In this video, we are going to review and reflect on our project.
Paide Youth Center also shares the report of the event.
https://www.facebook.com/PaideANK/
Summary
Outcome:
Completed the exchange event with 6 participants in Paide Youth Center
Finding:
★ It is valuable to have a platform in which people can be connected with each other.
★ In the Estonian context, we found smaller groups are better, 1 to 1 ideally, for conversational events (e.g. Human Library) especially when the topic is sensitive.
★ It was meaningful for both participants and Tallinn University students to reflect on ourselves and get to know others as the same human being no matter where we come from and what we do.
★ Probably we should have an online meeting with the center at least once, not only communicate through email, to be on the same page and have a mutual understanding of the event advertisement and schedules.
★ It is always challenging to get teenagers involved, so our event was!
★ Next time, we will make more concrete strategies to get targeted participants while still making the interpersonal dialogue one-to-one.
Research-based perspective:
★ In terms of social capital (Israel et al., 2001), we reached our goal to deliver the opportunity to meet with people outside their ordinary life. Even though Paide is considered to be one of the important center cities (Tõnurist, 2015), the participants said that it was their first time meeting and talking to people from non-EU countries. We could achieve a kind of intervention to make a small change in terms of opportunity disparity. Particularly for those who are interested in Asian cultures and pursuing a future path in sports, some of us could give them advice and share experiences.
★ As for the relationship between socioeconomic status, we are not able to conclude anything since we have no data from participants and it depends on household rather than region.
★ Sipe (2002) in his work mentioned that those who are in trouble, they normally will not take an initiating role to seek help. Somehow, the event in Paide proves this perspective. One of the participants revealed that one of her friends wanted to join as well, but for some others reason, the person didn't come. Also, considering the number of the participant, we found that it's not that easy to approach to those who are really social-economically disadventaged. This finding also helps us to reflect on our way to premote the event.
★ Even though we agree the importance of consistency and persistence of the intervention to make impact in the youth's life (Sipe, 2002), the high quality conversation with the participants matters. This one time heart to heart communication helps both the speaker and listener to echo each other in the world topic such as life, family, struggle and so on. one of our participants said that "we all are human, we suffer the same things."
★ In the experimental research done by Chung and Tse (2022), forty-five participants, who were aged between 18 and 23 years old, were recruited and divided into three different groups randomly (the human library intervention group, the comparison group and the control group). The study found that the human library intervention is effective at improving mental health literacy and reducing stigma and preferred social distance. Therefore, we believed that the interactional human library approach was suitable for achieving our project aim. In addition, one of our participants mentioned that she felt safe and secure showing her thoughts during the communication.
References
Israel, G. D., Beaulieu, L. J., & Hartless, G. (2001). The influence of family and community social capital on educational achievement. Rural sociology, 66(1), 43-68.
Sipe, C. L. (2002). Mentoring programs for adolescents: A research summary. Journal of adolescent health, 31(6), 251-26
Tõnurist, A. (2015). Estonian human development report 2014/2015. Estonian Cooperation Assembly.
Chung, E. Y. H., & Tse, T. T. O. (2022). Effect of human library intervention on mental health literacy: a multigroup pretest–posttest study. BMC psychiatry, 22(1), 1-8.
Comments
Post a Comment