IOOW Part 1

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.