Ethnography-informed interventions: Using mobile assessments to tailor pesticide safety messages among Mexican immigrant farmworkers

Farmwork is more than an occupation; it is also a condition of risk. An estimated 4 million farmworkers are exposed to pesticides annually, yet pesticide safety intervention efforts aimed to increase personal protective equipment (PPE) use show limited success. Improved PPE intervention efforts are needed to improve pesticide and safety among farmworkers, the vast majority of whom are Mexicans (over 80% self-identify as Mexican; another 10% identify as non-Mexican Latino). To this end, we present research findings of a place-based intervention aimed to reduce pesticide exposures by examining and promoting PPE use among Mexican farmworkers living along the Texas-Mexico Border of the United States. To deliver our intervention, we partnered with Texas Migrant Council's (TMC) Migrant and Seasonal Head Start to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of the novel intervention in a sample of 60 farmworkers. First, we integrated highly innovative mobile-health methodology with ethnographic research from the primary author to examine daily risk assessments of pesticide exposure in real, contextual time. Next, we offered farmworkers dynamically tailored motivational messages based on their actual PPE usage; messages included culturally-appropriate language delivered using highly interactive text messages on mobile smart phones aimed to increase PPE use and other protective practices. Our findings demonstrate a unique opportunity for use of multiple, interdisciplinary research methods toward innovative, culturally-tailored data collection in context and real-time. This work is also a pioneering effort for using mobile-health and ethnographic methodologies to reduce environmental risks among farmworker populations.