Sally talks with a team in MN that put their heads together to build an intersectional approach to data collection, analysis, and use for the Minnesota Student Survey. Watch for part 2 to learn about survey results and part 3 to hear how youth used the data.
This project was supported by Grant / Cooperative Agreement 5 NUF2CE002510-05-00 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:02):
Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence
Resource Center on Understanding, responding to and preventing Sexual Abuse
and assault. I'm Sally Laskey, NSVRC Evaluation Coordinator. This is part
one of a three part series on what an intersectional approach to data
collection, analysis and use can look like. If the concept of intersectionality
(00:24):
is new to you, please check out the show notes for grounding resources
from Kimberlé Crenshaw. Like the podcast Intersectionality Matters! With
Kimberlé Crenshaw, you can pause and come back. We will totally wait right
here. When you are ready to dive into part one, you'll be able
to hear our guests, Cory Cole, an applied epidemiologist in the injury and
(00:48):
violence prevention section at Minnesota Department of Health. Barbara McMorris,
associate Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota.
Marissa Raguet, the evaluator for the Sexual Violence Prevention Program
at the Minnesota Department of Health. And Nic Rider, associate Professor
at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health at the University of Minnesota
(01:13):
Medical School. They talk about their collaborative work to build intersectionality
into their sexual violence prevention data analysis of the Minnesota Student
Survey. Welcome to Resource on the Go everyone.
(01:48):
Hi, Sally. Hi Sally. Hi. Hey. So glad to have you here.
Could you each share a little bit about yourselves for our listeners?
Cory, could you get us started? Yeah. My name is Cory Cole. I
use she/her. And I am an applied violence epidemiologist at the Minnesota
(02:09):
Department of Health in the injury and violence prevention section. And
my job is to figure out how do we collect all the data
that we can get about sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and all
of the things upstream that affect sexual violence, and then how do we
translate that data so that it's usable for the prevention and advocacy
(02:31):
work that's happening around the state. Hi, I'm Barbara McMorris. My pronouns
are she/her and hers. I'm a sociologist who has found a home as
a faculty member in a school of nursing at the University of Minnesota
that values interprofessional teams. My research focuses on adolescent and
young adult health. And I'll pass to Nic. Hi everyone. I'm Nic. I'm Nic
(02:58):
Rider, and my pronouns, are they/them or just my name.
I'm a faculty member at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health,
and I'm the director of the National Center for Gender Health.
And both of those are housed within the University of Minnesota Medical
School. My research focuses on contextualizing health inequities and examining
(03:19):
social and structural factors that affect various aspects of wellbeing for
marginalized communities. And good morning. Hi everyone. My name is Marissa
Raguet. My pronouns are she and her. I work at the Minnesota Department
of Health in the Sexual Violence Prevention Program.
This is the program at the Minnesota Department of Health that receives
the rape prevention and education funding from CDC, the Centers for Disease
(03:43):
Control and Prevention. I am the evaluator for the program. I've been a
part of the program for over 10 years now, and preventing sexual violence
is my passion area and really what drives me. I've got into public
health work in order to focus on this upstream primary prevention work.
Oh, and I'm so glad that you all are sharing those passions with
(04:05):
us today. We've got a lot to talk about.
And it would be great to begin at the beginning and what brought
all of you together. Yeah. So our RPE funding requirements includes a lot
about data to action and evaluation regarding disparities and sexual violence,
and health equity. This is something that Marissa and I collaborate on very
(04:29):
frequently within the department. And our favorite data source that we use
to do this is the Minnesota Student Survey, which is this gigantic survey
of students in grades five, eight, nine, and eleven, that asks them about
every topic a youth could possibly care about, including sexual violence.
(04:50):
And some of the questions were specifically created by our team using feedback
from youth. We use a survey from year to year to look at
disparities in sexual violence. And we answer a lot of classic data questions
like, which students are experiencing the most elevated
(05:10):
burdens of sexual violence and how are trends changing over time.
