“Combatting Provider-Enacted HIV Stigma through Creative Educational Materials”

The team working on “Combatting Provider-Enacted HIV Stigma through Creative Educational Materials” (co-lead by UCF professors Christa Cook from Nursing and Blake Scott and Nathan Holic from Writing and Rhetoric) will create short scenario-based comics, or “graphic pathographies,” that quickly and impactfully illustrate the forms and effects of stigma in provider-client interactions. The first phase of the planned research involves working with area HIV service organizations (e.g., Hope & Help, Miracle of Love, Bliss) to identify and conduct focus groups and interviews with individuals living with HIV who have experienced provider-related stigma. Because this phase is on hold for safety reasons due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the team of researchers has been working on several additional tasks in the meantime: 1) we submitted our IRB protocol for our planned focus groups/interviews; 2) we consulted with two comic artists who have been part of the “graphic medicine” movement to get their ideas about the process of comic design, and these meetings have prompted us to consider using comics as a means of data collection; 3) we met with a medical librarian to conduct a literature search about data collection using comic storyboards, and were excited to find that this is an innovative approach for eliciting participants’ experiences and their responses to them; 4) we have adjusted our research protocols to enable participants to “fill or draw in” comic storyboards that illustrate their experiences, and Nathan has designed multiple versions and drafts of these storyboards (see a few examples below); 5) we are planning to conduct an online user-test of three different versions of the comic storyboards with 8-10 community members so that we can refine these tools before the full face-to-face focus groups and interviews begin, and this will also allow us to explore the feasibility of conducting further data collection online.