Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effecting Changes While Providing Reproductive Health Care in Diverse Organizational Contexts

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

This doctoral dissertation project examines variation in caregiving attitudes and practices, the resulting impacts on pregnancy outcomes, and caregivers’ attempts to improve outcomes in general while navigating differential institutional conventions. Caregivers face tradeoffs between individualized care and broader organizational priorities, and this research investigates how caregivers balance those tradeoffs while effecting organizational change.

This research valuably contributes to scholarship on the practice of health care amid divergent economic, ethical, and institutional challenges. By focusing on multiple comparable institutions, the research helps to characterize individuals’ contributions to organizational change. The results from the study help to guide the implementation of health care in diverse contexts.

This study contributes to the training of a graduate student in scientific methodology and analytical approaches.

This project examines how caregivers provide support and healthcare for pregnant and post-partum women in diverse organizational settings with limited infrastructure and access to resources, particularly prisons. The investigation focuses on tradeoffs imposed by the caregivers’ concurrent attempts to effect positive organizational change while maintaining high standards of health care.

Using a combination of methods, including observational approaches, interviews with a diverse sample of stakeholders, focus groups, and an analysis of social media content, the investigators examine how caregivers navigate these tradeoffs in multiple organizational settings. This comparative approach contributes to scholarship on the multifaceted factors that shape how healthcare providers advance and implement improvements to the systems in which they work.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.