with individuals, universities, and organizations across the globe
MiStory early work
Early work in MiStory examined whether the standardized and validated ethnographic instrument and the help seeking theory could identify cultural aspects of help seeking and recovery. Our initial group included several countries with whom we had previous relationships, consisting of researchers, practitioners, and an NGO, and included Italy, Ireland, Romania, Spain, Portugal, and the US. This initial group established the safety of the instruments and the feasibility to translate them into a wide variety of languages and cultural frames. In total, we examined the stories from 44 survivors.
Setting up goals and structure
Once we affirmed that the CENI could be used effectively and safely in a broad international study and that we could discover shared and culturally specific aspects of trauma recovery, we began to assemble the current team of collaborators. Currently, our collaborators are across over a dozen countries. We are all trained in the same methods and are using the same instruments. We work together to carry out a single shared research project in multiple sites and languages. We are refining intra-cultural and cross-cultural methods of analysis of the survey, interview, and mixed method data.
Independent research hubs to collaborate as a larger whole
This research was never intended to be a simple multisite study; wherein all data was part of the PIs work. We aim to share in this larger multicultural enterprise with survivors, investigators, students, practitioners, and NGOs. In this structure, each country is an autonomous research site, with sharing data across the whole consortium, created several benefits.
Things to consider if you want to join us
- Is there sufficient expertise, infrastructure, and experience to manage a research study with MiStory technical support? These skills may include research experience, analytic experience, and perhaps internal funding to be successful.
- Students need to “carve out’ their area of interest within the larger enterprise. That means that there would be exciting and potentially very illuminating “spin-off” projects, as well as some of the more in-depth work needed, such as instrument validation or instrument development.
- Because each country would be grounded in this larger project, MiStory and the collaborators agree to develop future scholars to do new projects, as well as develop mechanisms to share their in-country data for smaller, more focused, secondary analyses. This structure further contributes to ownership, engagement, excitement, and generates new work. Moreover, it promotes the sustainability of our work.
- These autonomous research sites should be training grounds for scholars from other countries. A master’s or Ph.D. student could go to one of the other sites and become exposed to a familiar research project being carried out in another country. Besides, completed doctoral students might choose to do a postdoc with an investigator from a partner research site. Forth, these autonomous sites could cooperate along interest lines in smaller culture regions, for example, or develop some sub-aim across sites. For example, some sites might share an interest in the development of a regional grant or work together on a joint meta-analysis.