My final week at Northeastern was busy, yet productive. After being troubled by operating the Twitter API for the last week, I was finally able to fix the code to work. Now I am receiving tweets from youth health organizations that we can use in our content analysis. Obtaining the data was definitely one of my most challenging tasks for the summer, yet a good learning experience. 

For our main project, we transcribed  audio recordings from our sessions with the BAHEC youth. From a preliminary analysis, we developed 3 themes (based on the recordings): entertainment, relatable and empowerment. These themes represent what youth expressed they needed from SNAs to effectively advocate health in the community. I analyzed the surveys each participant completed, which evaluate community connection, civic awareness and civic efficacy. Scores revealed that youth did not have a strong sense of civic responsibility to the community as expected, with a score of 60 (on a scale of 1 - 96).

Overall, my research experience at Northeastern University was great! I really enjoyed being in Boston. It was special for me, since I am a southern girl :). During the research process I gained a lot of insight from the graduate students also. My mentor, Dr. Parker was absolutely amazing! Thank you to the DREU program for granting me this opportunity. 

I attended a storytelling session earlier in the week to document how storytellers interact with children. The purpose was to gather information about how storytelling can be used to promote physical activity among families. This work was done to assist with Herman's storytelling research project. 

Thursday we held the final session of the Youth Advocacy project. Earlier in the week we analyzed the data gathered from previous sessions to present our findings to the students. This is a step in the participatory design process, to show participants what we believe they desire based on the information collected. That way we can ensure a product is produced that meets their needs. From the analysis we determined that youth prefer a SNA with entertaining features that allows them to relate to topics in their communities. The application should also make them feel comfortable with balancing peer pressure from fellow youth. After presenting our prelimnary findings to the participants, they agreed implementing features to support those needs are necessary for youth to successfully advocate health issues. 

While working with the students from BAHEC, I gained a lot of insightful info about what's preferred by adolescents in the social networking world. They were a fun, intelligent group of students that I believe can have a positive effect on their communities now and in the future. 

This past week I worked on organizing participatory design activities for the youth in our study. For the fourth session our goal was to get the participants to design prototypes that would help advocate health in social media. As a group, we came up with a video prototyping activity where the students would design their social application on paper first, then explain its use in a short video clip. From this activity I observed that youth would be more attracted to social media that's entertaining, rather than informational. For example, one of the groups designed a prototype for an app that challenges users to complete tasks associated with health issues and posts videos of what they did on the app. The purpose of the app was to use entertainment as a source of advocacy. 

During my weekly meeting with Dr. Parker and Priscilla, we discussed our approach to analyzing data gathered from advocacy accounts on social media. So far we've figured out how to utilize Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr API's to obtain posts and interactions from accounts. Our next step is to organize the information to determine patterns in the data. Working with the API's has been one of my bigger challenges so far because I don't have a lot of experience working in JavaScript. Despite the challenge, I'm happy I have the chance to become more familiar with the language. 

This week we had session 3 of our Youth Advocacy Project with the BAHEC students. During session 3 we asked the youth to design an innovative prototype that could be used to help communicate in healthy ways. There were 3 ideas from each of the groups. Group 1 proposed the idea of shoes that measure a person's activity. The data can be downloaded to a mobile application. Group 2 proposed a fitness mirror that could be place in public places to different people interact. The touch screen mirror would allow people to read health stories and comment on them. Group 2's idea was based on tackling obesity. Meanwhile, group 3 thought of a chip that could be place on one's clothing to determine their healthy activity. The data from the chip would be downloaded on an app, and others can view connect with you to view it. I really enjoyed this activity because it gave the students a chance to be creative in their thinking process. 

Also throughout the week I worked on organized social media accounts that promote health and wellness. Priscilla (undergrad at Northeastern) and I are developing a method for downloading information (comments, likes, retweets) about posts from Twitter, Facebook & Tumblr. Initially it was difficult to figure out the API's for each website, but I think we're off to a good start. 

The week started off with a meeting with the graduate students about our project. We discussed the schedule for session two, and what we wanted to accomplish. I helped devise activities that would help the youth brainstorm about health topics in their area.

