Fighting for Air: Asthma, Inequality, and Policy Gaps in Hartford’s Hispanic Communities
Jimmy Palmer, Md. Abdullah All Shakil
Objective:
Asthma in Hartford, CT disproportionately affects Hartford’s Hispanic community, where social and environmental factors. This persists despite public health guidance in the form of both direct and indirect intervention. Our research seeks to address the gap between asthma disparity reducing policies and community experiences of asthma by:
- Assessing the lived experiences of caregivers and patients navigating asthma in everyday life.
- Confirm existing social environment matches community experiences.
- Develop community-driven strategies to mitigate asthma disparities and inform future policy interventions.
Methods:
We integrate both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. To obtain the lived experiences of Hispanic mothers and caregivers we facilitate discussion utilizing qualitative methods focus group, Photovoice, and participatory mapping. To confirm these experiences match the present social environment we use qualitative methods to analyze publicly available social and health data related to asthma. This includes leveraging the differences between geographic regions of said data to statistically confirm parts of social environment may trigger asthma. This culminates in qualitative interviews with policy leaders to capture institutional perspectives.
Method designs center community voices while connecting them to broader social environment and policy context.
Progress:
The project is currently in the stage of receiving Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. Preliminary quantitative analysis of housing data is already underway, laying the foundation for matching structural insights with forthcoming community-based qualitative findings.