Beating the Stigma of Substance Use Disorder

Methods

Summary

We will be using Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) methods for our project. 

CBPR is an approach that is especially important for disenfranchised groups who are more likely to be researched rather than empowered to lead the research.  CBPR includes people with the designated lived health conditions (i.e. SUD) as active constituents in the research process.  CBPR teams partner to develop a research agenda and materials that may be left out of the data collection process without such community involvement. People with lived experience of SUD are the experts on this topic and provide a critical perspective to stigma research. 

The CBPR team will working on defining the stigma of SUD and planning focus groups to collect qualitative data that will inform the development of Honest, Open, Proud (HOP) for beating the stigma of SUD.

We have previously conducted CBPR studies to develop peer navigator manuals for African Americans with serious mental illness who are homeless (Corrigan et al., 2017a) as well as Latinos with serious with serious mental illness (Corrigan et al., 2017b) .  As part of the African American study, the CBPR team developed a manual for peer navigators called "Inspiring Change" (Sheehan et al., 2015). It may be found at our website www.chicagohealthdisparities.org.

Corrigan, P. W., Kraus, D., Pickett, S., Schmidt, A., Stellon, E., Hantke, E., & The Community Based Participatory Research Team. (2017a). Peer navigators that address the integrated healthcare needs of African Americans with serious mental illness who are homeless. Psychiatric Services, 68(3), 264–270. PMID: 28093056

Corrigan, P. W., Torres, A., Lara, J. L., Sheehan, L., & Larson, J. E. (2017b). The healthcare needs of Latinos with serious mental illness and the potential of peer navigators. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 44(4), 547-557.

Sheehan, L., Ballentine, S., Agnew, L., Ali, Y., Canser, M., Connor, J., Jones, R., Laster, E. Muhammad, K., Noble, S., Smith, R., Walley, G., & Corrigan, P.W. (2015). Inspiring change manual: A community-based participatory research manual for involving African Americans with serious mental illness in research. Chicago: IIT. Published with funds provided by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute

Challenges

Recruiting people with SUD may be challenging for our project. We will overcome this challenge through the work of our CBPR team, which includes people with lived experience in the community.  Our team members will keep participants engaged and be essential to recruiting stakeholders for our focus groups.

Pre Analysis Plan

We will use thematic analysis to analyze the qualitative data from our focus groups. Themes are determined in advance, in this case through the focus group questions, and two independent raters sort collected data into these categories. The CBPR team will come up with thematic categories that allow adaption of HOP to beat the stigma of substance use disorder.