To answer these questions, we do a lot of data analysis like pages
and pages of charts and bar graphs and
going into each type of disparity and breaking them down further where it's
appropriate. But as we continued to report this way, we realized that we
(05:35):
were kind of only telling one layer of the story when it comes
to health equity and sexual violence. We were getting a lot of asks
to break down some of our analyses by a third variable,
or stratify by a second variable and breakdown by a fourth variable.
And even when we answered those questions and dug deeper, it still only
(05:58):
felt like we were getting a tiny piece of the big picture.
And so, at the time we were doing a lot of reading as
far as new scholarship in the field about
why traditional epidemiology methods might not be the best to really
model intersectionality and the complexity of how students experience
(06:24):
violence and oppression in the real world. And so when it came time
to present these findings to our partners, we were very honest and upfront.
We said, there's a lot going on here and we've done a lot
here, but we know that there is more that can be done with
this data. And we are actively looking to collaborate with anyone who has
(06:46):
any technical experience with the kind of methods that it would take to
give this data the love and care it deserves.
And at that time I was pretty new to Minnesota, so I didn't
know how much brain power we had in the room, but we had
some very skilled longtime collaborators who were listening.
(07:08):
And that is when we got connected with our wonderful colleagues at the
U. Yeah. Thanks Cory for that handoff. So I've been conducting analyses
and writing papers using that Minnesota student survey since 2007. So a
long time, like 17 years. And my colleagues and I make it a
(07:28):
priority to partner with the Minnesota Department of Health and other youth
serving agencies in our local community and state
to help translate like complex research findings about Minnesota students
into practice. And as Cory was saying, that that Minnesota Student Survey
is a super unique data source about adolescent health. It's like the youth
(07:52):
risk behavior survey that the CDC conducts, but it's more of a census
of almost all Minnesota students. And again, it asks, it's really unique
because it asks students about critical topics like gender identity, sexual
orientation, and sexual exploitation. So for example, in that 2019 survey
(08:14):
that Cory was talking about it was one of the first times that
any state epidemiological survey had ever asked a question about trading
sex for something of value. And our university team partnered up with the
Department of Health to produce some of the first population based prevalence
(08:36):
estimates of trading sex for high school students.
So we had been on the Department of Health's radar and in terms
of these collaborations. And Marissa and Cory and I started working together
during the pandemic to dig deeper into how young people were reading and
understanding questions on the survey about sexual violence.
(08:58):
Because we were noticing some inconsistencies in how students were reporting
on the data. We learned a couple of things by talking to 24
young people during the pandemic. That people might wanna know about students
taking those surveys at school. The first is that,
you know what behavior, like sexual exploitation, sexual violence is gonna
(09:21):
be under reported. And that's because students are gonna be hesitant to
answer questions accurately because of how the data might be used.
They might be worried about an anonymity, they might be worried about
fear of social or legal repercussions. So that's just good to know that
any data that we're reporting is likely an underestimate.
(09:44):
And then secondly, the adults creating surveys need to learn a lot more
about how to frame our questions and be less adulty researchy in our
language about asking about sex, anything around sexual violence.
So those were just a couple of insights about the fact that,
(10:04):
young people are gonna call things differently than adults do.
So as Cory was saying, I listened, I was at that presentation that
Cory was presenting on the sexual victimization data from the survey.
And put that out there that they were looking for people to partner
in terms of intersectionality and really digging deep into that type of
(10:27):
analysis. And it rang a bell because my teams at the university had
just begun trying out different methods to incorporate intersectionality
into our analysis with the survey data. And specifically my colleague Nic
here, had been advocating that we try to use a strategy that marketing
(10:47):
researchers had been using to really, really dig into intersectionality
into our data. Really interesting. Okay. Yeah. And so when I think about
the beginning and what really brought us together, I actually get brought
back to some of our very early discussions that really, it kind of
(11:11):
solidified for me how much I like, love our little group and the
way that we think and approach our research. And so
when we first kind of came together, we had discussions, and this started,
like I said, very early on, about how legacies of oppression and violence,
so like the multiple realities of white supremacy, colonialism, cis heteronormativity,
(11:35):
patriarchy, and and similar kind of concepts all interweave together, creating
this sort of tapestry of experiences that affect rates of intimate partner
sexual violence experiences. And so we wanted to better examine that kind
of nuance of disparities and intimate partner violence,
(11:58):
intimate partner sexual violence, while also considering context. Because
there's a really important piece that gets missed if you don't contextualize
the findings in a lot of these survey data that we're doing.
