Presenters: Colleen C. Walsh, PhD, Sarah S. Willen, & Abigail Fisher Williamson
Topic: employs mixed-methods to examine how Americans think about their own sense of health-related deservingness, how they assess the deservingness of others, how views and values shift over time, and what catalyzes these shifts. In partnership with Health Improvement Partnership-Cuyahoga (HIP-Cuyahoga), we also examine how involvement in the local health and equity initiative facilitates these shifts. The study’s first phase involved ethnographic interviews with a diverse sample of 170 residents of Greater Cleveland. In Phase 2, these interviews were used to generate hypotheses about what shapes conceptions of health-related deservingness, which were then tested in a nationally representative sample of 3,320 Americans using online survey experiments. In this presentation, ARCHES investigators will discuss key findings from both the qualitative interviews and the national survey including participants’ reflections on two local health disparities, reactions to a well-known equity versus equality image, and how health hardship is associated with a more capacious sense of health-related deservingness among survey respondents.
is Associate Professor in the School of Health Sciences at Cleveland State University. A medical anthropologist focused on urban health, she is interested in using anthropological and political economic models to understand urban living and health inequities. Prior to joining Cleveland State University, Dr. Walsh served as Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at ӰƵ and Research Associate at the Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods in CWRU’s School of Medicine. She holds a PhD in anthropology from ӰƵ and is a member of the Advisory Council for the Swetland Center for Environmental Health.
is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where she also directs the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights at the Human Rights Institute. A medical and sociocultural anthropologist, she is author of the multiple award-winning book, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), and author or editor of three books, six special issues, and several dozen articles and book chapters on issues of migration and health, health equity, health and human rights, and clinical education, among other topics. She is Principal Investigator of (funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), Co-Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded study, “The Impact of Covid-19 on the Educational and Career Outcomes of First-Generation College Students and their Families,” and Co-Founder of the .
Abigail Fisher Williamson, PhD is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy & Law and Director of the Center for Hartford Engagement and Research () at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She is the author of (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Williamson serves as a co-Principal Investigator of , an interdisciplinary study of how Americans think about health and fairness, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. and Masters in Public Policy from Harvard and a BA from Williams College.