[psych-hr] Anne Anderson comments on the IPEDEHP case study

Dear Discussion Group members,

I am also responding early because I am in the process of moving the PsySR
office and may be off-line for a few days. I am also very pleased to 
have this opportunity to be in dialogue with all of you, and want to thank
Marcy for her careful and thorough process in setting up the pilot group
for us.

Thanks also to Mike for kicking off the discussion. I am as enthusiastic
as he is in my response to IPEDEHP's work and curious about a number of
elements which means that part of my response at this point is in the form
of musings that fall into the category of "Wow, how in the world did they
do it?" So, I'd like to lay out some of those questions, and also comment
on some of our other discussion questions that Marcy so kindly reminded me
about:

First of all, I am impressed by the fact that IPEDEHP has been
getting people to participate--how do you get people in the door,
especially when they must expect to deal with some very difficult feelings?
Are there certain special ways they have of explaining their methods so
that the potential participants are not intimidated? 

The community connections and ongoing support system for participants must
be a critical factor in the multiplier effect that they report. How
exactly are those networks developed and maintained? I'd love to
know more about how that works.

1) Methodology--I am impressed with the level of access Marcy had to the
participants. Obviously, she had the opportunity to interview people who 
were involved in the program and, given that we are looking at how things
work that work well, I think it is fine to have the population made of
people who have continued to be involved in the program. It does not
really help us understand when, why, and with whom the program did not
work. That is probably the subject of a future study and I don't find it
to be a flaw in this study, only that we should keep in mind that we do not
have that data.

The important piece of information for me in thinking about replicating the
program would be to know if IPEDEHP has had experiences with people who
really had difficulties with their feelings and ended up leaving
the training, or having ongoing emotional difficulties post-training? 
What elements in the training help to guard against such casualties? Are
there ways of choosing participants that perform a protective function? I
think, if I were running such a program, I would want to have some ideas
about which people would most benefit from training. 

2) Why the transformation--I would imagine that, first of all, since the
community networks were involved in identifying and nominating people to
take the training, we are already dealing with folks who show leadership
potential. 

I think that when you give people the respect for themselves, validation of
their experiences, and then also the understanding and tools to function on
their own behalf, as well as on behalf of others, and they were ready to
take off anyway, it is an incredibly powerful mix. 

3) Applicability--one of the key elements I kept picking up from the
summary was the fact that people did not know what their rights were, and
they were able to learn about those rights in the training in ways that
made sense to their lives. One of the problems I have seen in the
Declaration of Human Rights and how it is often presented is that is
intellectual, legalistic, and not related to everyday life. It sounds like
a person can go home from the IPEDEHP training and work to change something
in her/his immediate environment, even if he/she can't fix the government
tomorrow. This is a most empowering process--we know from social action
organizing studies that getting people to do little actions is the best way
to get them to get them to move to larger issues or situations.

My concern here is taking careful stock of how dangerous it may
be to the participants--Marcy mentions the political dangers of doing this
work, and so does Mike--so perhaps we need to think about how to help
people assess the realities of their political situation when thinking of
replication in other situations.

4) Applicability to the US--A major hurdle to using this in the USA is the
fact that the general consensus is that we have it pretty good. I will not
detail the specifics of human rights abuses that need to be addressed in
the US at this point--I just want to be sure that at least in this group we
understand that the US is not exempt from scrutiny. This question does
make me wonder how we might use the IPEDEHP approach to bring issues more
to light in the US. Hmm, something to think about.

5) I'm not ready to respond to the "lessons drawn" question yet. I look 
forward to seeing what other people's reactions have been.

Best regards, Anne