My name is Kiran, I am the chair of In Our Own Words
and a health psychologist by background.
And I am Rachel and I have recently come on board with In Our Own words and I am
newly qualified as a clinical psychologist
It’s nice to meet you all by the way.
So just to explain what In Our Own Words is.
It is a wiki essentially, to
build up a knowledge resource around distress, suffering, pain fatigue, those
kind of symptoms or experiences people might struggle with from ethnic minorities
as they may describe them in everyday terms.
So moving away from clinical disorders
and moving away from looking at the Western equivalents of anxiety and
depression, but really looking at how people describe it in an everyday sense
in order to try and help people to get earlier access to support
when they need it from psychological services.
And as part of that we are building a resource section
for different communities under different
languages where we link to papers- sorry,
not papers-research done by different
researchers, you know, trainee
psychologists, early career psychologists,
with ethnic minorities around
some of their sense-making when they have mental and physical health difficulties,
particularly work that might not have been
published before.
[Rachel] This is often called a preprint
[Kiran] That's it, yeah
[Rachel] When I was possibly thinking about publishing my thesis
so yeah it's basically a term in academic publishing which is like a version of
your scientific paper that precedes a formal peer review and actually
it doesn't have to, a formal peer review
doesn't have to follow on. And you can
just complete a dissertation or a piece of work, or a even a service
evaluation for example, and you can-
there's a number of places you can upload
them. Yeah and you, and you make
the pre-print available, how it's
described [the process]. People can view hat, it's searchable, people can download
it. And yeah, others go on to publish it.
Yep. And One of the nice things about it
is you can actually see how many people
download your paper and you can create
citable links of your research paper from
there. Erm so we'll talk a bit about who
might actually benefit from this, and talk
about some of the caveats, like who
might not be so-who might want to think
about it before they share their pre-
prints with us. And so, this is possibly
going to appeal more to people who train
and go in to practicing, erm psychology in
applied settings, clinical settings so for
example, erm clinical psychologists,
counselling psychologists and perhaps some
practitioner health psychologists, you
know, amongst some others. The
reason why we say that is that there's
less pressure to publish in academic
outlets when you are oriented towards
those services because-and that-that is an
advantage because, some journals-a number
of journals don't really accept pre-prints
or you know reviewers may comment that
this-that this has been a pre print else-
where and that can actually impede chances
of success at those journals. On the
other hand some open access journals that
tend to be, you know, higher impact or
you know, harder to get in to as well,
they don’t mind having-accepting
pre-prints, in fact they may
encourage it. Erm so that-We would ask you
to consider that, you know before
uploading your work on a pre print
server because we don’t want to stop you from doing that
if that's-if publishing academically, if
that's what you want to do first. That
said, you know, we know it can be
difficult and a lot of really good work
never gets out there in academic journals
and we want to help people-make that
accessible, and you know get the exposure
and the credit they deserve for doing that
work. And we know that those working with
ethnic minorities can sometimes find it
really difficult to get their work
published in an academic outlet but
we really need to hear about that stuff
[their research].
[inaudible]
With regards to how it works on our Wiki,
as I say we have a resources section under
each language and the idea is people can
click through and visit and download it
and have a look. The first thing they
see is, like you know a page of terms and
recordings of phrases but
sometimes people might actually want to
understand a particular community more
and understand how they make sense of
you know, struggle, physical and
emotional struggle, and their-you know
when their health needs aren’t being
quite met, so they can either get
more support, you know or they can-or if
they are a professional, figure out how
to support a member of the community
better. Obviously we do welcome work
from any psychologist that has worked with
an ethnic minority but we are particularly
welcoming ethnic minority psychologists,
as that is part of our ethos, it's our
focus to try and help get ethnic minority
psychologists to get their work recognised
to counteract some of the barriers that
we can sometimes face as ethnic minorities
[Kiran] So yeah with regards-
[Rachel] Can I give an example?
[Kiran] Oh go on-
[Rachel] An example might be-you
might be a-a practicing health psychologist
Perhaps you are a few years down the line
after study, but actually like you had
a really incredible dissertation or thesis
that was on, for example the experiences
of barriers to help in the South
Asian community in relation to eating disorders
That-and say it was a qualitative piece
and you interviewed like 8 people
and it's-you might not have had
the support, the time, the energy to-
perhaps or the interest to go down
that peer review process, cos it is - as
Kiran said there are any barriers for
lots of different reasons, perhaps then
a preprint could be really useful cos that
would mean that information-that knowledge
can be picked up and used by practitioners, just by the public, by
people of the South Asian community specifically and that is exactly the
sort of thing we would absolutely love in
the resources section and we can
actually put that in-under the certain
languages that that would be-that that
would be relevant to, so yeah that's just an example.
[Kiran] Yeah thank you, that's always
helpful for people to have that, you know,
cos it can seem a bit abstract.
So when we say we link to it, a popular
repository that we talk about--that accepts a lot of preprints is called
PsyArXiv. We'll go over how to upload
things onto PsyArXiv and one of the
lovely things about that is that you can
create a permanent link which is easy to
publish to-well link to, also should you
then later on publish it, you can create a
link to the final published version-and
you can even choose whether to make it
private or public, update the version
if you choose to re-write it a little bit. You have all these options
And one of these things that we hope
that could happen is if we-this site
builds and you know becomes a real key
-leading resource amongst professionals
and service user groups, we could end up
attracting some editors who would love to
publish your work, who may approach you
as a result. So, that's-kind of the other
hope really by doing it this way, and of
course to make sure we credit people
appropriately for the work that they do.
So what we do particularly welcome
is-in terms of the types of research
we-we are looking for original empirical
research studies, qualitative, indepth
studies with an ethnic minority
participant group and sometimes
quantitative measures, to see where
someone might be struggling with their
physical or mental health as that can help
[to] identify people in clinical practice
who might need some support, so those are
the kind of the studies that we're
looking for. So if that you know sounds
like it might be of relevance to you-I'm
just gonna check that I haven't missed
anything [laughs]- if that sounds like
it could be something you would
be interested in, and you know
you'd like to hear more and see more of
our projects then, you know you're more
than welcome and we'd love to hear
from you.
Thank you-thank you very much for your
attention and we look forward to speaking
to you soon.