So often when we consider health disparities in a population, we focus on what is wrong or deficient — the barriers to good health. But what if instead we gathered wisdom from people and communities who are exceptions to the rule, then tried to replicate the conditions that enable them to be successful? This is what the “positive deviance” framework does: it reframes our thinking to consider that often communities themselves already have the solutions to problems, if only we focus on their strengths rather than deficits.

My guest in today’s episode is one of my former graduate students, Tyra Toston Gross, who is the one who first introduced me to this framework when she used it in her dissertation to examine breastfeeding in the African-American community—focusing on women who despite having no more resources or knowledge than their peers were managing to breastfeed successfully. Now a successful educator and researcher at Xavier University of Louisiana, Dr. Gross joins me to talk about positive deviance and other strengths-based and community-participatory approaches.

Resources:

• A basic overview of Positive Deviance from Wikipedia
• About Tyra Toston Gross: https://www.xula.edu/directory//people/tgross.html
• Gross TT, Davis M, Anderson AK, Hall J, Hilyard K. Long-Term Breastfeeding in African American Mothers. J Hum Lact. 2017 Feb;33(1):128-139. doi: 10.1177/0890334416680180. Epub 2017 Jan 6. PMID: 28061039.
• Other researchers using the framework: The Positive Deviance Collaborative

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