CIRA Qualitative Research Discussion Group (QRDG): "Co-Design and Evaluation of a Smartphone-based Mental Health Promotion and Anti-stigma Embodied Conversational Agent for Church-affiliated Black Adults”

Teresa O’Leary, Yale School of Public Health (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Teresa K. O’Leary is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biostatistics Department (Health Informatics Division) at the Yale School of Public Health. Before graduate school, Dr. O'Leary held various roles in the healthcare industry, both in direct care and research positions. Dr. O’Leary earned her interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Personal Health Informatics from Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences and Bouvé College of Health Sciences. As a qualitative researcher, Dr. O’Leary takes a socioecological approach to her work, where she conducts in-depth fieldwork and utilizes an iterative design approach to design, build, and evaluate the impact of software tools on helping people manage their health to achieve the quality of life they aspire to. Dr. O’Leary’s dissertation focused on the co-design and evaluation of a smartphone-based mental health promotion intervention to enhance readiness for professional mental health treatment in church-affiliated Black adults. As a postdoctoral fellow, she looks forward to supporting CHIL’s research mission and goals while advancing her research agenda—community-engaged health informatics—the study of health technologies embedded within community settings to effect social change.

QRDG Overview:

The goal of the Qualitative Research Discussion Group (QRDG) is to provide opportunities for individuals involved in qualitative or mixed-methods research to meet regularly to discuss the qualitative research process and potentially problem-solve issues that may arise when engaged in qualitative research. Discussion topics include, but are not limited to: logistics, data management, analysis, dissemination, role of the researcher, and ethics. It is intended as a venue for discussing research in progress and new or relevant literature on qualitative methods and practice as well as to create networking opportunities and foster research collaborations. CIRA's Dissemination Implementation Science and Methods (DISM) Core member, Lauretta Grau, PhD, is coordinating the meetings. She can be reached at lauretta.grau@yale.edu.