MPH candidate Elizabeth Pleasants develops quality assessment tool for Wallace Center

September 9, 2018

headshot of Elizabeth Pleasants

MPH candidate Elizabeth Pleasants

Since late 2017, MCAH student Elizabeth Pleasants' (MPH '19) has interned with The Wallace Center for Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health . The Wallace Center is a research-action center focused on advancing maternal, child and adolescent health (MCAH) and reducing health disparities through innovation, technology, and community engagement.  Elizabeth's work, which will continue through late 2018, focuses on an initiative combining the technological expertise of the Center with that of the Bixby Center for Population Health, and Sustainability.

The project’s goal is to improve sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in the United States by examining digital health-seeking behaviors for reproductive health technology and services.  Data will be analyzed in multiple contexts, through the top SRH queries used in Google searches, and the top sites accessed by users for those queries. The initiative is interested not only in what and how users are seeking information, but in the information they receive, including misinformation that contributes to common misconceptions about contraception and abortion.

Thus far, Elizabeth has spent her internship developing a comprehensive SRH website quality assessment tool which will assess the quality of SRH-focused websites based on the accuracy of SRH information presented and user experience of the sites, to be applied to the most accessed sites for key SRH queries in the US.

Elizabeth's first year in the MCAH program facilitated her work with the Wallace Center by providing high-level analytic skills and an awareness of the influences of policy on sexual and reproductive health at the US, state, and local levels. As she begin the second year of her MPH, she will continue to work on the Wallace project.  Further work will implement the quality assessment tool and combine it with all other project analyses to provide a snapshot of how people use the internet and what is being communicated to them by websites they access for SRH information, and how this could be interacting with access to services and contributing to user understanding of contraception and abortion.