Jonah Wilde (2021)
Research Report: Jonah Wilde (2021)
Hey everyone, my name's Jonah. I'm one of the volunteers who's been working with Investigaytors for the past year or so. First thing that’s probably on your mind: WHO or WHAT are the “Investigayors”?
Long story short, it’s a volunteer research program centered around 2SGBTQ+ men’s health. It was founded in Vancouver by the Community Based Research Centre (CBRC) and has since branched out into Alberta and Manitoba, which is how myself and my (extremely talented and cool) colleagues got involved. We’ve been learning how to conduct community research through a series of workshops, centered around the Sex Now survey which has been conducted throughout Canada by the CBRC.
The survey was held throughout Manitoba in 2019, and asks questions relating to substance use, healthcare access, mental health, sexual health and more. The goal of the survey is to develop an understanding of how 2SGBTQ+ men understand their own health, how they are taking care of their own health, how they are accessing healthcare, where they are accessing healthcare, and how we can help fill the gaps in any of these areas.
Here’s a link on the <a href="https://www.cbrc.net/investigaytors">Investigaytors</a>, and the <a href=" https://ninecircles.ca/news-events/sex-now-online-home-grown-research-at-home/ ">Sex Now survey</a> if you want to know more.
Before we go any further, here’s a bit about me:
- I graduated from the University in Manitoba with a double major in film & theatre
- I realized that I was never going to make a career out of it.
- COVID happened.
- I realized that I was DEFINITIELY never going to make a career out of it.
- I am now training to be a Library Technician at Red River College.
As you can see, I’m not a scientist at all. I came into this from an Arts background, without much experience in research beyond what I did for university, and having previously participated in a shorter program similar to Investigaytors (Totally Outright, 2014). My main area of experience is volunteering in the community, which I’ve done for several years now and I’m hoping to continue as soon as COVID gets out of here. My hope is to take that experience, do what I can to stay on top of the currents needs of the community, and address that in my research. That said, if I ever mess up or don’t seem like I know what I’m talking about, feel free to roast the hell out of me.
So… Back to Investigaytors. As part of the program, one of our jobs was to develop a research question based on the survey. We were given a list of survey questions, told to pick a range we wanted to see the results for. And based on that, each of us developed our own research question. Something WE wanted to know about queer men’s health in Manitoba, for which the data would hopefully provide some insight.
For my research question, I wanted to look at how people with disabilities accesses healthcare. More specifically, I wanted to how people’s perception of themselves as a person with a disability affects how they talk about their health to others, and how they choose to access healthcare.
I have ADHD and wasn’t diagnosed until my mid-20s. I spent years blaming myself for stuff that was actually the fault of my disability. That made it impossible to adequately take care of my mental health or talk to people about it, and it wasn’t until I got my diagnosis that I was able to start disentangling myself from that mindset and get help for the first time.
So, I wanted to know what experience other people had with their own disability. Did their perception of themselves as a person with a disability change how they access healthcare, or how they talk about their health? I narrowed it down to a set of questions questions asking whether or not people were accessing healthcare, how often they accessed it, and if they weren’t, what was the reason for that? I sent in the question, got my results, and the answer was…
There was very little difference, statistically. The number of people with disabilities accessing healthcare was basically the same as the number of people without, and out of the reasons given for not accessing healthcare, self-perception never really came up. My question was a dead-end, basically.
And that's just how things work sometimes! You have an idea, you start asking questions, you get blue-balled by science, and then you go write a paper about it. I think part of the problem is that I projected too much of myself into it and came out with a question that was too tailored to my own experience.
But there’s still plenty of directions I can go with it. For example: While the overall number of people accessing healthcare was similar between each group, the frequency with which they had difficulty accessing healthcare was very different. People with disabilities who said that they had difficulty accessing healthcare were either currently experiencing, or have previously experienced that difficulty far more often than people without.[1]
Building off that, I’d like to look at how this is split geographically. Where in Winnipeg, and Manitoba as a whole, are people having the most difficulty accessing healthcare? Through questions like this, we can identify an area where people are actively having difficulty accessing health care and look at what kinds of changes are needed. So that’s what I’m hoping to do moving forward! Build off the first question and keep asking more, to develop a useful body of community-based research.
That’s it for now! If this is your first time on the site, go click the button up top and check out everyone else's blog entries too. I’ve been working with some incredibly cool and insightful people through the Investigaytors program, and every single one of them has something valuable to add to the conversation. So go take a 15-minute break, make yourself a snack and get reading
[1] There’s SO much more that can be said here, but it’s not something that can adequately be addressed in an intro post, or from my perspective alone as an able-bodied person with a learning disability. So it’ll be the subject of a future post.
