PERIOD POVERTY | Multimodal Research ON MENSTRUATING IN a Pandemic

by Shelby Davies, MD,  a pediatrician at CHOP and a recipient of the 2020 CEE Graduate Student Funding. 

While the coronavirus pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to the field of research, it has in many ways brought menstrual health into a more national spotlight. As many menstrual health advocates have alliteratively put forth, periods do not stop for pandemics. Menstruators with means may have been able to sufficiently supply themselves with menstrual products during the pandemic, but many menstruators, especially those facing unemployment and school closure, are faced with new barriers such as higher prices and supply shortages. Now more than ever youth are joining the national dialogue. They are talking about their periods and this once taboo topic has now become part of mainstream conversation. Furthermore, we know that adolescents were used to communicating largely through virtual media prior to the pandemic but they have
adapted to the new normal with increased use of technology as a means of social contact. We know that teens now have fewer school commitments and less access to extracurricular and social opportunities, and many have turned to screen entertainment and social media as a natural solution to the challenges of quarantine.

Sanitary napkin disposal container in public bathroom. United States.

There we have it. Adolescents are raising their virtual voices about menstrual health and equity. So, where does this leave our research. We have been able to gather a cohort of adolescent twitter user posts in both text and media format related to the theme of menstruation. We are in the process of manually annotating the tweets now and plan perform quantitative and qualitative analysis of the annotated data to determine the main themes that arise when teens talk about their periods online. We had initially planned to convene a small cohort of youth to design a either a digital web-based and/or in-person exhibition of the multimodal data. This cohort will likely be moved to a virtual platform but rather than a roadblock, I believe this offers a unique opportunity to explore digital media among youth as yet another multimodal tool to elevate and empower the
youth voice. Periods don’t stop for pandemics and neither do we!