What the Muscogee Nation's First Maternal Health Survey Had to Account For

Lucy Sun and Daphne Wang spent the summer supporting the development of the Muscogee Nation's first Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System survey, built to capture maternal health data specific to Muscogee women. Much of the work was the unglamorous machinery of survey research: literature reviews, dataset analysis, drafting questions. The frame around it is the part worth noticing — the project required accounting for data sovereignty and governance structures specific to the Muscogee. A questionnaire can look like a neutral instrument. Deciding who asks, who holds the answers and who gets to interpret them is a political decision before it is ever a statistical one.