Barriers to Health and Housing in Houston Communities

Improving health outcomes in diverse communities is contingent upon increasing representation in the complete research processes – from data collection to analysis. While there are several barriers to conducting or participating in research for underrepresented groups, certain methods, such as community-based participatory research (CBPR), present solutions to celebrate and support creative collaboration towards progress. The University of Houston Community Health Worker Initiative (CHWI) complements the goals of CBPR by utilizing a data-guided approach to inform responsive engagement. I analyzed mixed-methods CHWI data from a sample of 123 respondents to explore potential interventions that could appropriately, effectively, and positively impact the community. The results of this analysis suggest that alluvial diagrams are a powerful method for visualizing categorical data to understand the relationships between variables in an exploratory fashion. While there are sample size limitations to this data, future work will attempt to better identify specific and implementable interventions to serve this community.