Boundary Crossings
Director: Mary Lawlor ScD, OTR/L, FAOTA
The Boundary Crossings Lab, directed by Dr. Mary Lawlor, addresses a range of issues related to the lived experiences of children, adolescents, and adults who have health and developmental challenges as they engage in the extraordinary and ordinary activities that constitute living and learning in daily life. In 1997, USC Professors Mary Lawlor and Cheryl Mattingly and an interdisciplinary research team began conducting a longitudinal, ethnographic study of healthcare trajectories in 30 African American children with illnesses and/or disabilities, their families, and the practitioners who served them through a series of studies funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau and NICHD (NCMRR) at NIH. The research aims were to identify, describe, and situate how families contribute to the production of culturally responsive care, and to reveal the strategies families and practitioners employ to establish commonality and bridge differences to effectively “partner up.” Using an approach that is both event-centered and longitudinal, this study led to information about how discrete moments of healthcare encounters produce effects across both context and time. Findings of this study facilitate a reconsideration of dominant models of cultural competency and health literacy at multiple policy levels.
This series of studies formed the foundation for more recent and current work related to meanings of illness and disability in family life, “partnering up” and collaboration, social and community participation, the role of narrative in clinical action and transformation, health disparities in autism, cultivation of family expertise with home invasive therapies, and adolescent and adult experiences with community engagements and social participation. We continue to develop research methodologies and designs to examine these complex phenomena and enhance rigor in ethnographic, phenomenological, and qualitative methods.
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