And so instead of just simply creating profiles of individuals who are considered
"at risk" or "vulnerable," we wanted to go beyond that. And we also
(12:23):
wanted to move away from this idea that the story is just about
their social identities that are at fault or putting people at risk 'cause
that isn't what's happening. We wanted to really focus on social power and
structural oppression related to those identities that are really impacting
people's experiences around intimate partner sexual violence. And so
(12:46):
to be able to do that and to have an approach and to
be more nuanced in our examination, we did a lot of talking about
how our different fields need to just do better. And some of the
conversations that we had are not only with like, how can we be
creative in our analysis approach." But doing a paper in a project like
(13:08):
this is one type of action oriented approach to
changing how we do some of this. And so we, again,
wanted to be creative, we wanted to be critical, we wanted to stretch
our minds not only together, but with the many people that we collaborate
with and had conversations with. And ultimately we wanted to create a more
(13:30):
like robust picture of what sexual violence disparities for adolescents
in the Minnesota context were experienced and to... Were experiencing and
really better support their unique needs. With that context in mind.
I so appreciate you sharing about this longstanding relationship,
(13:54):
but how you all really all brought your skills together in this effort
to do better. We've talked on previous podcasts about how the ways in
which data are collected, analyzed, and reported can address or actually
(14:14):
cause inequities. Can you walk us through how you actually applied an intersectional
approach to your analysis? Yeah. So there were a lot of different layers
to how this analysis became intersectional. And it goes way beyond the statistical
(14:38):
method that we chose. It was kind of more like a series of
decisions after decisions. And every time we made a decision, no matter
how consequential or seemingly small, we tried to do that with
the guiding philosophy of intersectionality in mind. And we mean, capital
(15:00):
I, intersectionality, the theoretical framework proposed by black feminist
coined behavioral collective, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins.
So this means thinking about power and history and systems every time we
make a decision. And not just how are we gonna get the p
value to work. Furthermore, it was important to make the decisions with
(15:25):
the people who would be using the data with, for action.
A lot of times if you're on a multidisciplinary team, there are still
kind of these silos that emerge between the people who do
the numbers and the people who do the action. And it's, I find
it's really easy to get lost in there. And as a data person,
(15:48):
you have to make a lot of choices that seem small or arbitrary
about model specification or how the table is going to look and you
think, "I'll just handle this. This is my lane." But
the more you have these grounded conversations and share the decision making
power with people who may not have the same technical orientation towards
(16:13):
statistics, but have a lot of context and wisdom that you don't,
the more you learn that there are no small choices in data analysis.
So basically a quick rundown of some of the decisions that we made
as a team, as a unit that was trying to center
anti oppression, intersectionality in our thoughts, we decided to use a
(16:36):
method called exhaustive Chi Squared Interaction Detection Automatic Interact...
That's exhaustive chi squared Automatic interaction detection or E CHAID,
which is kind of a very basic machine learning model that
splits a large sample into more focused groups and it shows you how
(17:00):
much internal diversity there is within a large sample. We also
used our decision making process to talk about
how to present the variables we put in, how to talk about the
variables, how to choose the variables, how we choose to frame the groups.
And how even we present the primary data visualization, we ended up kind
(17:25):
of literally turning it on its side to kind of bust this idea
that divisions that we make for the purposes of data analysis and convenience
are hierarchical in nature. And so we ended up not necessarily with
groups that were at odds with one another,
(17:46):
but groups that were connected in a larger web of experiencing
violence and solidarity together. Yeah. And there's so much more we could
talk about. I'm going to pass the mic for a minute.
