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1. Role of social, cultural and symbolic capital for youth and community wellbeing in a rural Alaska Native community

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2022.106459  

   Philip, Jacques; Newman, Janessa; Bifelt, Joe; Brooks, Cathy; Rivkin, Inna (June 2022, Children and Youth Services Review)

   Health promotion programs by and for Indigenous Peoples increasingly use strength-based Indigenous approaches aimed at reinforcing protective factors rooted in their cultures and traditions. These protective factors can counteract the deleterious effects induced by the rapid social changes related to colonization. Western social scientists de/ned cultural, social and symbolic capital as assets akin to social strengths that can promote health. It is important to understand Indigenous perspectives on these social and cultural capitals, and the ways their interplay can promote wellness. Using the qualitative methods photovoice and digital storytelling, we elicited the perspectives of Athabascan middle and high school students participating in the Frank Attla Youth and Sled Dog Care-Mushing Program in their home community of Huslia in Interior Alaska. Subsequently, we disseminated the stories and preliminary /ndings in Huslia, and conducted focus groups with adults to triangulate with the youth perspectives. Deductive and inductive thematic content analysis of youth stories and photos revealed the impacts of the program on them and their community. Youth reported gains in cultural, social and symbolic capital and shared what these forms of capital mean in their cultural context. Cultural capital gains were mostly in its embodied form, e.g. in work ethics, perseverance and the value of cultural traditions; social capital gains revolved around relations with peers, adults and Elders, nature and animals, as well as social cohesion and sense of belonging in Huslia; Symbolic capital was re5ected through pride and spirituality. The students’ stories also illustrated their perspectives on how the program affected their wellbeing, through physical activity, healing relations with dogs, increased self-esteem and visions of a bright future. Adults corroborated youth perspectives and shared their observations of program impacts on discipline, academic and life skills and resilience. These /ndings could be used to guide development and assessment of culturally-based wellbeing promoting interventions. 

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2. Impacts of commercial and subsistence fishing on marine and cultural ecosystem services important to the wellbeing of an Indigenous community in Hawai'i

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2024.101661  

   Vave, Ron; Heck, Nadine; Narayan, Siddharth; Carrizales, Sonya; Kenison, Damien; Paytan, Adina (October 2024, Ecosystem Services)

   Marine ecosystems provide essential services to coastal residents, particularly for indigenous fishing communities that have strong ties to the environment and obtain multiple benefits from their use and management of ocean spaces. However, understanding of how these are impacted by fisheries, external pressures, and ocean management, remains limited due to a focus on economic valuation and aggregated metrics. This study explores the importance of select marine ecosystem services to the wellbeing of an indigenous community in West Hawaiˈi and the observed impacts on these ecosystem services by commercial and subsistence fishing. We used a mixed-methods approach that combined a workshop with an online survey of community perceptions regarding community important marine resources and cultural values. We find that both fish and non-fish species are important to all four well-being categories, including food security, culture, mental wellbeing, and income, though the least importance was given to the economic value. This study also found that commercial fishing is perceived to have a higher negative impact on marine resources and cultural values than subsistence fishing, but a generally lower impact on non-fish than fish species. The lack of community input into legislation development and a lack of enforcement capacity were perceived to aggravate these further, whereas the integration of place-based knowledge, values and rules of the environment was seen as beneficial to both marine and cultural ecosystem services. Overall, this study shows that non-economic and disaggregated valuation approaches are critical for revealing the variable ecosystem services that marine environments provide to local communities and the importance of more inclusive resource management approaches to manage impacts on these services. 

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3. Researcher Wellbeing and Best Practices in Emotionally Demanding Research

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3503742  

   Feuston, Jessica L.; Bhattacharya, Arpita; Andalibi, Nazanin; Ankrah, Elizabeth A.; Erete, Sheena; Handel, Mark; Moncur, Wendy; Vieweg, Sarah; Brubaker, Jed R. (April 2022, Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   HCI researchers increasingly conduct emotionally demanding research in a variety of different contexts. Though scholarship has begun to address the experiences of HCI researchers conducting this work, there is a need to develop guidelines and best practices for researcher wellbeing. In this one-day CHI workshop, we will bring together a group of HCI researchers across sectors and career levels who conduct emotionally demanding research to discuss their experiences, self-care practices, and strategies for research. Based on these discussions, we will work with workshop attendees to develop best practices and guidelines for researcher wellbeing in the context of emotionally demanding HCI research; launch a repository of community-sourced resources for researcher wellbeing; document the experiences of HCI researchers conducting emotionally demanding research; and establish a community of HCI researchers conducting this type of work. 

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4. Personalized Wellbeing Prediction using Behavioral, Physiological and Weather Data

   Yu, H; Klerman, E. B; Picard, R; Sano, A. (January 2019, IEEE-EMBS Biomedical and Health Informatics 2019)

   We built and compared several machine learning models to predict future self-reported wellbeing labels (of mood, health, and stress) for next day and for up to 7 days in the future, using multi-modal data. The data are from surveys, wearables, mobile phones and weather information collected in a study from college students, each providing daily data for 30 or 90 days. We compared the performance of multiple models, including personalized multi-task models and deep learning models. The best personalized multi-task linear model showed mean absolute errors of 12.8, 11.9, and 13.7 on a continuous-100 pt scale for estimating next days mood, health, and stress value, while the best multi-task neural network model, applied to 3-way high/med/low classification of the wellbeing values showed F1 scores of 0.71, 0.74, and 0.66 on mood, health, and stress metrics, respectively. We found that features related to weather, and morning academic activities are strongly associated with wellbeing labels. We further found greater prediction accuracy among participants with the least fluctuations in their wellbeing labels. 

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5. Localizing resource insecurities: A biocultural perspective on water and wellbeing

   https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1440  

   Brewis, Alexandra A.; Piperata, Barbara; Thompson, Amanda L.; Wutich, Amber (July 2020, WIREs Water)