RESEARCH SERVICES and EXPERIENCE

My research support services include literature reviews, grant writing, study design and development, project management, focus group facilitation, content analysis, research summaries, ethnographic research, case study generation, and culture-based observations and assessments.

PRIOR RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

(A) "The Processes and Politics of Ethical Becoming for the Contemporary Doula”

This four-year ethnographic study—which I conducted while in a PhD program at the University of Chicago—focused on birth doulas, a paraprofession that began as a social movement and was in the process of professionalization. My primary interest was in the phenomenology of doula care: (a) how they understood their work and role; (b) how they articulated the parameters around their work and role; (c) how they developed their expertise and then enacted that expertise; and (d) how these elements changed over time, as the doulas responded to professionalizing forces, intergroup tensions, and ethical dilemmas.
My findings centered around the doulas’ agency and morality within the complex U.S. reproductive landscapes; their identity changes over time; their process of developing expertise (moving from “learning” to “doing”); and the ethics of their caregiving. In conference papers and a book chapter, I showed how doulas’ understandings and expertise informed and were reflected in their communication and interaction with other actors in their field of practice (e.g., doctors, nurses, midwives, their clients, and other doulas)—and how professionalization tensions were omnipresent.
The project’s main findings can be summarized as follows:

(1) The ways in which doulas communicated about their role and their work were shifting in response to external professionalization forces (economic, social, and societal). However, language evoking the doulas’ roots as a social movement still echoed throughout their communication. Moreover, the ways in which they communicated (verbally and nonverbally) depended on with whom they were interacting. Doulas learned to enact this kind of strategic communication when supporting their clients, “self-authoring” (Elliott, 2012) to avoid moral dissonance and/or safeguard their own position.

(2) As another part of their “processes of becoming,” following Deleuze (and Biehl and Locke), the doulas learned to occupy pockets of what I called “micropower,” which gave them enough “wiggle room” to enact strategies on behalf of their clients (and, sometimes, themselves) in arenas where (a) their clients had limited power and (b) those in formal professions were constrained by the rigid parameters within which they had to practice. This micropower had to be wielded carefully, however, as there were consequences for doulas and the larger doula community if a doula was perceived as wielding “too much” power—this included empowering rather than overpowering their clients. In the liminal, interstitial space they occupied, the doulas walked a fine line between supporting and supplanting their clients’ wishes, and the (ethical) precarity of this position was interwoven with the push to professionalize.

(3) Internal conflicts arose around the (explicit and tacit) professionalization strategies and other top-down structural constraints that were being placed around the doula role. These conflicts reflected the tensions between their activist roots, on the one side, and their professionalization strategies, on the other. They could be understood not just as the “growing pains” of professionalization, but also as reflecting the problems around gender, race, and class inherent in doula work at that time, as well as the viability and sustainability of doulaing as a (para)profession.

(B) Caregiver attitudes regarding spirituality and pediatric palliative care"

After I completed my fieldwork for my dissertation project, I was hired as a Co-PI for a year-long qualitative study through the University of Chicago Hospitals and the Department of Medical Ethics, researching doctors’ communication with parents of children who had been diagnosed with a serious illness.
The University of Chicago Children’s Hospital had developed an extensive (and expensive) palliative care program for critically ill children, and although doctors encouraged families to utilize the services, most families refused. Through a series of focus groups, this study explored why this was the case, focusing on how the families experienced (and understood) the doctors’ communication about the services on offer. Findings centered on how race, class, and spirituality affected the understanding and decision-making processes of the children’s parents.

For my master's research at the University of Chicago, I conducted a mixed-methods study drawing on 100 (previously collected) interviews with African American mothers from a low-income, high-risk neighborhood in Chicago. My focus was on how they experienced their unexpected pregnancies and subsequent births. The qualitative component involved thematic analysis to determine how mothers adjusted to their pregnancies over time.
Some of the mothers became positive about their pregnancies by the time of the birth, some became more negative, some stayed the same, and some were both positive and negative. We then conducted a quantitative analysis via SPSS to determine the proportion of mothers in each category. Finally, I reanalyzed the interviews, to identify elements that supported or hindered the mothers in their experiences of their unplanned pregnancies. Here, the presence or absence of social support played a key role.

(D) "The Doula Project"

I was a research assistant for a large study, with Dr. Sydney Hans as PI, evaluating a community doula program for Black adolescent mothers in Chicago. I interviewed participants the morning after they gave birth in a large urban hospital, collecting and video recording their birth stories, administering questionnaires, and collecting saliva samples to assess cortisol levels.
The study found that the mothers’ mothers, infants’ fathers, and doulas were more likely to be mentioned in the stories as providers of emotional and instrumental support than were medical providers. Doulas were more likely to be mentioned as providers of information than were family members or medical providers. For a recent publication from this study, see Hans SL, Cox SM, Medina NY. African American Adolescent Mothers’ Childbirth Support From Fathers, Grandmothers, Nurses, Doctors, and Doulas. The Journal of Perinatal Education. 2022. DOI: 10.1891/j-pe-d-20-00045.