Volunteer Research Fellow: Patient Narratives & Methods

About Healthful Stories

Healthful Stories is a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) patient advocacy nonprofit dedicated to surfacing the real patient journey. We conduct structured, longitudinal interviews with individuals living with chronic and complex health conditions as a means of providing critical information to others navigating the same illnesses. Our work produces rich, firsthand accounts of what it means to seek care, manage symptoms, and navigate a health system that often falls short. Our volunteers are at the heart of this work. We engage skilled contributors in patient interviewing, content development, video editing, and community outreach to give professionals and students with backgrounds in public health, journalism, communications, technology, and the health sciences a meaningful way to apply their skills in service of the patient voice. We serve patients, caregivers, researchers, and the broader healthcare community and all who benefit from understanding illness as people actually experience it.

Healthful Stories is a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that conducts in-depth interviews with people living with chronic and complex health conditions. We exist to document the real patient journey the delays, the barriers, and the turning points in a way that will have the greatest impact on those living with similar illnesses. Our interviews are structured and informational, not just inspirational. We don't ask people how they stay positive. We ask what happened, because it's the information, decisions, and resources that we firmly believe can best support others on their own journeys.

About the Role

We are looking for a master's or PhD candidate to bring rigorous qualitative methods to our work as our first Healthful HEART (Healing, Empathy, Advocacy, Reach, and Trust) Research Fellow, applying the same discipline you might bring to a dissertation or fieldwork project to real-world patient advocacy. This is a hands-on role where you'll also practice and hone your own research craft you'll be designing interviews, building coding schemes, and helping synthesize across dozens of stories into structured insight to guide our policy initiatives and collaborations. Our goal is to become a credible, rigorous resource from patients, for each other, without needing every story to first pass through an already overburdened clinical system.

Responsibilities

• Designing and conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with patients and caregivers, documenting diagnostic journeys, barriers to care, and pivotal turning points
• Applying and refining our narrative frameworks so stories are gathered and analyzed with consistency and integrity
• Building coding schemes and thematic or narrative analyses toward a repeatable methodology
• Helping select or adapt patient-reported outcome (PRO) frameworks suited to complex chronic and post-viral conditions
• Synthesizing stories and findings into clear content for advocacy and public audiences — briefs, articles, and presentation materials
• Bringing scientific writing discipline to material intended for both expert and lay readers

Qualifications

• Candidacy for a Master's degree or PhD in medical anthropology, sociology, public health, health services research, nursing science, health psychology, or a related field
• Demonstrated qualitative research experience — interviewing, fieldwork, thematic or narrative analysis
• Strong writing skills, with the ability to translate complex material for both expert and general audiences
• Experience with informed consent and ethical interviewing practices, particularly with vulnerable or underrepresented populations

Valued but Not Required

• Familiarity with PRO frameworks or psychometrics
• Training in community-based participatory research (CBPR)
• Lived experience with complex chronic or post-viral illness
• Comfort with qualitative analysis tools (NVivo, Dedoose, or similar)

What You'll Gain

Applied, hands-on experience using doctoral-level methods in a real-world advocacy setting — designing interviews, building coding frameworks, and seeing your synthesis directly shape how Healthful Stories communicates patient experience to policymakers, clinicians, and the public. As a HEART Fellow, you'll join a growing community of emerging leaders across public policy, public health, and advocacy who carry these same values into their work. This is genuine methods practice outside the academic pipeline a strong complement to dissertation work and a distinctive line on any CV or job application for careers in health services research, policy, or science communication. You'll work directly with our Executive Director and build a portfolio of synthesized, published content grounded in your own analysis.