Mark: Hello! I am Mark Odum, Director of NARIC. Welcome to the 9th episode of NARIC’s Spotlight Podcast and our first episode of our second year of podcasting. In this episode, Marta Garcia, our Bilingual Information and Media Specialist, interviews Jess Chaiken, NARIC’s Media and Information Manager, and Hafsa Abdirahman, NARIC’s Technical Writer. Join us as the three of them discuss NARIC’s Research In Focus series. They will discuss how articles for the series are chosen and how Hafsa analyses and writes the articles. Here’s their discussion.
Marta: Ah here it is. Hello, Hafsa! Would you like to tell us a bit about yourself, your title, what you do, etc.?
Hafsa: Hi, Marta. Thank you for having me on!
Marta: Of course!
Hafsa: My name is Hafsa, and I am a medical and health writer and I have a background in public health and entomology. And I have been writing and publishing scientific articles, medical content in general, for over a decade. So, my work has ranged from having published manuscripts, scientific manuscripts, to digital guides to medical educational materials to blog posts. And I would say that my true passion when it comes to this field is communicating life-changing health research and finding ways for everyday people like us, especially marginalized communities, to understand the health information that is out there.
Marta: Wow. That is amazing. Thank you! My next question is for Jess Chaiken. Good morning, Jess!
Jess: Good morning.
Marta: Jess why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Jess: So, I am Jess Chaiken. I am the Media and Information Services Manager for NARIC, the National Rehabilitation Information Center, and my background is library science as well is American Sign Language linguistics. I have also done some health writing and Hafsa and I completed the Health Writers… Hafsa, remind me of the full name of the course that we both completed. We can give them a shout out. What is the title of it? (Laughs).
Hafsa: Health Writer Hub.
Jess: Thank you! Health Writer Hub, yes! I took the introduction to health writing course and I found it incredibly helpful for what we do here, which is taking the interesting findings from studies focused on disability and rehabilitation and turning them into lay-language summaries that can easily be digested and easily shared with the communities that are most impacted by this research.
Marta: So, thank you, Jess! My next question goes back to Hafsa. In general, can you tell me what the Research In Focus series is? Jess just talked a little bit about it, but would you mind giving us a little more detail?
Hafsa: Yes. So, the Research In Focus series is a weekly publication where we summarize the latest NIDILRR-funded research. These articles are designed to be reader friendly. We provide an overview of the study, we highlight important findings, we share implications and areas for future research. And these articles are hand selected from the diverse collection here at NIDILRR and our aim is to cover broad research, you know, interesting research on many areas of disability, types of interventions… We also cover a wide range of ages – from early childhood to aging with and without disabilities.
Marta: Very awesome! Thank you! So, Jess, I know Hafsa had mentioned that the articles come from the collection. But, exactly where do these articles appear?
Jess: This is where we work with a large community of grantees funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, or NIDILRR, and NIDILRR funds about… There are usually about 300+ active projects in any given year and they publish articles, reports, guides, and manuals and our library collects those. So, as these are coming into the collection, we are looking for topics of interest, things that may be topical for what’s happening now. For example, in the last year or so, we have been looking at articles that look at the impact that COVID-19 has had on the disability community. So as these articles are coming in, we are looking for: Are they relevant to our sphere? Are they interesting? And that’s a quality judgement, but I think we are really good at selecting things that will interest and engage a wide audience. Is it funded by NIDILRR? This is very key. It has to be an article funded by NIDILRR that has to go for paying for the research itself. And is it recent? We try to focus on articles that have been published in the last six months. There’s new research all the time. And that’s not to say that older research isn’t still relevant, but we are trying to share some of the latest results from NIDILRR-funded projects. And all of these articles that we highlight are and have been added to our collection, so they are available through our document delivery service. So, if someone reads this article and wants to learn more, we can provide copies.
Marta: Oh, awesome! Thank you! Now Hafsa, would you mind telling me or telling our audience what your process is for writing a Research In Focus article?
Hafsa: Yeah. It’s a pretty extensive process. (Laughs). But I will try and summarize it.
The first thing I do, of course, is read the article in its entirety. I really pay attention to the objectives, the hypothesis of the study, the methods used in the study, and I try to highlight any significant findings. What I also try to do, if there are any tables included – which most of the time they are, I try to make sure that the findings in the results section, for example, match up with what we are seeing in the tables. And so, that is to, again, to make sure that I understand the information correctly and I am not miscommunicating it in any way.
Once I start drafting the article, I actually try to take a step back and talk about the population of the study. A lot of these studies have a very targeted population. So, for example, if we were looking at employer barriers that are faced by visually impaired people in the United States, then it will be very important for me to include general information about this population. For example, how many people in this population are in the workforce in the US, what are some common barriers that they face. Once I introduce the population, I go into the purpose of the study. So, some studies have different purposes, right? Some studies focus on sharing statistics. Others focus on qualitative studies, so they focus on interviewing people and focus on their experiences. Some studies may be looking at a new intervention, so they want to see if they are successful or works better than the standard care. So that is really important to talk about the purpose. And, of course, I share information about the authors of the study and the fact that it is NIDILRR-funded research. And, finally, I summarize the research findings. And I talk about the implications for the research. How does this apply to the everyday person or for the targeted population of the study?
