How might therapy services be made more accessible for Arab American users?
I knew Arab Americans underused psychological services, now I wanted to know why.
To better understand Arab Americans’ therapy experiences
To identify user pain points
To propose opportunity areas to improve service access
I decided to conduct a semi-structured interview study on Arab Americans’ mental health service use. Exploring user narratives would help service providers better understand this user population, and hopefully encourage the designing of services for and with this unique population.
Most of my participants came from email lists (for the Arab Am. associations of multiple universities and some Arab Am. professional associations).
I reached a smaller but still significant amount of participants through Twitter posts and sharing.
I reached the second highest proportion of participants through Instagram messages with Arab Am. Student Association accounts as well as outreach to Arab Am. civic organizations' accounts and asking them to publicize the study recruitment on their respective platforms.
After re-reading all the interviews and noting down my initial ideas, I developed theoretically derived thematic codes, collating those codes into potential themes that provided a nuanced picture of user pain points and experiences.
I then reviewed and cross-checked these themes for their representativeness of the overall sample, using a tally system to indicate the frequency of each theme and subtheme.
I visualized my thinking in Google Sheets as shown above.
Malak
Mechanical Engineer, Eldest sister second-generation
Age: 26
Hometown: Riverside, CA
Occupation: Works at Deloitte