Staying Up When Life Turned Upside Down

Not too long ago, schools, businesses and public gathering places closed as people huddled in their homes to avoid a new and deadly virus called COVID-19.

The pandemic of 2020 and 2021 is history, although the disease persists and still kills. Communities that faced isolation, the deaths of loved ones, job loss, a lack of community services and other effects have endured, including the minority, low-income and rural communities that reportedly suffered the most from the disease, the lockdown, and its economic and social fallout.

Jennifer Beasley, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, thinks there is much to be learned from the experiences of people in these communities, not by focusing on what they lacked and how they suffered from COVID-19 but on how they faced challenges and built resilience.

“There is a critical need to understand the impact that COVID-19 has had on diverse families and their children, including racially, ethnically, linguistically, culturally and developmentally diverse families and their children,” she said. “We are doing that utilizing a strengths-based, or resilience-based, perspective rather than a deficit-based perspective. We want to look at what diverse families, particularly those with young children, experienced when life got turned upside down and we want to understand how they dealt with challenge after challenge after challenge.”

Beasley is principal investigator on a project called Families Flourish: A COVID-19 Resiliency Study, a three-year effort to examine the pandemic experiences of North Carolina families that, because of different socioeconomic or educational levels, mistrust or isolation, usually don’t participate in research projects. By bringing together focus groups to discuss their experiences during quarantine, the researchers hope to unearth what happened during the pandemic and how those experiences continue to affect families and communities today. They also hope the focus groups provide an outlet and support system for people whose voices are often not heard.

“Our idea has been to make sure that we’re letting families lift their voices to share their experiences from that time of quarantine,” said Beasley. “So many of these families already have been through quite a bit and they have developed quite excellent coping strategies. We want to make sure we create a space to capture that as well.”

Families Flourish is funded by an Evans-Allen capacity grant, a program through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture that supports research at 1890 land-grant universities. Beasley has three co-PIs on the project: Jeff Wolfgang, Ph.D., and Maylee Vazquez, Ph.D., both assistant professors in the College of Education’s counseling department; and Valerie Jarvis McMillan, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences.

The team has been very intentional about recruiting diverse families for focus groups and developing focus group questions that are culturally specific, strengths-based, and inclusive of diverse families.

The team defines diverse families as those who are racially, ethnically, linguistically, culturally, economically and developmentally different than the middle-class, Caucasian families typically cited in research literature. Although most of the focus has been on families in rural areas, about a quarter of the families Beasley hopes to talk to reside in underserved areas of Greensboro and other North Carolina cities. All study participants have children age 5 and younger. Many are Spanish-speaking families in isolated rural communities and in minority and underserved urban neighborhoods

Building Bridges, Earning Trust

To recruit families, the research team depends on partnerships with community members they’ve dubbed Master Bridge Builders, (MBBs), who are trusted community members actively involved in local issues as teachers, church leaders, healthcare professionals, activists, small business owners, etc. These community members serve as liaisons, or bridges, to potential focus group members who might otherwise be wary of university research teams.

“We’ve been able to leverage those kinds of community relationships to help us create that bridge,” said Beasley, who added that some of the MBBs have been colleagues she has worked with in early childhood education and intervention programs. “If someone can say ‘This is my friend, Dr. Beasley, and she wants to talk to you about your experiences with COVID,’ it’s kind of saying that this professional, this person, is trustworthy,” she said.

Jennifer Beasley, Ph.D., right, an assistant professor in the Dept. of Family and Consumer Sciences, has been conducting research on how families faced COVID-19 during the pandemic. Beasley has collected data from families like Larissa, left, and Houston Gilmer, whose son Houston II, is a student in the N.C. A&T’s Child Development Lab.

MBBs ensure the Families Flourish project is not a top down effort. The builders are partners who give advice on what questions and approaches should work well with a particular set of focus group individuals. They help the researchers understand culturally specific focus group logistics, such as whether in-person or Zoom-based group meetings are most appropriate, the best times of day to hold a meeting and whether childcare will be needed.

“If someone can say, ‘This is my friend, Dr. Beasley, and she wants to talk to you about your experiences with COVID,’ it’s kind of saying that this professional, this person, is trustworthy.”

— Jennifer Beasley, Ph.D.

So far, Families Flourish has conducted four focus groups and talked to 17 families, including nine Spanish-speaking families. Preliminary findings suggest these families coped with many challenges during the pandemic, including job loss, isolation, and a lack of services for themselves and their children. Beasley said several mothers talked about being pregnant during the pandemic and unable to access prenatal care from an overburdened healthcare system. Fathers faced challenges too, from being laid off and put into a different role within the family to working overtime or multiple jobs to make ends meet.

“For many families, you could see the emotion on their faces (during the focus groups),” said Beasley. “Access to prenatal care and child wellness care was difficult; the system was overwhelmed. And many of these families have a kind of guilt that they still carry with them although we all know it’s not their fault.”

Despite the traumas, the pandemic had a bit of a silver lining, even for families with the most critical needs. Beasley said giving families the chance to talk with other families about their experiences seems to help them deal with feelings of trauma and isolation they’ve carried with them since the quarantine.

“We’re also hearing from families that in addition to some of the more challenging memories, they have recalled positive experiences from that time that they now associate with resiliency and empowerment,” she said. Many parents reported spending more quality time with their children during the quarantine, and some started new family traditions of getting out of the house to walk, play games, or dance to music.

“One of the biggest positives that families reported is the realization that all these things they’ve been told are good – more time with their kids, playing with their kids, dancing and so forth – really helped them throughout the pandemic and even now with their overall well-being. Some said these are the kinds of things they continue to do and prioritize,” said Beasley.

Families Flourish wraps up in September 2025. By then Beasley hopes the team has talked to approximately 30 families from diverse backgrounds and learned about their pandemic experiences, their lasting traumas or concerns that stem from the pandemic, how their family dynamics have changed since the pandemic, and the different strategies they’ve used to survive, thrive, and give their very young children a positive start to life.

“We want to understand how they experienced it, and then how it has shifted or changed their lives now, particularly within the family system and particularly with parent-child interactions,” said Beasley. “We know that in early childhood, specifically within the 0-5-year-old age group, quality parent-child interactions among other things are critical to setting the foundation for school and life.”