My Research Project

My project is Inequities in Pre-Pregnancy Health Experienced by Indigenous Populations in the United States. Although this title has went through a couple of changes as we had to axe other outcomes and rates of care due to time constraints. So currently we are mostly focusing summarizing rates of chronic conditions found in AI/AN individuals who give birth. I think the impact of the work would be for it to work as a small introduction in the the general health of AI/AN individuals who become pregnant. Statistics are good at identifying areas of greatest need and the AI/AN population has largely been overlooked due to the small population size.

My role in this project is to find and synthesize the results of studies pertaining to this topic. I have been using the PubMed database to search and compile studies for further investigation. Afterwards I am supposed to determine what the literature says about the rates of these chronic conditions. I have a spreadsheet where I document how the study was conducted, results, and conclusions. The sum total of which is supposed to end up in a UROP project poster where the article findings I have put into a spreadsheet can be used later on if wanted by other people.

As for ethics I believe it is incredibly important to represent the findings accurately and with non-judgment, and a hint of skepticism since AN/AI individuals are already apart of a small often stigmatized population. They have their own cultural practices as well as rituals, medicine, and geographic differences that are often overlooked and watered down as many studies look at national or state-level data which does not take into account indigenous heterogeneity.