Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing through Affordable Housing: How One Professor Engages Collaborators as Equal Partners in Research

In plain language, what is your project about? What questions are you trying to answer by doing this research?

HOME-RL (the Housing, Mobilization, Engagement & Resiliency Lab) conducts community-based, high impact research on the role that housing, social services, and community programming plays as fundamental contributors to social, physical, and mental wellbeing.
 
Currently, our largest project is the Maritime Community Housing & Health Initiative. This project has a few different components, but we are currently focusing on the first and largest phase of the study that explores the impact of publicly funded housing initiatives (rent-geared-to-housing and rent supplements) on mental health, wellbeing, and resilience in low-income households. We want to answer the question: do public housing affordability interventions promote wellbeing in low-income households? To do this, we are surveying people who are waiting for housing every 6 months for 18 months. Once they receive the affordable housing intervention, we survey them as part of an intervention group at 6 month intervals for an additional 18 months. By doing this, we can compare the mental health and wellbeing of people waiting for affordable housing interventions with that of those who have received them and see if there are any differences.  

Looking at your research team members, there are people from other departments and institutions. Have you worked together before this project?

Our research team is quite diverse. This is my first formal collaboration with Social Development and my colleagues here in New Brunswick, but I have collaborated with all of my colleagues from Ontario throughout my post-doctoral period; my post-doctoral fellowships were held at McMaster and at CUHS where I interacted with all of the Ontario-based scientists in this grant. During my post-docs, these scientists introduced me to their research, provided mentorship and offered opportunities to develop projects with them. All these scientists were so supportive and are amazing at what they do. They were invested in me and my work and I learned a lot from them which I brought to this present project. As experts in many of the methods and topics associated with this research, including them on this project team was a natural fit.

Dr. Julia Woodhall-Melnik

From UNB, we are working with Shelley Doucet and Alison Luke from Nursing and Connie Stewart from Mathematics & Statistics. Dan Dutton from DMNB is also engaged in this collaboration. I met Shelley, Alison, Connie, and Dan when I reached out to them to meet when arriving at UNB. I was specifically looking to build collaborations with folks at UNB for this project and I was very lucky to find strong collaborators right in my own backyard. Connie is an amazing statistician and Shelley, Alison and Dan are all phenomenal health researchers. Upon meeting these folks, I invited them to this project, as I knew they had the expertise to be great collaborators. I was also really drawn to each of their high energy approaches to their work and their dedication to methodologically rigorous research that is community focused and is designed to have a high impact on policies and communities.

I began working with Social Development when I started my position at UNB. During the first month of my tenure, I cold called Social Development and they quickly engaged me in a meeting. I knew that I wanted to work with the government to investigate public housing and they were quite responsive. I began by asking them about what they wanted to learn about, and our project developed from there. I am lucky to work with some amazing, and extremely knowledgeable staff members from Social Development. ​

How – if at all – has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your research project and/or collaboration?

We aren’t physically meeting and our work was stalled throughout the late winter and into the spring/summer as Social Development focused on the provincial response to the pandemic. I hope to have an in-person collaborators meeting one day where we can invite collaborators from Ontario to come to New Brunswick and meet the rest of the team in person, but this pandemic has really brought the conference call to a whole new level. The new normal of using video conferencing as a default has made cross-provincial and international collaborations much easier. And it is environmentally conscious, so that’s amazing as well. 

What advice would you give to others on building a successful research collaboration

I would say that you need to be open and engaging when you begin your work. If you think someone might be a good collaborator, approach them. Most folks are happy to talk about your research, even if they don’t have the time or ability to be involved. My Mom always told me that, “The worst they can say is, ‘no.’” I remember this anytime I reach out to a potential collaborator.
 
Be honest about what you need in a collaborator and make sure that you find people who you think you can have a positive working relationship with. Research can be exciting and fun and good relationships are key to building a team that enjoys working together.
 
In terms of building successful collaborations with community partners, my advice is to listen to their needs and engage in work together as equal partners. I always ask potential community partners what they think gaps in knowledge are and why. If my areas of interest connect with their needs and perceived gaps, this shows me that we have a potentially good fit for a great collaboration. I work with them to conduct research that fills these gaps and I know that the end product will be useful to my partners. I can then work with them to use the research to positively impact the people who they work with/help/serve. Research and community expertise should be equally valued. My partners and research participants are the experts on the day-to-day realities of housing. Persons with lived experience of housing instability/housing affordability stress are the experts. They know what this stress feels like and what this experience looks like in the real world. All those who honour me with their participation and collaboration in my research are equal partners with extremely valuable knowledge; this is something that should not be forgotten.

This project, Maritime Community Housing and Health Initiative, is funded by a Project Grant through the Canadian Institutes for Health Research; it was also previously funded through NBHRF’s Establishment Grant. The team is continuing to collect data; this space will be updated with references once published.

Julia Woodhall-Melnik, PhD
Director, Housing, Mobilization, Engagement & Resiliency Lab
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences
University of New Brunswick Saint John
 
Shelley Doucet, RN, BN, MScN, PhD
Jarislowsky Chair in Interprofessional Patient-Centred Care
Associate Professor, Department of Nursing & Health Sciences
Director, Centre for Research in Integrated Care
University of New Brunswick Saint John
 
Alison Luke, PhD
Research Associate, Centre for Research in Integrated Care
University of New Brunswick Saint John
 
Connie Stewart, PhD
Department of Mathematics & Statistics
University of New Brunswick Saint John
 
Daniel J. Dutton, PhD
Department of Community Health and Epidemiology
Dalhousie University, Faculty of Medicine
 
Collaborators:
Department of Social Development, Government of New Brunswick
 
Jim Dunn, PhD
Chair, Department of Health, Aging & Society, McMaster University
Director of McMaster Institute for Healthier Environments
 
Flora Matheson, PhD
Rosane Nisenbaum, PhD
MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions (CUHS)
 
Dr. Vicki Stergiopoulos
Physician-in-chief, Centre for Addictions and Mental Health