendations that might guide other HCI researchers and designers through challenges that arise during the process of cross-cultural design.},
journal = {Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.},
month = {apr},
articleno = {165},
numpages = {29},
keywords = {native american, mhealth, rural computing, behavioral health}
}