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Digital storytelling (DST) engages participants in a group-based process to create and share narrative accounts of life events. The process of individuals telling their own stories has not been well assessed as a mechanism of health behavior change. This study looks at outcomes associated with engaging in the DST process for vulnerable youth. The project focused on the experiences of Puerto Rican Latinas between the ages of 15 to 21. A total of 30 participants enrolled in a 4-day DST workshops, with 29 completing a 1 to 3-minute digital story. Self-reported data on several scales (self-esteem, social support, empowerment, and sexual attitudes and behaviors) were collected and analyzed. Participants showed an increase in positive social interactions from baseline to 3-month post workshop. Participants also demonstrated increases in optimism and control over the future immediately after the workshop, but this change was not sustained at 3 months. Analysis of qualitative results and implications are discussed.

Since the 2003 call by the Institute of Medicine to educate undergraduates in public health, various models have emerged for incorporating public health into the liberal arts and sciences. One model is a professionalized public health major that uses core public health competencies to prepare a workforce of health professionals. A second model offers a broad-based public health major rooted in liberal arts principles, resisting the utilitarian trend toward human capital formation. A third model resists even the label of “public health,” preferring instead to introduce undergraduates to many ways of analyzing human health and healing. The multidisciplinary Culture, Health, and Science Program, based on six key commitments for preparing liberal arts students to analyze health and respond to global health challenges, is offered as an alternative to the public health major.

Digital storytelling workshops are increasingly being used to capture lived experiences and develop/disseminate health promotion messages for vulnerable and marginalized populations. Thirty female Latina teens of varied sexual/parity status produced digital stories of significant life experiences in a group context and then viewed and evaluated them using the Narrative Quality Assessment Tool. This tool was used to examine participants' experience of emotional engagement and identification with each story as well as a single-item indicator of desire to "do something in my community" related to the story. Emotional engagement was moderately strong; identification scores were neutral relative to the stories. Emotional engagement was strongly, significantly related to "desire to act in my community," while identification was not related. Emotional engagement should be considered an important factor to incorporate in the production of digital stories for purposes of developing interest in social action beyond the digital storytelling workshop.

The field of public health frequently issues calls for social justice, but it is not clear that everyone agrees on what this means or how to achieve it. To assess lay citizens' views on the relationship between justice and health, we conducted individual interviews with 19 young parenting women to hear and discuss their thoughts about the causes of health disparities, ways to reduce them, and the nature of the just society. A salient theme to emerge in these interviews was the topic of “caring.” This article reports on four categories identified under the theme of caring: 1) observations of apathy and indifference; 2) the effects of not caring; 3) models of caring; and 4) the pull of caring. Based on these results, the article outlines a grounded theory on the role of caring in conceptualizing health motivation.