An official website of the United States government
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a framework to improve social equity by engaging communities as equal partners in research design, conduct, and knowledge creation. While CBPR has seen increasing application in Arctic regions, its use in Greenland has been limited by logistical, linguistic, and historical challenges, including community fatigue from extractive research practices. This manuscript details a CBPR-informed approach used to conduct an exploratory study on fertility, reproductive health, and climate adaptation in the Kalaallit community of Paamiut. The study aimed to understand the socio-environmental factors influencing fertility decisions amid economic and environmental changes. We report on nine strategies used to conduct equitable health and socio-ecological research in Greenland guided by the principles of CBPR. Using CBPR principles improved trust, participant recruitment, and the creation of community-valued research products in Paamiut. While time and funding limitations constrained full implementation of CBPR best practices, this study highlights the potential of CBPR to improve equity in Greenlandic research. Using CBPR principles to guide community-engaged research in Greenland provides a concrete and actionable way for students or early-career researchers to promote equitable relationships despite resource limitations. The methods described can be applied across other research disciplines to continue building trust and sustainability in international research partnerships in Greenland.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on March 1, 2026
Policymaker and stakeholder perspectives on determinants of fertility decisions through changing environmental and economic conditions in Greenland
This study explored linkages between natural resources and determinants of fertility decisions in Greenland. Interviews were conducted with 26 policymakers and key stakeholders in two communities about climate adaptation, hunting and fishing, economic development, and fertility and reproductive health. Participants link fertility outcomes to disparate community socioeconomic circumstances that affect individual access to education and financial mobility. Workforce and education challenges in Greenland limit ability to expand culturally grounded reproductive healthcare. Coordinating healthcare, education, and housing policy may improve material resources to support fertility decisions in Greenland. We contextualize drivers of fertility decisions within Greenland's climate adaptation policy options.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2330886
- PAR ID:
- 10590921
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Health & Place
- Volume:
- 92
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 1353-8292
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 103443
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)In the transnational fertility industry, individuals have differently positioned bodies, ranked by race, class, education, socioeconomic status, gender, and citizenship. Different forms of labor support the transnational fertility market, bringing geopolitical, and social inequities to the fore. While some people need wombs, eggs, or sperm to create their families—and have the means to pay for third‐party reproductive services—others emerge as suppliers of reproductive labor, and still others as coordinators or service agents in the international fertility industry. Building upon contemporary feminist social science and postcolonial research on reproductive travel and labor, this article explores three intersecting components: the forces that influence reproductive travel and cross‐border egg donation; how emotion and meaning are framed in clinical settings to recruit a young, healthy, able‐bodied workforce; and the embodied experiences of women who travel across borders to provide eggs for pay. Drawing upon donor and professional interviews, and multisited online and ethnographic fieldwork in fertility clinics, we explore the linkages between emotional choreography and the creation of a bioavailable workforce for the global fertility trade. Here, we examine how local and cross‐border egg provision illuminate global reproductive hierarchies—what we call “reproductive colonialism”—in transnational reproduction.more » « less
-
Abstract The adoption of contraception often coincides with market integration and has transformative effects on fertility behavior. Yet many parents in small-scale societies make decisions about whether and when to adopt family planning in an environment where the payoffs to have smaller families are uncertain. Here we track the fertility of Maya women across 90 years, spanning the transition from natural to contracepting fertility. We first situate the uncertainty in which fertility decisions are made and model how childbearing behaviors respond. We find that contraception, a key factor in cultural transmission models of fertility decline, initially has little effect on family size as women appear to hedge their bets and adopt fertility control only at the end of their reproductive careers. Family planning is, however, associated with the spread of lower fertility in later cohorts. Distinguishing influences on the origin versus spread of a behaviour provides valuable insight into causal factors shaping individual and normative changes in fertility.more » « less
-
Eve, Alex (Ed.)Genetic analyses of mammalian gametogenesis and fertility have the potential to inform about two important and interrelated clinical areas: infertility and contraception. Here, we address the genetics and genomics underlying gamete formation, productivity and function in the context of reproductive success in mammalian systems, primarily mouse and human. Although much is known about the specific genes and proteins required for meiotic processes and sperm function, we know relatively little about other gametic determinants of overall fertility, such as regulation of gamete numbers, duration of gamete production, and gamete selection and function in fertilization. As fertility is not a binary trait, attention is now appropriately focused on the oligogenic, quantitative aspects of reproduction. Multiparent mouse populations, created by complex crossing strategies, exhibit genetic diversity similar to human populations and will be valuable resources for genetic discovery, helping to overcome current limitations to our knowledge of mammalian reproductive genetics. Finally, we discuss how what we know about the genomics of reproduction can ultimately be brought to the clinic, informing our concepts of human fertility and infertility, and improving assisted reproductive technologies.more » « less
-
A considerable literature explores whether the fertility of migrants from high-fertility contexts converges with that of women in lower fertility destinations. Nonetheless, much of this research compares migrants’ reproductive outcomes to those of native-born women in destination countries. Drawing on research emphasizing the importance of transnational perspectives, we standardize and integrate data collected in France (the destination) and in six high-fertility African countries (the senders). We show that African migrants in our sample had higher children ever born (CEB) than native French women but lower CEB than women in corresponding origin countries. These findings suggest that socialization into pronatalist norms is an incomplete explanation for migrant fertility in the first generation, an insight that is overlooked when analyzing destination settings only. Next, we conduct multivariate analyses that weight migrants’ background characteristics to resemble women in both origin and destination countries. Findings indicate that observed differences between African migrants in France and women in African origin countries help explain differences in CEB between the two groups, which supports selection. We also demonstrate that African migrants in France had delayed transitions into first, second, and third births and lower completed fertility compared to women in origin countries, thus disputing the disruption hypothesis. Finally, we show that observed differences between African migrants in France and native French women explain differences in CEB between the two groups, which supports adaptation. These multifaceted findings on selection, disruption, and adaptation would be obscured by analyzing destination settings only, thus validating a multisited approach to migrant fertility.more » « less
