Digital Storytelling as Health Promotion and Data: Ethical Tensions from Project Life in Northwest Alaska

The case study focuses on Project Life, a 4-year suicide prevention initiative that utilized digital storytelling as a primary prevention approach in Northwest Alaska, a predominantly Alaska Native region with extremely high rates of youth suicide. The project worked with young people in 12 Alaska Native villages to produce over 400 digital stories. Digital stories are three to five-minute visual narratives that synthesize images, video, audio recordings of voice and music, and text to create personal stories. The approach develops Alaska Native (AN) youth digital technology skills, while giving them a platform to reflect on and represent their lives, priorities and accomplishments. The rationale and of this approach will be described along with process and outcome evaluation findings, which consider the success of digital storytelling as a universal prevention strategy. More specifically, the first half of the presentation and discussion will explore the efficacy of this approach and describe some of the difficulties and ethical tensions of evaluating the digital storytelling process as primary prevention. The second half of the presentation will focus on results from a pilot research project that used the first 200+ DS as data to better understand youth realities in Northwest Alaska. Selected videos will illustrate ways in which AN youth are finding meaningful ways to represent cultural continuity, personal accomplishments and values and their everyday lives. Ethical tensions in both of these foci will be identified and discussed. The implications of dilemmas for participants own work will be explored through discussion.