Dr. Holly Atkinson is a medical health professor and a practicing science researcher. She teaches at both the CUNY School of Medicine at City College, and at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She conducts research independently as well as in tandem with several groups including Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA), the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition, HEAL Trafficking, the American Public health Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations to name a few. As a researcher, her main focus is human rights in terms of global health. Dr. Atkinson describes humans rights as the study of global social injustices caused by disparities in the social determinants of health. This is a field that has just recently begun to flourish as patterns of health around the world are beginning to be documented and analyzed in depth. Questions such as, why are there varying degrees of health globally, and why are certain groups of people being treated differently than others in certain regions, has springboarded researchers into various missions that have exposed human rights violations and injustices that have gone undetected for years. Dr. Atkinson is particularly interested in how human rights violations impact the health outcomes of women and girls. Some of the specific topics that she has worked with include: the health of persecuted female immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, female genital cutting, government use of tear gas on its own people, and the effects of war in Burma.

Human rights is a difficult field to study because data is primarily collected from the observation of experiences, and conclusions may be hard to prove. Unlike other traditional science fields, like physics and chemistry, general laws and experimental consistencies are not possible because conclusions may occur on a situational basis. Dr. Atkinson made the point that a social experiment done in the United States will more than likely give drastically different results when done in another country such as Japan or India due to differences in culture and societal norms. According to Dr. Atkinson, there are two different types of humans’ rights research: qualitative research and quantitative research. Qualitative research deals with physical investigation, interviewing individuals, and documenting the experiences of people who have been transgressed against. It is used to identify recurring themes and trends, formulate critical questions, and give insight to the larger problem; it is what proves the incident happened. Dr. Atkinson notes that this type of research is important because, despite the fact that not everyone is affected by certain events, there is a need to document people who have been marginalized, made vulnerable, or persecuted. An example she gives of this type of research is when she went on a mission to document the Bahranian government’s human rights violations on its own people. During this mission, her team and her interviewed 100 people who testified as to what the Bahranian government was doing to them. From these interviews, they were able to document fractures, head traumas, and respiratory distress, as well as, being able to piece together a timeline of events. Initially, researchers in the human rights field only utilized qualitative research techniques, however, there has been a movement towards quantitative research in recent years. Quantitative research involves collecting and analyzing data obtained from different sources in a structured manner. The movement has occurred because in cases where qualitative data cannot determine causation quantitative research can; it is used to prove issues exist. Dr. Atkinson said that many times, qualitative research can lead to quantitative research that proves facts. An example she mentions stems from the same Bahranian based mission mentioned earlier. In multiple interviews, pregnant women affected by heavy exposure of tear gas, inflicted by the government, reported miscarriages. From this qualitative data, a causal relationship between tear gas and miscarriage cannot be concluded but a quantitative research hypothesis can be made to prove such a relationship. The research posed would be: Could tear gas possibly be causing miscarriages in women who are exposed to high levels of it? This would lead to a larger quantitative study that would include a large number of pregnant women exposed to tear gas and document the number of miscarriages that occur in the sample population. Another reason for the movement is because it is easier to prove things with science facts, and large numbers as opposed to using stories. Especially in cases with large populations who have been affected by a social determinant of health in a negative way quantitative, specifically epidemiological, data is needed to create a causal relationship. Dr. Atkinson used the way health outcomes are measured and predicted as an example. The most widely accepted measurement of health outcomes is education level. The higher the education level, the better the health outcome. With only qualitative data, a causal association could not be made because it could be said that other factors such as wealth and race confounded the association. However,  quantitative studies produce compelling evidence. Examples of these studies include correlations between high school student grades and risk behaviors, and death and high school education. In a study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention it illustrated that there is an extremely consistent negative correlation between high school student grades and risk behaviors in the United States; higher average grade achievement is associated with lower rates of risk behavior and vice versa (“Health-risk Behaviors and Academic Achievement”, n.d.). This can be explained qualitatively as strong values and responsible habitats, traits that refute risk behaviors, are characteristic of those with high academic success. The qualitative data that can be observed and collected in schools nationwide is proven by the quantitative data. This is the same case for the other study in which death and high school education are compared. According to the study, an estimated number of 237,410 annual deaths are attributable to a lack of high school education among persons 25-64 years of age in the United States (Hahn & Truman, 2015). In both scenarios qualitative data such as, increased education leads to learning life skills and encourages health literacy; shifting away from the simple transfer of information, towards the development of self-esteem and confidence that allows individuals to make educated choices day to day their health, can be added to explain the results of the quantitative data (Brunello, Fort, Schneeweis, & Winter‐Ebmer, 2016). Putting the quantitative data together with the qualitative data puts the whole story together. Despite the traditional and common usage of qualitative research in human rights research, the power of quantitative research in the science field is pushing for its use in the field.  

