- Who
Ever since fourth-year Taussia Boadi arrived on Penn’s campus, she knew she wanted to do research. Initially, the sociology major from Westchester, New York, thought it might involve food stamps and their effect on unhealthy behaviors. But taking an urban studies class Health on the Urban Margins in the fall of her third year sparked an interest in looking at how trauma affects Black women’s maternal health.
“I began by wondering about how trauma affects people, knowing that I’ve been through my own personal traumatic experiences. Not having studied mental health issues before, I decided to just explore,” Boadi says.
That’s how she learned about adverse childhood experiences (ACES), a set of traumas experienced before the age of 18, and how ACES affects birth outcomes.
“I realized that there wasn’t as much literature out there on ACES and birth outcome disparities between Black and white women, which was really shocking to me. If you think about the maternal mortality rates, they’re very disparate between those two populations,” she says. “I thought this could be where I step in, so I began writing my honors thesis on that topic.”
- What
At first, she thought her research would be a comparative study, looking at how Black women are experiencing ACES at higher rates and having poorer birth outcomes compared to their white counterparts.
But her thesis advisor, Courtney Boen, asked why Boadi wanted to include the experiences of white mothers when she was trying to show what Black mothers were experiencing. “She blew my mind because in a lot of social science research, white women and white people in general are the standard,” Boadi says. “I thought it would be really powerful to center and uplift those voices, those stories, those experiences of Black women without the comparison because I do think the comparison creates noise and detracts from the focus.”
For her thesis, “The Shadow of Trauma: Examining the Relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences, Birth Outcomes, and Resilience in Black Women,” she received funding from the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration to complete some of her research.
Boadi interviewed 10 mothers, many of whom came from the day care her mother owns in New York, but also mothers she met in her work at the public library and elsewhere in West Philadelphia. She found that Black women have a higher prevalence of ACEs, but many of them are not captured in standard surveys, and more research in this field must be conducted. Boadi says that increased data collection on women’s childhood experiences is essential to understanding the true impact that ACEs can have on women during pregnancy and childbirth.
“I think I had the success I had in getting women to talk to me because I, too, am a Black woman. I think it gave them a sense of comfort knowing that they were talking to someone like them who might have experienced the same things. It made me realize how important it is to have people like me in these research and health care spaces.”
- Why
Boadi is the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants but has never visited the country. She’s motivated to take what she has learned so far at Penn and merge it with what she’s going to study down the road. She is on a pre-med track and hopes to one day focus on obstetric cardiology and eventually travel to Ghana to help influence positive change there.
“My biggest motivation for wanting to go back to Ghana to help is because my grandmother there died of heart disease that was completely preventable. She couldn’t get a pacemaker, which are so easily accessible in America,” Boadi says. “She would always tell me to study hard and become a doctor so I could take care of her. I never got that chance, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t take care of others who might have similar stories to her.”
Boadi says that drive to help others also comes from her study of sociology.
“Sociology is a study of people and populations, but really I think it’s a practice of empathy,” she says.
Boadi’s research was funded by a Turner Schulman undergraduate research fellowship, awarded by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration.
