Reframing personal and community report back of consumer products by centering intersectionality

PROJECT ABSTRACT Racial/ethnic inequities in chemical exposures from consumer product use are shaped by social-structural factors and can amplify health disparities across the life course. Intersectionality is an important framework for understanding and addressing these environmental health inequities since racism, sexism, and other systems of power and oppression intersect to disproportionately impact Black and Latina women. Intersectionality also provides a framework for report back of research results to support bidirectional communication and move the report back field from right-to-know to right-to-understand. We seek to advance methods for sharing of research results to account for upstream social-structural drivers and support actionable messages that align with community values. We will leverage the Taking Stock Study, an ongoing community-based, participatory research study, to address the following aims: 1) analyze community experiences of receiving personalized study results among Black and Latina women, and through collaborative inquiry, move from right-to-know to right-to- understand.; 2) develop and test an enhanced report back process for an intervention study that centers ethical dilemmas, including issues of actionability; and 3) develop a community-level report back toolkit in order to support grassroots organizations to be better equipped to tackle ethical concerns related to consumer product exposures, including when there are no safer alternatives. We will recruit participants from the first phase of the Taking Stock Study who will have already received personalized study results reports to attend community meetings to learn from their experiences including what they wanted, what they understood, and what was lacking during the report back process. We will use this feedback and usability testing with a subset of participants to iteratively refine the personalized study reports generated with Silent Spring Institute’s Digital Exposure Report-back Interface (DERBI) for the second phase of Taking Stock, which is an intervention study. We will test the refined reports among Taking Stock participants by evaluating environmental health literacy outcomes, including knowledge, understanding and motivation to act before and after receiving DERBI reports. Findings from individual-level report back will then inform community-level report back, which will be developed collectively with community partners. We expect to develop new frameworks, tools, and empirical evidence on how to center principles of intersectionality in report back of environmental health data, and how to advance a right-to-understand report back paradigm to support health equity.