Kate Winskell

I specialize in communication for social and behavioral change and in the development and testing of digital behavioral interventions. I am particularly interested in game-based interventions for mobile health (mHealth) platforms such as smartphones. I work both domestically and internationally on health issues including HIV, diabetes, and COVID-19, and use a range of qualitative and participatory approaches in intervention development and message framing, including community-based participatory research and human-centered design.

Narrative and narrative-based approaches occupy a central and distinctive place in my work. Colleagues and I have developed a smartphone game, Tumaini ("Hope for the Future" in Swahili), based in interactive narrative to help prevent HIV among young African adolescents. We are currently evaluating the game in an efficacy trial in Kisumu, Western Kenya, with colleagues at the Kenya Medical Research Institute. A game for adolescents living with HIV and a gamified diabetes app are also in development.

My team's HIV-related games draw on our research on social representations of HIV in close to 2,000 narratives written by young Africans as part of the Global Dialogues HIV communication process. A participatory process anchored at the community level, Global Dialogues involves the production of short fiction films by leading directors based on winning ideas submitted by young people to scriptwriting competitions (www.globaldialogues.org). Over forty short fiction films are currently available (www.youtube.com/globaldialogues). Available in 30 languages, they are used extensively as educational resources at community level and have been viewed 120 million times on YouTube. To date, the Global Dialogues process has generated an archive of over 100,000 narratives on HIV and related themes written by a quarter of a million young people. With my research team, I analyze these narratives to better understand factors influencing both cross-national differences in young Africans’ social representations of HIV/AIDS and changes in these representations over time, and thereby to inform optimal framing of health messaging and the enhancement and cultural adaptation of evidence-based programming.