PART 2: AN INSIDER'S VIEW OF PITTSBORO

Gaining Community Member Perspectives

The interview guide we used with community members was modified from our service provider guide to elicit what it is like to live, rather than work, in Pittsboro. The guide included questions about family, neighborhood, school, and health and social issues. The focus group guide was much shorter than the individual interview guide and was intended to guide an open conversation between several community members about issues facing Pittsboro and community resources available to address these issues. The guides for both types of interviews and the focus group are attached to this report in Appendix A. Also included in Appendix A are the fact sheets that were read to each individual that was interviewed describing the interview process. All interview and research materials were reviewed and approved by the School of Public Health Institutional Review Board.

The Chatham Coalition for Adolescent Health was invaluable in helping us identify key informants to interview. We also contacted people that we had met at the Family Health and Fitness Fair and the Pittsboro Street Fair. The community members that we spoke with were people that we felt could provide new perspectives on or add to the information that had come out of our service provider interviews. As with the service provider interviews, each interview and focus group was tape recorded after permission was obtained from the individual(s) being interviewed. A note-taker was present at each interview and all interviews were transcribed.

With a special interest in Pittsboro adolescents we recognized the importance of hearing their voice. We received approval from the Institutional Review Board for Study on Human Subjects to conduct focus groups with adolescents but we were not permitted to contact them directly or conduct individual interviews. This stipulation, and the parental consent that had to be obtained, proved to be difficult barriers to getting focus groups with adolescents set up. Through various community contacts we tried to set up several focus groups with adolescents in Pittsboro. Unfortunately, none of them happened due to various reasons. We recognized that this lack of adolescent voice might lead to a picture of the Pittsboro community that is different than if we had adolescent input and so we tried to gather teen voice in other ways.

Although the goal of the community diagnosis project is to gain entree into the community and many attempts were made to gather an objective perspective of the Pittsboro community, it is impossible for the process not to be guided somewhat by our own perceptions and assumptions. We would like to take an opportunity here to recognize the potential for this in our community diagnosis. We tried to get a wide range of viewpoints and perspectives regarding the Pittsboro community; however, it was infeasible to talk to everyone. Therefore, we made decisions on who we thought would be valuable people to interview based on the information we were trying to elicit from the community. We looked towards obvious places where we could find people that would have input into what life was like as a teen in Pittsboro, but we may have overlooked some valuable sources of information.

Another limitation to our data collection is the lack of diversity in the population of people we interviewed. Certain subpopulations within Pittsboro were more accessible than other subpopulations. We have great representation from white adults in Pittsboro but have little voice from the African-American population and no voice from the Hispanic population. Due to barriers mentioned before we also had limited access to teen voice in Pittsboro. We realize that this has shaped the information that we have gathered and the issues that have emerged and that, had we had greater representation from these other subgroups, the resulting picture may have been different.

Our role as "outsiders" coming in to conduct a community diagnosis on a community that we were not members of most likely had an impact both on how we approached the project and on how the community approached the project. We, as a team of public health students from the University of North Carolina came into the community with a background of education on the technique of community diagnosis. We also had our own political and philosophical viewpoints that may have affected how we approached the community by guiding our decision on who we should talk to, how we interpreted what we heard, and what leads to follow.

In addition to us bringing our assumptions into the process, the community members also may have had perceptions and assumptions about us that affected their participation in the process. We experienced some resistance from some community members who were hesitant to talk to students from Chapel Hill. A few residents appeared to feel over-studied and frustrated at being the subject of an academic assignment. This skepticism may have kept them from getting involved in the Community Diagnosis process and may have skewed the voice we were able to collect from the community.

Service Provider Interviews

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Themes from Community Member Interviews