Faith-Based Storytelling as SDOH to Promote Health: A Partnership with Marginalized Communities and Faith-Based Institutions

In this chapter, in collaboration with our community partners, we describe the steps to develop the Culturally Based African American Cancer Survivorship Storytelling Intervention. This intervention is theory-driven, narrative based, and uses a multimedia platform to incorporate religious songs into a series of cancer survivorship stories. In our preliminary work, African American cancer survivors were interviewed to capture stories about a stressful diagnosis and treatment, which culturally based coping strategies they used, and health outcomes they experienced. The PI’s research team has coded this data and identified themes that represent the coping strategies. The process of developing this intervention was conducted in three phases. In Phase 1 (Narrative Collection) and Phase 2 (Narrative Review), we collected the stories of members of the target population and extracted five categories of stories in religious songs. Phase 3 consisted of professional video narrative editing with our multimedia expert. In Phase 4, we will use concepts from Transportation Theory to guide our preliminary evaluation of the video-recorded narratives for usability and pilot testing for transportation (identification, narrative engagement, and emotional response). The final product from this study is a collection of narratives most likely to influence positive affective and behavioral changes among the target population. This pragmatic intervention might be tested in other populations but also readily integrated into healthcare, community, and faith-based settings.