The Augustana College Center for the Advancement of Community Health and Wellness is conducting a research project concerning maternal health experiences and outcomes women have experienced in the Quad Cities area. They are looking for at least 100 survey participants.
This survey is open to people ages 18-45 and who have been pregnant within the past two years. The survey also is looking for those who either gave birth in the Quad Cities, or received healthcare in the area during their pregnancy.
“This specific research project is kind of a two-pronged approach,” Dr. Kimberly Murphy said, the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Community Health and Wellness and a professor of Biology at Augustana. “There is a survey, then we are doing a more qualitative study, which is interviews of people with lived pregnancy experience within the last two years.”
The Center for the Advancement of Community Health and Wellness is an interdisciplinary center on Augustana’s campus, with the goal of getting students involved in community-based research projects. They do this through reaching out to local community groups, task forces, and coalitions focused on community health and wellness, and seeing if there are problems that need to be addressed that students could help with.
“I call it a win-win situation,” said Dr. Murphy. “It is a win for the community partner to make sure that they’re getting to whatever problem. They feel like we’re really helping them address that. For the students, they’re getting a true learning and engaging experience.”
This study was a student-driven initiative. For this project, Augustana has partnered with Quad Cities Health Initiative, Healthy Pregnancy Coalition, and Heart of Hope, among others.
“We hope at the least we created a space for people to talk about their experiences openly and truly,” Peyton Heisch, the Sustainability Manager of the Center for the Advancement of Community Health and Wellness said. “But at the most, we hope that we can write a paper from our qualitative and quantitative data and be able to share the results with our partners, to hopefully allow people in positions that make decisions about these things to understand better what people in the community have to say about what they’re actually experiencing.”
The survey is approximately 30 minutes long in length, and all responses are kept confidential. The survey is a Google Form, and can be done on either a smartphone or computer.
“Mothers and children make up a really large part of our population,” Heisch said. “And they’re both going through something at birth that we don’t all understand, but we should care about and learn more about.”
To take part in this survey, email cachw@augustana.edu.
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