Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Language has a critical role as a social determinant of health and a source of healthcare disparities. Rhetorical devices are ubiquitous in medicine and are often used to persuade or inform care team members. Rhetorical devices help a healthcare team acknowledge and interpret narratives. For example, metaphors are frequently used as rhetorical devices by patients to describe cancer, including winning or losing a battle, surviving a fight, war, potentially implying that the patient feels helpless like a pawn fighting in a struggle directed by the physician, thus reducing patient autonomy and agency. However, this occidental approach is flawed because it excessively focuses on the individual's agency and marginalizes external factors, such as cultural beliefs and social support (Sontag, 1989). Although there is a large body of research about how the rhetoric of medicine affects patients in the United States, there is a lack of such research about how patient experiences' rhetoric can help increase the understanding of Latino populations' unique social determinants. This creative project aims to analyze the rhetorical differences in the description of disease amongst Latino and American communities, translating to creating an educational module for a Spanish for biomedical sciences class. The objective is to increase future healthcare professionals' ability to understand how the composition of descriptions and medical rhetoric in different mediums of humanities can serve as critical tools to analyze social determinants in Latino healthcare delivery.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of health misinformation and the lack of credible health information as determinants of health disparities affecting the Hispanic population in the United States during public health emergencies. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a quintessential and relevant exhibit of a public health emergency, a review of literature was conducted to identify the interactions between the accessibility of health misinformation and credible health information in exacerbating pre-existing socio-economic barriers that affect the Hispanic population. The findings of this study were then analyzed to develop solutions for future public health emergencies to ensure that vulnerable communities are provided equally accurate and accessible health information as non-vulnerable communities in order to promote a more effective nationwide public health response. These solutions include providing more educational resources to help vulnerable communities find accurate information online and increasing surveillance of misinformation sources online, especially in the Spanish language.

After doing projects at Maryvale High School with the director of the gifted program and her students, I was inspired to investigate if Maricopa County’s public school funding data would show a correlation between higher proportions of Hispanic/Latino students and less funding. The per-pupil expenditures were compared with the proportion of the student population that was Hispanic/Latino. I proposed that these two factors would show an inverse correlation in the public school districts of Maricopa County and in the high schools of the Phoenix Union High School District (PUHSD). This hypothesis was refuted, and no correlation was shown at the district level nor at the high school level. While there was little correlation between race/ethnicity and per-pupil expenditures, there were still huge disparities between the districts of Maricopa and among the high schools of PUHSD. These results might indicate the current state of public-school funding, but they are insufficient in describing the entirety of education in Maricopa. The lived experiences of the students I worked with indicated that they felt less privileged than their peers in both public and charter schools. Further research must be done to investigate how the inclusion of private schools, charter schools, and additional schools in Maricopa County influences these variables of race/ethnicity and per-pupil expenditures. Further research should also be done to compare different variables to race/ethnicity, such as rates of high school graduation and college acceptance.