Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Attributes of researchers and their strategies to recruit minority populations: Results of a national survey
    (2012) Quinn, Sandra Crouse; Butler, James; Fryer, Craig S.; Garza, Mary A.; Kim, Kevin H.; Ryan, Christopher; Thomas, Stephen B.
    Despite NIH mandates for inclusion, recruiting minorities is challenging for biomedical and public health researchers. Little is known about how attributes of researchers affect their choice of recruitment strategies. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by examining how use of recruitment strategies relates to other researcher characteristics. To do this, we conducted an online survey from May to August 2010 with researchers (principal investigators, research staff, and IRB members) in which we measured the number and types of recruitment strategies utilized, along with other characteristics of the researchers and their research. We identified two clusters of researchers: comprehensive researchers who utilized a greater number and more diverse and active recruitment strategies, and traditional researchers, who utilized fewer and more passive strategies. Additional characteristics that distinguished the two groups were that comprehensive researchers were more likely than traditional researchers to 1) report racial and ethnic differences as one of their specific aims or hypotheses, 2) receive federal (CDC and NIH) funding, 3) conduct behavioral or epidemiological research, and 4) have received training in conducting research with and recruiting minorities. Traditional researchers, on the other hand, were more likely to conduct clinical research and a greater (though non-significant) percentage received funding from pharmaceutical sources. This study provides a novel description of how researcher attributes are related to their recruitment strategies and raises a number of future research questions to further examine the implications of this relationship.
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    Ethics in public health research: protecting human subjects: the role of community advisory boards.
    (2004) Quinn, Sandra Crouse
    Increasingly, researchers grapple with meaningful efforts to involve communities in research, recognizing that communities are distinct from individuals. We also struggle to ensure that individual participants in research are fully protected. Community advisory boards (CABs) offer an opportunity to adopt a relationships paradigm that enables researchers to anticipate and address the context in which communities understand risks and benefits, and individuals give consent. CABs provide a mechanism for community consultation that contributes to protecting communities and fostering meaningful research. Furthermore, CABs can help us to re-create informed consent as a process. It is critical that we conduct research to understand the role of CABs in the informed consent process.
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    Toward a fourth generation of disparities research to achieve health equity
    (2011) Thomas, Stephen B.; Quinn, Sandra Crouse; Butler, James; Fryer, Craig S.; Garza, Mary A.
    Achieving health equity, driven by the elimination of health disparities, is a goal of Healthy People 2020. In recent decades, the improvement in health status has been remarkable for the U.S. population as a whole. However, racial and ethnic minority populations continue to lag behind whites with a quality of life diminished by illness from preventable chronic diseases and a life span cut short by premature death. We examine a conceptual framework of three generations of health disparities research to understand (a) data trends, (b) factors driving disparities, and (c) solutions for closing the gap. We propose a new, fourth generation of research grounded in public health critical race praxis, utilizing comprehensive interventions to address race, racism, and structural inequalities and advancing evaluation methods to foster our ability to eliminate disparities. This new generation demands that we address the researcher's own biases as part of the research process.
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    The Role of Community Advisory Boards: Involving Communities in the Informed Consent Process
    (2001) Strauss, Ronald P.; Sengupta, Sohini; Quinn, Sandra Crouse; Goeppinger, Jean; Spaulding, Cora; Kegeles, Susan M.; Millett, Greg
    Ethical research involving human subjects mandates that individual informed consent be obtained from research participants or from surrogates when participants are not able to consent for themselves.The existing requirements for informed consent assume that all study participants have personal autonomy; fully comprehend the purpose, risks, and benefits of the research; and volunteer for projects that disclose all relevant information. Yet contemporary examples of lapses in the individual informed consent process have been reported. The authors propose the use of community advisory boards, which can facilitate research by providing advice about the informed consent process and the design and implementation of research protocols. These activities could help reduce the number of individual informed consent lapses,benefiting study participants and the scientific integrity of the research in question.
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    Belief in AIDS as a Form of Genocide: Implications for HIV Prevention Programs for African Americans
    (1997) Quinn, Sandra Crouse
    The purpose of this article is to examine factors associated with belief that AIDS is a form of genocide and trust in federal government reports on AIDS in a cross-sectional sample of 1,054 black church members. Reports in both the professional literature and mass media have documented fears that AIDS is a form of genocide unleashed on black Americans, and distrust of reports on AIDS.Results from this study demonstrate that a substantial number of participants believe that belief in genocide is not accounted for by levels of AIDS knowledge. Belief in genocide may be a modern urban legend that need not be a barrier for AIDS education. Implications for development of AIDS education sensitive to the cultural context of African Americans are described.
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    African Americans' views on research and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
    (2001) Freimuth, Vicki S.; Quinn, Sandra Crouse; Thomas, Stephen B.; Cole, Galen; Zook, Eric; Duncan, Ted
    The participation of African Americans in clinical and public health research is essential. However, for a multitude of reasons, participation is low in many research studies. This article reviews the literature that substantiates barriers to participation and the legacy of past abuses of human subjects through research. The article then reports the results of seven focus groups with 60 African Americans in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Atlanta during the winter of 1997. In order to improve recruitment and retention in research, the focus group study examined knowledge of and attitudes toward medical research, knowledge of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and reactions to the Home Box Office production, Miss Evers' Boys, a fictionalized version of the Tuskegee Study, that premiered in February, 1997. The study found that accurate knowledge about research was limited; lack of understanding and trust of informed consent procedures was problematic; and distrust of researchers posed a substantial barrier to recruitment. Additionally, the study found that, in general, participants believed that research was important, but they clearly distinguished between types of research they would be willing to consider participating in and their motivations for doing so.
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    Framing a Transdisciplinary Research Agenda in Health Education to Address Health Disparities and Social Inequities: A Road Map for SOPHE Action
    (2006) Gambescia, Stephen F.; Woodhouse, Lynn D.; Auld, M. Elaine; Green, B. Lee; Quinn, Sandra Crouse; Airhihenbuwa, Collins O.
    the Healthy People 2010 goal of eliminating health disparities through its Strategic Plan. SOPHE held an Inaugural Health Education Research Disparities Summit, Health Disparities and Social Inequities: Framing a Transdisciplinary Research Agenda in Health Education, August 8 and 9, 2005. This article explains the process used at the Summit where more than 80 researchers, academicians, practitioners, and students from across the country convened to ask fundamental questions about health disparity associated with race and ethnicity and how a health education research agenda could help in eliminating these disparities. From this Summit, about a dozen questions and/or recommendations have been developed to frame our future discussions about health disparities. Through its Research Agenda Committee, SOPHE has developed a process of translation and dissemination, including community participation, review, dialogue, and action.