To address health disparities related to communication with older people, the Carolinas Conversations (CC) will serve as a digital data collection with Web access for researchers interested in recordings of older people (65 years and older) of diverse social identities (gender, race, ethnicity, language, and socioeconomic status) throughout the Carolinas, historically underrepresented in health communication research.
Aim 1 : Establish the digital portal and corpus for research in health communication at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Library and related protocols for consent, access, security, search and retrieval;
Aim 2 : Collect and generate data for communication analyses of diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic elders;
Aim 3 : Expand the capacity of researchers to use the Carolina Conversations Portal, broaden methods skills, evaluate utility and data safety, stimulate translational research, and disseminate results. Based on demonstrated archival methods and an informatics portal in the social sciences, this interactive archive will collect, prepare, and enable management and use of digital audio and video data in health research. For the archiving of data for secondary analysis as well as a source of original data collected with specific procedures for uniformity, the corpus will serve as a data repository (electronic portal) and resource for research orientation for the use of health and disease sub-collections. As a corpus ensuring consistent quality and compilation, the virtual site will offer spoken data to users from clinical, neurological, and social-behavioral paradigms. Prior to each recorded conversation, health literacy, health status, and cognitive function will identify participant condition. Using information technology, digital recordings and transcripts will be coordinated for retrieval and analysis of phenomena, such as word-finding pauses, content, syntactic cohesion, and referentiality. Online modules will show researchers how to organize, retrieve, and analyze transcripts by age, gender, ethnicity, time of day, and facilities. Privacy and confidentiality will be maintained for the persons recorded, using previously developed consent procedures and research access conventions. A team of medical librarians, informatics specialists, health and social science faculty in a multidisciplinary medical university with underserved populations will deliver data to generate hypotheses for testing regarding disparities in decision making, compliance, therapy, and cultural effectiveness in healthcare.
| Davis, Boyd H; Pope, Charlene (2010) Institutionalized ghosting: policy contexts and language use in erasing the person with Alzheimer's. Lang Policy 9:29-44 |
