Decatur High School student Sienna Mayo was recognized at the Federal Way City Council meeting on Feb. 4 for a recent research project.
Sienna is on the Federal Way Youth Commission and also represented “Federal Way: A Great Place to Live” at a torch passing ceremony at this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration.
Sienna partnered with UW Medicine’s Office of Healthcare Equity to study medical mistrust in Black children and adolescents as part of her AP Research class.
Students can choose any topic, and Sienna told the council that she wanted to find something that she really cared about. Her love for the study of psychology was another important factor and the fact that there is “a distinct lack of research in this subject,” adding to her drive to explore this subject.
Councilmember Lydia Assefa-Dawson said that “it’s huge at her age again. I’ll go back to her being a youth and still in high school, doing a research and coming up with a valid data and information for our communities, not just Federal Way. This is something that’s real for Black adolescents and Black families in general.”
In her project, Sienna completed surveys and qualitative interviews with youth in several elementary, middle and high schools. In total, she had 55 Black participants (ages 8 to 18) in her study, according to the UW article.
Although Mayo told the council that with this number of participants, “that’s not enough breadth for it to be something that’s publishable right now,” in an article about Mayo’s work from UW, Dr. Leo Morales, UW Medicine’s Associate Dean for Quality Improvement, shared that “I’ve never really seen a study this sophisticated from a high school student before,” adding that “it is pretty impressive.”
According to the UW article, Sienna’s work found that medical mistrust did increase in older youth, but that it actually started early at even the youngest ages in her study.
The reasons for this are complex, and Sienna’s work suggests that in general, the youth in her study didn’t pick up on this mistrust because of direct negative experiences or because of negative messaging from parents of family members, but from absorbing the awareness of the possibility of poor treatment over time.
The article shared that Sienna concluded from her research that “this is not an issue of a culture averse to modern medicine but of one currently and continuously isolated by it.”
In the MLK Jr. Ceremony in which Sienna was also honored, she shared that her “dream for Federal Way is that the city improve in its collective action for the betterment of our community, especially on issues that divide us.”
