Re/producing Knowledge in Health and Medicine: Designing Research Methods for Mental Health

ABSTRACT

Constructing mental health interventions comes with specific methodological challenges, especially when working with vulnerable communities. Developing means of assessment for such projects compounds these challenges because the need to protect participant information may conflict with the need to produce persuasive results about the intervention to obtain funding for additional care. This article seeks to redress these methodological challenges by proposing new protocols for approving and assessing mental health interventions centered within multiply marginalized communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Health/medical communication
• rhetoric of science
• action research
• design of communication
• methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Cannon

Peter Cannon, PhD, is the Project Manager for the Responsive Librarianship Lab at the University of South Florida’s School of Information where he studies the neurorhetorics of libraries and information science. His current research applies findings from the neurosciences, which suggest reading fiction may improve an individual’s socio-cognitive abilities, to the development of therapeutic library collections. He is also researching how images in graphic novels can help develop or improve socio-cognitive skills.

Katie Lynn Walkup

Katie Lynn Walkup, PhD, is a Collegiate Assistant Professor in Communication for Sociotechnical Systems for the Calhoun Discovery Program at the Virginia Tech Honors College. Her research focuses on technical communication, disability, and mental health stigma.