So going off of some of what Cory's also, already said
is when we think about intersectionality, it isn't simply about the type
(18:09):
of quantitative analysis that we use. And I think that's a really important
point to make. Intersectionality is a critical analytic framework. So it's
about thinking critically about all these aspects of the research project
and just kind of uplifting a little bit more about intersectionality.
Again, it came out of the work of black along with additional women
(18:33):
of color feminist scholars. And that's been like this concept
even before the term intersectionality was a term,
has been advanced for years and years and years to bring attention to
oppression and privilege and systems of power that affect people in their
daily lives and are resulting in these inequities and disparities that we're
(18:56):
talking about. So when we are incorporating intersectionality, it goes beyond
focusing on multiple types of identities that overlap.
And in the literature Lisa Bowleg and some other folks have written about
when we focus on just multiple identities itself, this is actually called
(19:16):
flattening intersectionality. And so it's really about thinking about how
power and oppression based on those intersecting identities shape the opportunities,
the access, the resources, the various experiences and so on, that manifest
in people's lives or don't manifest in people's lives and affect their wellbeing.
(19:40):
And so in our particular research process, intersectionality was incorporated
from, like I mentioned earlier, from the beginning, about being reflexive
as researchers to discussing topics such as whose voices are represented,
who's included in the research process, who's the research audience
as well as how are our own lived experiences. At times,
(20:04):
even when looking at the data, choosing which variables, how we're interpreting
it, how do our own lived experiences, our own kind of like biases
in the world, our own framework on the world affect how we're interpreting
or choosing what gets included or not. And how we even rep like show
this in a paper. And so again, in our work,
(20:24):
we got very detailed at times about this discussing even like specific words
when we're... And when we think about power and oppression that brings us
to history and how histories of structural racism and associated violence,
how that's really important even in our language and terminology. And so
just as an example, a lot of the times the Minnesota Student Survey
(20:48):
in itself is described as a surveillance survey. And so we've kind of moved
away from using that language. And this is just one example to describe
that survey, because surveillance, that word holds so many different meanings
to different groups of people, particularly with regards to history, modern
day oppression, social, political, climate, violence, harm. And so
(21:13):
as Cory said, our approach to this research project...
Or what Cory kind of alluded to, took a lot of intentionality and
it also required a willingness for all of us to slow down and
grapple and really think about the complexities that truly exist and do
so in a way that takes the onus off of the individuals and
(21:36):
the participants that that are in the survey, but also who the survey
represents. So it takes the onus off the individual and onto the systems
and structures that are leading to disparities. It's really powerful to
hear about your approach. 'Cause I can feel
(21:57):
how it did these two things at the same time, which you wouldn't
think would happen. It really showed the complexities of
the issue of sexual violence, but also is making it more accessible
(22:20):
for people to be able to see how those complex systems are all
around us. So that, just hearing you describe your process, it's just,
I'm having these wonderful pictures of that slowing down, really being thoughtful
(22:42):
applying this systems analysis, but also really showing
people as full human beings instead of a single identity.
So I'm really excited to now talk to you all about what your
(23:02):
analysis revealed. Cory, could you talk to us a little bit about that?
Yeah. I'm so interested in how you talk about
the study is like making this topic more accessible. Because I think intersectionality
is a concept that is at the same time kind of necessarily
(23:26):
complex and difficult to describe and visualize. But also kind of intuitively
true for anyone who's paid attention to the lived context
that we find ourselves in, in our current society. And
that kind of speaks to a lot of how we process the results
(23:48):
of this project. A lot of it was,
on one hand stuff that we could say we already knew from decades
and decades of multiply marginalized people telling us through
lived experience, through scholarship, through literature. Everything that
(24:11):
people who do navigate more than one force of systemic oppression
experience a type of marginalization that is more than just the sum
of each marginalization on its own. And it's
(24:31):
on the other side of the coin, people who are multiply privileged,
experience privilege in a way that is synergistic and more than just the
sum of each privilege on its own. Thank you for listening to this
episode of Resource on the Go. We hope part one piqued your interest
and you will listen to the rest of the series that explores results
of the survey and action steps in the community. For more resources and
(24:54):
information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at NSVRC.org.
