Presenters: Colleen C. Walsh, PhD, Sarah S. Willen, & Abigail Fisher Williamson

Topic: The AmeRicans’ Conceptions of Health Equity Study (ARCHES) employs mixed-methods to examine how Americans think about their own sense of health-related deservingness, how they assess the deservingness of others, how views and values shift over time, and what catalyzes these shifts. In partnership with Health Improvement Partnership-Cuyahoga (HIP-Cuyahoga), we also examine how involvement in the local health and equity initiative facilitates these shifts. The study’s first phase involved ethnographic interviews with a diverse sample of 170 residents of Greater Cleveland.  In Phase 2, these interviews were used to generate hypotheses about what shapes conceptions of health-related deservingness, which were then tested in a nationally representative sample of 3,320 Americans using online survey experiments.  In this presentation, ARCHES investigators will discuss key findings from both the qualitative interviews and the national survey including participants’ reflections on two local health disparities, reactions to a well-known equity versus equality image, and how health hardship is associated with a more capacious sense of health-related deservingness among survey respondents. 

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