Data Storytelling through an Equity Lens

Dr. Osagie Obaogie

Haas Distinguished Chair & Professor of Bioethics

UC Berkeley - UCSF Joint Medical Program

UC Berkeley School of Public Health

For Dr. Osagie Obasogie, Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Bioethics in the UC Berkeley – UCSF Joint Medical Program and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, ethical data collection and representation begins with a commitment to ascertaining what’s happening in people’s lives and focusing less on the individual project he’s working on. “As someone who does a lot of interviews I tried to think about my work as not necessarily focusing just on what I need to do my research, but rather how can I get the most accurate representation of someone else's life and their lived experiences?”  

While Obasogie goes into interviews with a general sense of the questions he wants to ask, he aims for the flexibility to allow people to say things that might not be on his radar but are reflective of their own experience: “Trying to build flexibility into the process, asking broad questions that are still tailored and still trying to speak to the issue that I find important but allowing people to kind of think outside the box that I might have created either intentionally or unintentionally.”

For Obasogie, collecting data equitably means framing questions intentionally to avoid presuming a certain pathology either for an individual or family, or community. “Moving away from individual frameworks and asking questions that really focus on the set of conditions that either allowed someone to succeed or that might have restrained someone's ability to advance can help you frame questions in a way that allows the respondent to have a bit more nuance to their responses.”

Obasogie encourages organizations to take cues from this kind of qualitative data and relate their impacts to funders as complementary, rather than sole support for those they serve. He notes a tendency among nonprofits to tell stories about how their individual organization had a transformative impact on another individual's life; while an organization might play an important role in getting someone out of a difficult situation, the individual is also supported by social ties and other support mechanisms. In order to tell an ethical and equitable story with data, says Obasogie, “we have to find ways to show that knowledge while also showing the nonprofit's no positive role in people's lives. All this  should not be seen as boiling down to the work of individual reservations, but see them as collaborations with the communities that people live in.’