The Anchored Testimony Calendar: A Black Feminist Method for Retrospective Behavioral Health Inquiry with Justice-Impacted Young Adults and Caregivers

Retrospective behavioral health instruments calibrated for chronological precision and discrete-symptom reconstruction can fail people whose lives have been organized by structural racism, sexism, and economic inequality. We describe the Anchored Testimony Calendar (ATC), a Black feminist adaptation of the event history calendar developed within the Epidemiological Project Involving Children in the Court (EPICC), a longitudinal study of justice-impacted young adults and caregivers launched in 2014. ATC pre-populates an interviewer-facing four-domain grid-behavioral and psychiatric health, education, family context, and juvenile legal system involvement-with the participants' own survey responses from seven adolescent assessment waves, anchoring recall to participant-identified transitions rather than calendar dates. Grounded in Black feminist epistemological commitments-lived experience, dialogue, and an ethic of care that refuses extraction-ATC privileges contextual fidelity and cross-domain coherence over chronological precision. From a target of 50 dyads at the young adult follow-up, 38 young adults and 19 caregivers completed an ATC-guided interview before federal funding was terminated. Four vignettes (two caregiver, two young adult) illustrate the instrument at work, and surface structural conditions as participants name them. This paper documents science that federal funding cuts interrupted. ATC is offered as a usable tool, an open methodology, and a record of what behavioral medicine stands to lose.