"Studio 34" Youth Health/Social Media Project

Hey everyone,                                      
                                        
 

Under the 'Our Lives' project, we have incorporated a youth health/social media project called 'Studio 34' which aims to promote youth health through the creation of music, arts and media by young people, for young people. This is a joint project between the Menzies School of Health Research and the Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus Unit of the Northern Territory Department of Health and Families.

So what we are trying to do is to see how we are able to promote youth health more effectively to young people within the Darwin region - and hopefully beyond - through the use of social media avenues such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, etc. We already have a Facebook page going, with a little over 100 people following us, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Studio-34/129959087027173.

We've had a few workshops already around Darwin and in Borroloola, NT, which I'll go into a little bit later on. These workshops have a youth health component - which is either the Community Risk Mapping or Body Mapping activties - and then a hip/hop songwriting workshop conducted by local Darwin hip hop artists. Another side aim of this project is to promote local talent and for young people in Darwin to know that there are ways for them to get their voices heard and their talent showcased. So, the expected outcomes of these workshops are to produce rich qualitative data from the youth health activities, and also to produce either music, videos and photos that the youth themselves have developed that have a positive youth issue or youth health message which we upload on to Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. At present, we are currently working on producing/mixing some songs, which hopefully will be released soon!

Cheers from Our Lives,
Nia

Community Risk Mapping & Body Mapping Activities

Hello again,

Like I mentioned in the previous blog, the 'Our Lives' project has activities or 'research tools' that we use to get young people to discuss any issue that they feel are the most pertinent to them or ones that they believe are affecting them the most right now. These include the Community Risk Mapping Exercise and the Body Mapping Activity. We chose these two because they have been found to be quite effective at engaging young people to discuss issues related to sexual health, risks and risk-taking behaviours from a related pilot study conducted by Save the Children Australia Programs East Kimberley Division called 'Risky Business: Sexual Health Youth Programs East Kimberley', in which I was the Research Officer for, where the aim was to develop and trial innovative and creative strategies to determine their effectiveness at engaging youth - particularly Indigenous youth - at discussing issues that are quite sensitive in nature. So, from that particular project, the Research Team decided to incorporate the Community Risk Mapping and Body Mapping Activities in the 'Our Lives' project because it just seemed like a pretty good fit.

1) Community Risk-Mapping: Where young people identify areas where they feel safe, unsafe, and where they hang out. Young people get to discuss any issue that they feel are quite pressing at the moment and talk about how to overcome them as a group. In this way, they are learning from one another on possible ways of avoiding partaking in risky behaviours, and also a way for them to articulate how they believe some of their issues could be appropriately addressed by the relevant service providers or agencies.

2) Body Mapping: Where young people paint/draw their embodied perceptions of risks. This is quite a creative activity, where the participants discuss how some of the issues they identified in the Community Risk Mapping Exercise in terms of how that affects their bodily health. It's a really great way to get stories or anecdotes of young people's experiences of certain health risks - and other types of risks for that matter - because really they perceive the exercise as just drawing and 'yarning' (talking), which is really what the activity aims to do.

These activities are not structured at all. There are no set questions or anything like that. It's all up to the participants on what they want to talk about. If they don't want to talk about sexual health for a variety of reasons, they don't have to. That's why these activities are considered non-invasive and youth-friendly. Also, these activities allow young people to provide new and up-to-date information regarding risks that they face within their respective towns/communities - if they feel comfortable - which is great because there are a lot of things that youth service providers and other related agencies don't know about the everyday lives of young people. More importantly, because they're not set in a formal classroom context, the participants are more engaged with the activity, and it has been observed that they are learning from each other just by asking questions, talking - and sometimes debating - about youth issues, and generally engaging in discussions with the facilitators and with one another. Due to the informal nature of these sessions, it's quite interesting to hear the conversations that come up!

Cheers from Our Lives,
Nia

Hello!!!...and Welcome :)

Hi everyone :)

Welcome to the 'Our Lives: Culture, Context and Risk' youth sexual health project! My name is Nia, and I am the Program Manager and Project Officer for the project, and I'll be blogging on here regularly, but there are others on our team that might want to drop in a line every now and then.

We've actually been really busy lately, but before I get into that, I'll just give you a bit of info on what the project is actually about. So, the 'Our Lives' research project is a national youth sexual health project funded by the Australian Research Council. What we are trying to do is to determine the socio-cultural influences on the sexual health decision-making of Indigenous young people, particularly in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. So, as you can see, it's quite a big area to cover, but it's very important that we include a diverse range of young people - both Indigenous and non-Indigenous - so that we have a sound understanding of how and why they decide to engage in certain risky behaviours - particularly in terms of their sexual health. We need to do this so that we can develop and implement ways for young people to make well-informed decisions regarding their overall health and well-being - ways that are fun and that young people will actually use in their everyday lives. But before we get into that, we have to do quite a bit of research and actually get out there and talk to young people and see what they actually think about all this health stuff. We have a few fun, creative and effective activities or 'research tools' that we use to engage young people in discussing issues related to sexual health, risks and risk-taking behaviours - but I'll get to that a bit later on.

So, currently our Research Team includes:
Dr Kate Senior, Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin, NT
Dr Richard Chenhall, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC
Dr Marian Pitts, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, VIC
Dr Sherry Saggers, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, Perth, WA
Dr Victoria Burbank, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA
Dr Tricia Nagel, Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin, NT
Anania Tagaro (that's me!), Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin, NT
Susan McMullen, Menzies School of Health Research, based in Cairns, QLD
Joseph Fitz, Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin, NT
Jolie Lawrence, AMS Research Student, Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin, NT

Everyone in the team has different expertise and skills that they bring to the project. As the project grows, we'll also have other project officers and research assistants that will come on board, particularly once we've established the research project in the different research sites in the NT, SA and WA.

We've accomplished quite a bit since July, and I'll be sure to let you all know about it in the subsequent blogs.

Hope all is well!

Cheers from Our Lives,
Nia