You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources at NSVRC
Respect Together.org.
Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence
Resource Center on Understanding, responding to and preventing Sexual Abuse
and assault. I'm Sally Laskey, NSVRC Evaluation Coordinator. This is part
one of a three part series on what an intersectional approach to data
collection, analysis and use can look like. If the concept of intersectionality
(00:24):
is new to you, please check out the show notes for grounding resources
from Kimberlé Crenshaw. Like the podcast Intersectionality Matters! With
Kimberlé Crenshaw, you can pause and come back. We will totally wait right
here. When you are ready to dive into part one, you'll be able
to hear our guests, Cory Cole, an applied epidemiologist in the injury and
(00:48):
violence prevention section at Minnesota Department of Health. Barbara McMorris,
associate Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota.
Marissa Raguet, the evaluator for the Sexual Violence Prevention Program
at the Minnesota Department of Health. And Nic Rider, associate Professor
at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health at the University of Minnesota
(01:13):
Medical School. They talk about their collaborative work to build intersectionality
into their sexual violence prevention data analysis of the Minnesota Student
Survey. Welcome to Resource on the Go everyone.
(01:48):
Hi, Sally. Hi Sally. Hi. Hey. So glad to have you here.
Could you each share a little bit about yourselves for our listeners?
Cory, could you get us started? Yeah. My name is Cory Cole. I
use she/her. And I am an applied violence epidemiologist at the Minnesota
(02:09):
Department of Health in the injury and violence prevention section. And
my job is to figure out how do we collect all the data
that we can get about sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and all
of the things upstream that affect sexual violence, and then how do we
translate that data so that it's usable for the prevention and advocacy
(02:31):
work that's happening around the state. Hi, I'm Barbara McMorris. My pronouns
are she/her and hers. I'm a sociologist who has found a home as
a faculty member in a school of nursing at the University of Minnesota
that values interprofessional teams. My research focuses on adolescent and
young adult health. And I'll pass to Nic. Hi everyone. I'm Nic. I'm Nic
(02:58):
Rider, and my pronouns, are they/them or just my name.
I'm a faculty member at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health,
and I'm the director of the National Center for Gender Health.
And both of those are housed within the University of Minnesota Medical
School. My research focuses on contextualizing health inequities and examining
(03:19):
social and structural factors that affect various aspects of wellbeing for
marginalized communities. And good morning. Hi everyone. My name is Marissa
Raguet. My pronouns are she and her. I work at the Minnesota Department
of Health in the Sexual Violence Prevention Program.
This is the program at the Minnesota Department of Health that receives
the rape prevention and education funding from CDC, the Centers for Disease
(03:43):
Control and Prevention. I am the evaluator for the program. I've been a
part of the program for over 10 years now, and preventing sexual violence
is my passion area and really what drives me. I've got into public
health work in order to focus on this upstream primary prevention work.
Oh, and I'm so glad that you all are sharing those passions with
(04:05):
us today. We've got a lot to talk about.
And it would be great to begin at the beginning and what brought
all of you together. Yeah. So our RPE funding requirements includes a lot
about data to action and evaluation regarding disparities and sexual violence,
and health equity. This is something that Marissa and I collaborate on very
(04:29):
frequently within the department. And our favorite data source that we use
to do this is the Minnesota Student Survey, which is this gigantic survey
of students in grades five, eight, nine, and eleven, that asks them about
every topic a youth could possibly care about, including sexual violence.
(04:50):
And some of the questions were specifically created by our team using feedback
from youth. We use a survey from year to year to look at
disparities in sexual violence. And we answer a lot of classic data questions
like, which students are experiencing the most elevated
(05:10):
burdens of sexual violence and how are trends changing over time.
To answer these questions, we do a lot of data analysis like pages
and pages of charts and bar graphs and
going into each type of disparity and breaking them down further where it's
appropriate. But as we continued to report this way, we realized that we
(05:35):
were kind of only telling one layer of the story when it comes
to health equity and sexual violence. We were getting a lot of asks
to break down some of our analyses by a third variable,
or stratify by a second variable and breakdown by a fourth variable.