Being in the field for over 30 years, Dr. Atkinson has learned what skills and traits make a human rights researcher efficient and effective. According to Dr. Atkinson, important skills that human rights researchers should acquire are networking, professionalism, building relationships, and earning the trust of others. In the world of research, collaboration is important as this is how data, resources, and knowledge is shared. It is especially in human rights because researchers who go out in the field and who have collected eye witness accounts of events have the most valuable information. In order to earn the respect and attention of these accredited researchers who may be able to help you advance your research and career, networking and professionalism are crucial. Networking enables you to talk to the right people while professionalism leaves them a good lasting impression that will help you earn their respect and support. Once these connections have been made, the next skill mentioned comes in handy, being able to build good relationships. As mentioned before, research is very collaborative and being able to clearly communicate and efficiently work with others is important. Dr. Atkinson mentioned how the relationship amongst research members can make or break a publication. If team members cannot get along, the publication process becomes disorganized, segregated, and slow. Team members may not clearly know their role, the workload may be divided unequally or unfairly, and the quality of the research and publication may end up poor. The next important skill to being able to earn the trust of others. This skill is not only beneficial when developing relationships with other researchers, but when also during missions when researchers are trying to collect qualitative data from groups of people who have had human rights violations acted against them. Persecuted groups are often scared of outsiders and defensive. These groups may be seeking aid and for someone to share their story, but fear the consequences of being located or for telling their truth. With this being said, researchers who collect data out in the field need to be able to instill trust in their target population or they won’t be able to collect any data. In order to gain their trust, researchers may need to learn the culture of the people, adopt their social norms, spend time talking to the people, and explaining to the people their mission and goals. Dr. Atkinson gave the example of her Burma mission where she had to earn the trust of a population of persecuted Muslims. As a white researcher from the west, she had to learn about their religion and culture in order to communicate with the people in a manner that made them feel comfortable and respected. By respecting their culture and explaining their values, goals, and mission, they built trust with the people which allowed them to gain access to survivors of a massacre they were documenting. With the survivors being hidden from military personnel, who would execute them to keep them silent, Dr. Atkinson built up a considerable amount of trust in order to be taken to see them. Developing these skills and traits can help further research in the human rights field.

In a final analysis, Dr. Atkinson has been a researcher in the ever-evolving field of human rights for over 30 years. During this time, she has learned the most efficient procedures and research styles, perfected the skills needed to excel in the field, and has deeply rooted herself in specific topics such as female genital cutting, and the mental and physical health of immigrant women seeking asylum in the United States. Despite becoming an expert researcher, there are still shifts and changes occurring in the field that require new skill sets and techniques, meaning that Dr. Atkinson is still growing as a researcher as there is always room to grow. Dr. Atkinson’s main goal in humans rights’ research, and for global health research as a whole, is for there to be health equity amongst everyone and for everyone to have an equal opportunity to live a long, healthy life, mentally and physically. By sharing the stories and statistics of people who do not have a voice, awareness for human rights has grown tremendously. No matter what the how powerful the violator is, whether it is a government, army, or religious group, no one should be able to escape justice.

 

References

 

Brunello, G., Fort, M., Schneeweis, N., and Winter‐Ebmer, R. ( 2016) The Causal Effect of Education on Health: What is the Role of Health Behaviors?. Health Econ., 25: 314– 336. doi: 10.1002/hec.3141.

 

Hahn, R. A., & Truman, B. I. (2015). Education Improves Public Health and Promotes Health Equity. International journal of health services: planning, administration, evaluation, 45(4), 657–678. doi:10.1177/0020731415585986  (Hahn & Truman, 2015)

 

Health-risk Behaviors and Academic Achievement. (n.d.). Retrieved April 30, 2019, from http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/health_and_academics/pdf/health_risk_behaviors.pdf