RAPID: COVID-19, Knowledge and Health in Remote Alaska Native Communities

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This community-based study responds to calls from tribal leaders and public health officials to understand how COVID-19 affects daily life in Alaska Native communities. Public health guidelines may be difficult to implement in many remote communities due to limited or inadequate housing, water and sanitation infrastructure and the effects of quarantine on food, transportation, and health care. Through qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys, this research will document daily living conditions, asking how participants perceive risk, experience impacts, and adapt to the threat of COVID-19. Findings will contribute to knowledge of COVID-19 within an Indigenous Alaskan context; understanding how community responses to the pandemic vary socially, culturally, and geographically; and expand the literature on the social ecology of Arctic health. Broader impacts include co-produced guidelines and recommendations that can be effectively implemented in remote Alaska Native communities.Mixed methods will be employed combining qualitative interviews with a series of three online surveys. PIs will conduct approximately twenty semi-structured interviews with village leaders and tribal and public health officials working in remote rural Alaska Native communities. Interviews will focus on community health challenges and responses to COVID-19 and will contextualize survey data. The survey tool, modified for rural Alaska from a World Health Organization model, will be deployed three times at two-month intervals. Survey questions will address respondents’ perception of COVID-19 risk, behavioral responses, and experience of daily life during the pandemic.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.