Approval Voice Versus Alive Voice

Hi, everybody, and welcome back to Human Print.

Today, I want to start with scoliosis research and statistics.

Yeah, I realize maybe that's not what you think you signed up for when you decided to listen to a podcast about AI and the human voice, but stay with me.

I promise it's connected, like all the other various domains that I explore in my life.

Also, I'm sort of incapable of separating the science nerd part of me from the writing and voice part, so here we are.

A few years ago, I started researching chronic pain and exercise, first through a small qualitative study with just three people living with chronic pain, much like I do, then through a much larger project that eventually became my scoliosis scales called the SE18.

It's a pilot study I did on adult scoliosis pain and how exercise impacts that.

So I hand coded interview transcripts.

I built a survey instrument.

I wrote research questions.

I did literature reviews.

I ran reliability testing, exploratory factor analysis, and let me know if you're overloaded yet.

Played around with SPSS and R.

You know, this is what I do for fun.

I play with statistics and research.

And I'm saying all of this because the whole thing started with lived experience, my lived experience with severe scoliosis and chronic pain.

So yeah, I have scoliosis.

I have a titanium rod in my spine.

I use exercise to manage my chronic pain.

So when I started digging into the research and then narrowing my focus from chronic pain generally to scoliosis pain, and specifically I wasn't doing it as some detached observer in a lab coat.

I was studying something I had lived in my own body for decades.

But then the research itself had to be written in a research voice.

Formal, careful, evidence-heavy, and third-person in places, literature-supported.

None of this, I had a titanium rod fused to my spine and then years later somehow ended up turning myself into a 40-something-year-old acrobat because life is weird and pain management takes you places.

You can't put that in science, apparently, I'm told, because that would just kind of be insane.