Innovative Participatory Bilingual Data Analysis With Latinx/@ Immigrants: Language, Power, and Transformation

Objective: The insights of Latinx/@ immigrants are essential to developing interventions that better address complex multilevel phenomena impacting mental health. Despite important advances in methods that genuinely embody participatory research practices, attention to collaborative data collection, analysis, and dissemination are limited. Our aim is to describe the development and implementation of research practices to address these gaps through an emphasis on and understanding of the centrality of language in collaborative research processes. Method: Guided from the outset by community-based participatory research principles, our community–academic research partnership recognized the importance of developing and intentionally studying our collaborative processes. As part of an ethnographic interview study with 24 Latinx/@ immigrants, a community–university research team developed innovative methods, including practices related to research team meetings, data collection, analysis, and dissemination, which we documented through ongoing discussion and reflection. Results: The resulting participatory research processes were grounded in a theoretical framework of praxis and language and included six innovative and iterative stages: (a) Establishing the research team, (b) planning the interview process/data collection, (c) developing the data analysis methodology, (d) interpreting findings to adapt the intervention, (e) integrating results of the participatory process into the analysis, and (f) data analysis for dissemination. Conclusions: A focus on praxis and language revealed how the language of research structures’ power, meaning, feeling, collaboration, analysis, and transformation.