Marta: Wow! That sounds very detailed, which is great! And just amazing. Wow. Thank you, Hafsa.
So, Jess, where can listeners find Research In Focus?
Jess: Yeah. Research In Focus is available on our website at naric.com. And we also have a weekly newsletter, News and Notes from the NIDILRR Community and Beyond. And whenever we publish a new Research In Focus article we highlight it in that weekly publication that’s available for free and you can sign up for it on our website. When you get to our website, there’s a big blue box in the center and you put your email in there, and then respond to the confirmation email – that’s very important – (laughs). Otherwise, you’re not going to get it. We also post it on our social media. We have Facebook and Twitter in English and Spanish and we are starting to get into Mastodon and see how that works.
One thing that Hafsa didn’t mention is that she plays a key role and, I should have said this, in how we select the documents and publications that we highlight. While Natalie Collier, who is our Acquisitions Manager… Natalie and I put together a list of possible selections, Hafsa performs a key function: She reviews them for us and gives us her input on, both the interest level and also the quality of the study and the methodology. Is it a small study? And small studies do have value. But sometimes that value isn’t seen until later. And it is not as easy to generalize, to… What I mean by that is to apply it to this group we could also apply it to other groups because of… It is harder to do that with small studies. I am always impressed by the notes that Hafsa gives me for the materials that we ask her to review. I think it is incredibly beneficial to me on what we want to select. Or NIDILRR makes the final selection on any material that we are going to highlight, but it helps me in making those recommendations to NIDILRR. I am very appreciative of that.
Marta: Oh, awesome.
Hafsa: Thank you for that, Jess.
Jess: You’re welcome. Cheers! (Laughs).
Marta: Hafsa, you also write the Research In Brief for the Spotlight blog, where you write about research related terminology in easy to understand language. How do you decide on what terms you will write about?
Hafsa: Well, our purpose for writing these Research In Brief articles is to help our readers better understand the Research In Focus (RIF) articles and other scientific studies as well. And, so, some of the things that I look at are: What are some terms that are appearing frequently in our articles? So, if you say for example, this is a qualitative study, this is a quantitative study, and things like this. We also want to provide our readers with the tools to identify reliable sources. And so some blog posts discuss what makes a study or resource reliable, some red flags that you should look out for. And so it all comes down to the fact that we really want to empower our readers to feel like they can discern the reliability of health information that they come across while doing research online.
Marta: Oh, wow! That’s wonderful. Thank you! Jess, Hafsa answered the last question (laughs). So, would you mind telling our readers and listeners where they can find the Research In Brief series?
Jess: Of course. We publish the Research In Brief series though our blog https://naricspotlight.wordpress.com/. And the blog articles also get indexed in our website, naric.com. So, if you’re searching our website, you will find brief summaries of those blog posts. And, actually, one of the most popular of those Research In Brief blog post articles was written by one of our previous writers, but we turned into a Frequently Asked Question of how do we dissect a journal article. And that was written by Ariel Silverman, who was our first Research In Focus writer, and she guides you on how do you read an abstract and then took us through her process, which is similar to Hafsa’s. But, like, how to read through the methodology and then understand the different parts and pieces of the methodology are. That is one of our most popular articles on our website: How to dissect a journal article. I think people are very interested in this topic because they are looking for the research that is meaningful to them and a lot of that research is written at a very high level, lots of technical words, jargon, like Hafsa mentioned qualitative vs. quantitative. How do I make sense of that when I am trying to figure out if this type of speech therapy is going to work for my grandmother who had a stroke? You know? So, I really think that this series helps people get in touch with the research literature that has an impact on them.
Marta: Thank you. And now this… Our interview comes to an end. So, thank you both! Thank you, Hafsa. Thank you, Jess, for joining us for this episode today. And I hope you both have a great day and a great week.
Hafsa: Thank you.
Jess: Thank you. And I have a question for you, Marta. Will the websites mentioned be in the show notes?
Marta: Yes!
OK, are you ready, sir?
Mark: Yes. Once again, thank you for listening to this episode of the Spotlight Podcast. I would also like to thank Jess, Hafsa, and Marta, who had an informative discussion on the Research In Focus series. I hope you, our listeners, learned more about the ins and outs of producing one of our more popular products and that their discussion, in this episode, has inspired you to delve into the wealth of NIDILRR-funded research in the Research In Focus series. All the websites and webpages mentioned in today’s episode can be found in the episode’s description. Transcripts of the episode are available in English and Spanish on NARIC’s website, naric.com.
By the way, if you have ideas for future episodes, please contact us via chat, email at naricinfo@heitechservices.com, or calling our toll-free number at 800/346-2742. Once again, this is Mark Odum, NARIC’s Director, thank you for listening.