And even when we answered those questions and dug deeper, it still only
(05:58):
felt like we were getting a tiny piece of the big picture.
And so, at the time we were doing a lot of reading as
far as new scholarship in the field about
why traditional epidemiology methods might not be the best to really
model intersectionality and the complexity of how students experience
(06:24):
violence and oppression in the real world. And so when it came time
to present these findings to our partners, we were very honest and upfront.
We said, there's a lot going on here and we've done a lot
here, but we know that there is more that can be done with
this data. And we are actively looking to collaborate with anyone who has
(06:46):
any technical experience with the kind of methods that it would take to
give this data the love and care it deserves.
And at that time I was pretty new to Minnesota, so I didn't
know how much brain power we had in the room, but we had
some very skilled longtime collaborators who were listening.
(07:08):
And that is when we got connected with our wonderful colleagues at the
U. Yeah. Thanks Cory for that handoff. So I've been conducting analyses
and writing papers using that Minnesota student survey since 2007. So a
long time, like 17 years. And my colleagues and I make it a
(07:28):
priority to partner with the Minnesota Department of Health and other youth
serving agencies in our local community and state
to help translate like complex research findings about Minnesota students
into practice. And as Cory was saying, that that Minnesota Student Survey
is a super unique data source about adolescent health. It's like the youth
(07:52):
risk behavior survey that the CDC conducts, but it's more of a census
of almost all Minnesota students. And again, it asks, it's really unique
because it asks students about critical topics like gender identity, sexual
orientation, and sexual exploitation. So for example, in that 2019 survey
(08:14):
that Cory was talking about it was one of the first times that
any state epidemiological survey had ever asked a question about trading
sex for something of value. And our university team partnered up with the
Department of Health to produce some of the first population based prevalence
(08:36):
estimates of trading sex for high school students.
So we had been on the Department of Health's radar and in terms
of these collaborations. And Marissa and Cory and I started working together
during the pandemic to dig deeper into how young people were reading and
understanding questions on the survey about sexual violence.
(08:58):
Because we were noticing some inconsistencies in how students were reporting
on the data. We learned a couple of things by talking to 24
young people during the pandemic. That people might wanna know about students
taking those surveys at school. The first is that,
you know what behavior, like sexual exploitation, sexual violence is gonna
(09:21):
be under reported. And that's because students are gonna be hesitant to
answer questions accurately because of how the data might be used.
They might be worried about an anonymity, they might be worried about
fear of social or legal repercussions. So that's just good to know that
any data that we're reporting is likely an underestimate.
(09:44):
And then secondly, the adults creating surveys need to learn a lot more
about how to frame our questions and be less adulty researchy in our
language about asking about sex, anything around sexual violence.
So those were just a couple of insights about the fact that,
(10:04):
young people are gonna call things differently than adults do.
So as Cory was saying, I listened, I was at that presentation that
Cory was presenting on the sexual victimization data from the survey.
And put that out there that they were looking for people to partner
in terms of intersectionality and really digging deep into that type of
(10:27):
analysis. And it rang a bell because my teams at the university had
just begun trying out different methods to incorporate intersectionality
into our analysis with the survey data. And specifically my colleague Nic
here, had been advocating that we try to use a strategy that marketing
(10:47):
researchers had been using to really, really dig into intersectionality
into our data. Really interesting. Okay. Yeah. And so when I think about
the beginning and what really brought us together, I actually get brought
back to some of our very early discussions that really, it kind of
(11:11):
solidified for me how much I like, love our little group and the
way that we think and approach our research. And so
when we first kind of came together, we had discussions, and this started,
like I said, very early on, about how legacies of oppression and violence,
so like the multiple realities of white supremacy, colonialism, cis heteronormativity,
(11:35):
patriarchy, and and similar kind of concepts all interweave together, creating
this sort of tapestry of experiences that affect rates of intimate partner
sexual violence experiences. And so we wanted to better examine that kind
of nuance of disparities and intimate partner violence,
(11:58):
intimate partner sexual violence, while also considering context. Because
there's a really important piece that gets missed if you don't contextualize
the findings in a lot of these survey data that we're doing.
