“Livin' in Your Body 4 Life” – Health promotion videos produced by urban public school teens for their peers in a community based participatory research project

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Jewell Brazelton, MSW, Annie Pope, MSW, Laura DeSousa, MA, Jaamal Conway, Shonquana Hamilton, Daja Nicholson, Jerome Scarborough, and Sarah J. Gehlert, PhD. Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research, University of Chicago, Institute for Mind & Biology - 940 East 57th St., Chicago, IL 60637, 773-834-9093, Mea57@aol.com

The community-based participatory research study of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research (CIHDR) involves an iterative process of information sharing with community members. It serves as a conduit between community stakeholders and CIHDR's three other research projects, which focus on how social environmental factors impact gene expression to contribute to Black-White differences in breast cancer. After establishing a Community Advisory Committee (CAC), we conducted 49 focus group interviews with 503 persons in 15 African American neighborhoods of Chicago's South Side to assess concerns, beliefs, and attitudes about breast cancer and its treatment to guide CIHDR's science. We invited all focus group participants (N=1300) to a summit at the Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church, where the focus group results were presented. Attendees broke into small groups, each led by a community member and an investigator, to develop a list of action steps to address results. In later meetings with our CAC and summit volunteers, we prioritized the action steps. Based on concerns that 12-16 year old youths are told what not to do (drugs, sex) instead of what to do to stay well, we enlisted high school teens in our Student Apprenticeship Program to create a 2.5 hour mini-series entitled “Livin' in Your Body 4 Life” (first action step, with in-kind institutional support of university videographer services). After a public screening, DVDs of the series will be given to Chicago public high schools, with CAC members assigned to each school to ensure they are shown, and aired on cable television.

Learning Objectives:

After attending in this presentation participants should understand

1)an approach to working with community participants using an iterative process to develop community-generated interventions, including a program of health messages in partnership with community members most like those for whom the messages are intended – youth in public school systems;
2)a novel way of disseminating health information designed by community stakeholders and facilitated by investigators that uses a movie premier format and promotes interaction between community members and researchers around salient health issues;
3)an example of leveraging existing resources and other community-related programs that many large academic institutions have, in order to improve the quality and effectiveness of community-academic partnerships for health research. In this example, the public school system students who created this series of health promotion videos participated in our Student Apprenticeship Program, a type of bridge program that many large urban academic institutions sponsor.
4)how forming these types of program linkages also supports another primary aim of CBPR research generally of addressing “pipeline” issues with the objective of increasing the numbers of underrepresented minorities in academia and scientific research. As one of the Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities funded by a trans-NIH initiative, our Center is committed to creating opportunities for youth from the surrounding community to enter college and launching new careers in health disparities research.

Keywords: Adolescent Health, African American

Related Web page: cihdr.uchicago.edu

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered

Recorded presentation

Innovative Approaches to Community Based Participatory Research

The 134th Annual Meeting & Exposition (November 4-8, 2006) of APHA