Throughout the rest of the week I continued to search for advocacy groups on social networks and gather data about their posts. Wednesday I had another group meeting, with all the students in Dr. Parker's research group. We updated each other on the individual projects we are working on, and offered advice. I learned a different approach to obtaining data from advocacy groups on social media. 

Thursday we had session two of our study with the BAHEC youth. From activities, discussion and observations, I learned why adolescents don't feel empowered to address health issues on social media. Much of it is credited to comfortability, relevance and structure of social networks. Next week I plan to come up with ways to address this problem. 

Things got a little more interesting during week 5. Farnaz, Herman, Priscilla and I completed the schedule for the BAHEC participants. Thursday we did our first weekly session with the students, and I believe it was a success! The participants arrived at our building at 9am and remained until 3pm.

Throughout the day we did different activities dealing with technology and health issues. The purpose of session 1 was to introduce the participants to the combination of health and technology. They completed the pre-surveys and did some team-building exercises. The youth seemed interested into what was going on, and definitely added great insight on community issues. I'm looking forward to the next session!

This week I dug more into the details of our main project. I co

mpleted the pre-survey the participants will take in the first week of the program. The survey includes questions about feelings of empowerment and change within the community. Tuesday we had a group meeting (with Dr. Parker and grad students in her group) about our plans for the start of the program next week. We discussed some of the activities that could be done with the participants that will answer our research questions.

Wednesday I went to a community outside of Boston called Mattapan with Herman. I went to assist him with his storytelling study at the local library. Unfortunately, the participants didn't show, but overall I think it was a learning experience.

This week I completed my analysis of research papers similar to our research for the summer. Instead of reading for understanding, I actually questioned some of the techniques other researchers used and suggested ways to improve their study. In our project, we want to use participatory design methods to obtain results from participants. This means conducting activities that help us incorporate new technologies with the help of their suggestions. I found a few activities for the participants in our study.

I also started on a side project to our Youth Advocacy study. The side project consists of searching for youth advocacy groups on social networks, analyzing their posts and reactions (likes, comments, etc.) to them. So far it has been a little difficult to find groups that catered specifically to advocacy for youth health. 

Week two consisted more of reading the papers about past research studies in our area. Instead of simply reading them, I actually analyzed them to determine how we could use or enhance other research methods. I also had the chance to assist one of the researcher's (Mercedes) in Dr. Parker's group with her Systematic Review study. I had to filter out a list of research p

apers based on inclusive/exclusive criteria. The inclusive criteria consisted of experiments with mobile technology, disadvantaged populations and patient-facing developed technology. It was interesting learning about how researchers are attempting to use technology to improve health. Later in the week I worked on another side project with Herman, who is also a researcher under Dr. Parker. Herman's project is about using storytelling to improve health relationships between parents and their children. On Saturday Herman, Dr. Parker, Farnaz and I attended a health advocacy program at a center in Mattapan to recruit members for the study. I really enjoyed the event and the different activities they had to promote health. 

After a long 13 hour drive from South Carolina, I arrived in Boston, MA Sunday afternoon for the summer. Excited about the DREU, I settled in just fine at an apartment a few miles from campus. On Monday I finally met my mentor, Dr. Andrea Parker along with her research team which consist of 2 doctoral students (Herman and Farnaz) and a post-doc (Mercedes). We all went out for lunch and chatted about a wide variety of things, from school to our interest outside of research. I was delighted to hear some of their interest, and also discuss mine. 

Following lunch, Dr. Parker and I had our first meeting, where we discussed goals and expectations for the summer. Our research will be in the field of human-computer interaction, where we will investigate how social networking applications can empower minority youth in low-income homes to address health issues in their community. The main project deals with social computing in teen advocacy. The side projects consist of improving the parent-child relationship through physical activity, and also a systematic review. 

For the remainder of the week I read journal articles about previous research in our field of study and started on the systematic review project. I also enjoyed a tour of Northeastern's campus given by Herman. The campus is beautiful and appears to be diverse. On Friday I attended by first talk on the subject of data analyst of hospitalizations. I'm excited for what this summer has to offer!