And so instead of just simply creating profiles of individuals who are considered
"at risk" or "vulnerable," we wanted to go beyond that. And we also
(12:23):
wanted to move away from this idea that the story is just about
their social identities that are at fault or putting people at risk 'cause
that isn't what's happening. We wanted to really focus on social power and
structural oppression related to those identities that are really impacting
people's experiences around intimate partner sexual violence. And so
(12:46):
to be able to do that and to have an approach and to
be more nuanced in our examination, we did a lot of talking about
how our different fields need to just do better. And some of the
conversations that we had are not only with like, how can we be
creative in our analysis approach." But doing a paper in a project like
(13:08):
this is one type of action oriented approach to
changing how we do some of this. And so we, again,
wanted to be creative, we wanted to be critical, we wanted to stretch
our minds not only together, but with the many people that we collaborate
with and had conversations with. And ultimately we wanted to create a more
(13:30):
like robust picture of what sexual violence disparities for adolescents
in the Minnesota context were experienced and to... Were experiencing and
really better support their unique needs. With that context in mind.
I so appreciate you sharing about this longstanding relationship,
(13:54):
but how you all really all brought your skills together in this effort
to do better. We've talked on previous podcasts about how the ways in
which data are collected, analyzed, and reported can address or actually
(14:14):
cause inequities. Can you walk us through how you actually applied an intersectional
approach to your analysis? Yeah. So there were a lot of different layers
to how this analysis became intersectional. And it goes way beyond the statistical
(14:38):
method that we chose. It was kind of more like a series of
decisions after decisions. And every time we made a decision, no matter
how consequential or seemingly small, we tried to do that with
the guiding philosophy of intersectionality in mind. And we mean, capital
(15:00):
I, intersectionality, the theoretical framework proposed by black feminist
coined behavioral collective, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins.
So this means thinking about power and history and systems every time we
make a decision. And not just how are we gonna get the p
value to work. Furthermore, it was important to make the decisions with
(15:25):
the people who would be using the data with, for action.
A lot of times if you're on a multidisciplinary team, there are still
kind of these silos that emerge between the people who do
the numbers and the people who do the action. And it's, I find
it's really easy to get lost in there. And as a data person,
(15:48):
you have to make a lot of choices that seem small or arbitrary
about model specification or how the table is going to look and you
think, "I'll just handle this. This is my lane." But
the more you have these grounded conversations and share the decision making
power with people who may not have the same technical orientation towards
(16:13):
statistics, but have a lot of context and wisdom that you don't,
the more you learn that there are no small choices in data analysis.
So basically a quick rundown of some of the decisions that we made
as a team, as a unit that was trying to center
anti oppression, intersectionality in our thoughts, we decided to use a
(16:36):
method called exhaustive Chi Squared Interaction Detection Automatic Interact...
That's exhaustive chi squared Automatic interaction detection or E CHAID,
which is kind of a very basic machine learning model that
splits a large sample into more focused groups and it shows you how
(17:00):
much internal diversity there is within a large sample. We also
used our decision making process to talk about
how to present the variables we put in, how to talk about the
variables, how to choose the variables, how we choose to frame the groups.
And how even we present the primary data visualization, we ended up kind
(17:25):
of literally turning it on its side to kind of bust this idea
that divisions that we make for the purposes of data analysis and convenience
are hierarchical in nature. And so we ended up not necessarily with
groups that were at odds with one another,
(17:46):
but groups that were connected in a larger web of experiencing
violence and solidarity together. Yeah. And there's so much more we could
talk about. I'm going to pass the mic for a minute.
So going off of some of what Cory's also, already said
is when we think about intersectionality, it isn't simply about the type
(18:09):
of quantitative analysis that we use. And I think that's a really important
point to make. Intersectionality is a critical analytic framework. So it's
about thinking critically about all these aspects of the research project
and just kind of uplifting a little bit more about intersectionality.
