Collaborative Research: Science with the People: Collaborative analysis of government data for policy reach and structural change in environmentally contested regions

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This project supports residents to use government data to document and examine patterns of health and wellbeing in their communities. Using health data that has been collected by government agencies enables community members to answer some of the questions they may have about illness in relation to the places they live. By working with residents to analyze and interpret official data, the residents’ own insights about their health and environment will be augmented by the science they are helping to produce. The project will build researcher, community, and institutional capacity to continue collaborative science work on environmental health justice and health equity beyond the project. The results of the project will be disseminated by public events in which residents are key speakers as well as in press conferences, social media, blogs, and articles. The project team will initially analyze data from government sources, such as cancer registries and Medicaid databases, to produce initial health data about patterns of health and illness. In partnership with communities, open collaborative workshops will be held where local people will discuss the initial data and ask additional health questions for the team to try to answer with the data, which the researchers will then share in a follow-up workshop. This iterative workshop method enables local community members to participate in the analyses and interpretation of government-generated health data, making the science more relevant to their lives. The scientific reports produced from these public workshops may be used by local residents to support their health claims towards regulatory and policy change. This process of using community-based collaborative workshops to analyze and interpret government data to answer local questions can be replicated for many kinds of data and a variety of community questions. To facilitate this, the final project deliverable is an online manual explaining how residents in other states or regions can replicate this process to produce their own data analyses from government sources.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.