Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, Blantyre, Malawi.
Malawi Universities of Business and Applied Sciences, Blantyre, Malawi.
Front Public Health. 2022 Apr 22;10:826428. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.826428. eCollection 2022.
Digital Story Telling (DST) is an art-based research method used to explore embodied experience of health and initiate dialogue with under-represented groups on issues affecting them. It involves engaging participants to create and share their stories using photos, drawings, and audio recordings in short videos. Benefits of DST include enhancing co-creation of knowledge, empowering participants to confront dominant narratives and revise inaccurate representations. We report our experiences and reflections of using DST to explore community perceptions of health concerns in urban Malawi. Community leaders were briefed about the project before and after study related activities. Three participatory workshops were organized to train community members in DST, support them to develop videos and discuss their experiences of DST. Twenty-six participants from two high density urban communities consented to be part of the workshops. They were all new to DST. All the 26 participants were invited together to the three workshops and their DSTs were developed in smaller groups ( = 7), based on their geographical location. Although we engaged residents from selected communities to share priority health concerns, all the seven groups presented challenges pertaining to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), and their powerlessness to address the complex challenges. The collective focus on WASH showed that DST effectively empowered communities to present priority health concerns. The inability of community members to address the challenges without external assistance or failure to use findings from DST to generate social change however raise questions on the ideals of empowerment and social justice. In addition, lack of financial resources or technical know-how to produce digital stories and unequal power relationships between service providers and community, may affect the use of DST for community activism among socio-economically disadvantaged groups. We conclude that DST empowered participants to articulate genuine health challenges that they felt powerless to address. We question the realization of "empowerment" and social justice of vulnerable participants in cases where structural challenges present obstacles to effectively address social inequalities.
数字故事讲述（DST）是一种基于艺术的研究方法，用于探索健康的身体体验，并就影响他们的问题与代表性不足的群体展开对话。它涉及让参与者使用照片、图画和录音在短视频中创作和分享他们的故事。DST 的好处包括增强知识的共同创造，使参与者能够对抗主导叙事并修正不准确的表述。我们报告了使用 DST 来探索马拉维城市社区对健康问题的看法的经验和反思。在研究相关活动之前和之后，社区领导都对该项目进行了介绍。组织了三次参与式研讨会，以培训社区成员使用 DST，支持他们制作视频并讨论他们的 DST 经验。来自两个高密度城市社区的 26 名参与者同意参加研讨会。他们都对 DST 不熟悉。所有 26 名参与者都应邀参加了三个研讨会，根据他们的地理位置，他们的 DST 是在更小的小组（=7）中开发的。尽管我们邀请了选定社区的居民来分享优先健康问题，但所有七个小组都提出了与水、环境卫生和个人卫生（WASH）有关的挑战，并且他们无力应对这些复杂的挑战。对 WASH 的集体关注表明，DST 有效地使社区能够提出优先健康问题。然而，社区成员在没有外部援助的情况下无法解决这些挑战，或者未能利用 DST 的研究结果来引发社会变革，这使得关于赋权和社会正义的理想受到质疑。此外，缺乏制作数字故事的财务资源或技术知识，以及服务提供者与社区之间权力不平等，可能会影响 DST 在社会经济弱势群体中的社区行动主义的应用。我们的结论是，DST 使参与者能够表达他们感到无力解决的真正健康挑战。我们质疑在结构性挑战成为有效解决社会不平等障碍的情况下，弱势参与者实现“赋权”和社会正义的问题。