Again, it came out of the work of black along with additional women
(18:33):
of color feminist scholars. And that's been like this concept
even before the term intersectionality was a term,
has been advanced for years and years and years to bring attention to
oppression and privilege and systems of power that affect people in their
daily lives and are resulting in these inequities and disparities that we're
(18:56):
talking about. So when we are incorporating intersectionality, it goes beyond
focusing on multiple types of identities that overlap.
And in the literature Lisa Bowleg and some other folks have written about
when we focus on just multiple identities itself, this is actually called
(19:16):
flattening intersectionality. And so it's really about thinking about how
power and oppression based on those intersecting identities shape the opportunities,
the access, the resources, the various experiences and so on, that manifest
in people's lives or don't manifest in people's lives and affect their wellbeing.
(19:40):
And so in our particular research process, intersectionality was incorporated
from, like I mentioned earlier, from the beginning, about being reflexive
as researchers to discussing topics such as whose voices are represented,
who's included in the research process, who's the research audience
as well as how are our own lived experiences. At times,
(20:04):
even when looking at the data, choosing which variables, how we're interpreting
it, how do our own lived experiences, our own kind of like biases
in the world, our own framework on the world affect how we're interpreting
or choosing what gets included or not. And how we even rep like show
this in a paper. And so again, in our work,
(20:24):
we got very detailed at times about this discussing even like specific words
when we're... And when we think about power and oppression that brings us
to history and how histories of structural racism and associated violence,
how that's really important even in our language and terminology. And so
just as an example, a lot of the times the Minnesota Student Survey
(20:48):
in itself is described as a surveillance survey. And so we've kind of moved
away from using that language. And this is just one example to describe
that survey, because surveillance, that word holds so many different meanings
to different groups of people, particularly with regards to history, modern
day oppression, social, political, climate, violence, harm. And so
(21:13):
as Cory said, our approach to this research project...
Or what Cory kind of alluded to, took a lot of intentionality and
it also required a willingness for all of us to slow down and
grapple and really think about the complexities that truly exist and do
so in a way that takes the onus off of the individuals and
(21:36):
the participants that that are in the survey, but also who the survey
represents. So it takes the onus off the individual and onto the systems
and structures that are leading to disparities. It's really powerful to
hear about your approach. 'Cause I can feel
(21:57):
how it did these two things at the same time, which you wouldn't
think would happen. It really showed the complexities of
the issue of sexual violence, but also is making it more accessible
(22:20):
for people to be able to see how those complex systems are all
around us. So that, just hearing you describe your process, it's just,
I'm having these wonderful pictures of that slowing down, really being thoughtful
(22:42):
applying this systems analysis, but also really showing
people as full human beings instead of a single identity.
So I'm really excited to now talk to you all about what your
(23:02):
analysis revealed. Cory, could you talk to us a little bit about that?
Yeah. I'm so interested in how you talk about
the study is like making this topic more accessible. Because I think intersectionality
is a concept that is at the same time kind of necessarily
(23:26):
complex and difficult to describe and visualize. But also kind of intuitively
true for anyone who's paid attention to the lived context
that we find ourselves in, in our current society. And
that kind of speaks to a lot of how we process the results
(23:48):
of this project. A lot of it was,
on one hand stuff that we could say we already knew from decades
and decades of multiply marginalized people telling us through
lived experience, through scholarship, through literature. Everything that
(24:11):
people who do navigate more than one force of systemic oppression
experience a type of marginalization that is more than just the sum
of each marginalization on its own. And it's
(24:31):
on the other side of the coin, people who are multiply privileged,
experience privilege in a way that is synergistic and more than just the
sum of each privilege on its own. Thank you for listening to this
episode of Resource on the Go. We hope part one piqued your interest
and you will listen to the rest of the series that explores results
of the survey and action steps in the community. For more resources and
(24:54):
information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at NSVRC.org.
You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources at NSVRC
Respect Together.org.
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