The Health of Philadelphia Photo-documentation Project (HOPPP) is a documentary initiative, intended to record the health priorities and concerns of Philadelphia residents. This descriptive project uses visual images and accompanying in-depth interviews to probe residents' beliefs regarding neighborhood characteristics that promote or impede health attainment.
HOPPP explicitly is not a hypothesis-testing research proposal. Rather, observations culled from this documentary project will 1) highlight community health concerns and assets, as described by local residents, 2) generate hypotheses regarding neighborhood health effects, and 3) guide the future development of traditional epidemiological tools for neighborhood health assessment.
Purpose
The purpose of the project is to ask the question, "Is Philadelphia a healthy place to live?" — and to visualize answers to that question through the eyes of Philadelphians.
The project draws on three types of visual data:
- Neighborhood photographs gathered systematically by our staff photographers
- Neighborhood photographs taken by project participants (Philadelphia residents) during the course of their normal daily routines
- Neighborhood photographs taken by our staff photographers, in partnership with these local residents, after their initial interviews have been completed, during "environmental interviews" guided by project participants in their own neighborhoods.
These three data collection methods have produced a photographic record of Philadelphia's physical and social environments. The photos have been employed as a springboard for recorded in-depth interviews, during which residents describe the significance of and meanings behind each of their own photographs. Photographs have proven to offer a bridge between local residents and researchers, eliciting information about Philadelphians' neighborhood health priorities. Interviewers will pay particular attention to residents' perceptions of the underlying causes of good and poor health in this city. We call these street-level etiologies.
Our intent is to build a resource, through photo-documentation, that can serve as a vehicle for illustrating and communicating population health concepts that are often discussed only in arcane jargon and complex statistics, and only to academicians and scientists. We hope to expand the audience for population health inquiry by interweaving novel and traditional data sources and by engaging local citizens in the production, dissemination, and application of health information.
