Initial Steps
To better understand the community health needs in the Bloomington-Normal community, we first looked at the Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) that was written for McLean County for the period of 2020-2022. This document outlines how many of the prominent health needs within the community fall into the categories of Behavioral Health (a focus on mental health and substance use), Access to Care, and Health Eating / Active Living.
In addition, due to limited time and a strong interest in behavioral and mental health, our group decided to focus on the Behavioral Health category. In fact, while the Behavioral Health Community Health Improvement Plan documented three strategies, our group picked a single strategy to focus on.
Our specific goal: “Support educational programs and media campaigns aimed at reducing behavioral health stigma, increasing mental health awareness and/or improving mental health status” (Community Health Improvement Plan, 24).
In the end, our aim was to generate a list of keywords specific to Bloomington-Normal in order to make this Promising Practices database more manageable. In particular, we hoped to generate keywords that would help find Promising Practices to satisfy the outlined strategy. We were interested in finding both Bloomington-Normal specific demographic words and goal-specific issues words.
In order to meet our goals, we first pulled empirical data from the behavioral health section of the McLean County Community Health Improvement Plan and placed it in a separate document.
We then started sifting through community social media groups in order to understand what community members consider to be the prevalent issues related to behavioral health. After looking at the Facebook pages of BN Parents, Always Unstoppable, Bloomington Normal Community Campus Committee (BNCCC), Chestnut Family Health, and the Instagram page of Bloomington-Normal Always Unstoppable, our team determined that the Chestnut Family Health Facebook group and the Bloomington-Normal Always Unstoppable Instagram page provided the most information relevant to our topic. We proceeded to pull out all the relevant captions on posts, comments on posts, and titles of linked articles that were shared on these pages and placed this data in another document. All of this information from these social media groups were from posts shared in 2022, 2021, and 2020.
This data was then transferred into Voyant so we could begin the process of finding the most prominent keywords. Voyant is a free textual analysis program that reveals trends and themes and helps individuals discern patterns in any body of text. Users can upload or copy data into the program, and it will generate a word cloud displaying the most common words as well as many customizable tables and charts which allow people to explore specific types of patterns.