A GW researcher has received a grant from the National Institutes for Health for $5 million to fund a five-year project investigating health disparities among immigrant Latino communities. Mark Edberg, an associate professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health in the School of Public Health and Health Services, is the principal investigator for the grant, which will run through 2017. Dr. Edberg also holds secondary appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Elliott School of International Affairs.
The funding comes from NIH’s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and names GW as an “exploratory research center” on Latino immigrant health disparities. The goal of the grant, Dr. Edberg explained, is to address several co-occurring health disparities among Latino immigrant youth—substance abuse, violence and sexual risk—that often share contributing factors. During the five-year run of the grant, Dr. Edberg and his colleagues will work closely with community partners in Langley Park, Md., to collaborate on reducing disparities and to implement an intervention program that will attempt to reduce the instances of these conditions.
There are four main “cores” to the grant: the university-community collaborative partnership structure; a community intervention, called ADELANTE (which means “forward” in Spanish), which will involve youth and families in Langley Park and will be based on a concept termed Positive Youth Development (PYD); a training core, which will provide GW public health graduate students with opportunities for research and involvement in the test community, as well as opportunities for community members to educate GW students and faculty about Latino immigrant health disparities; and a community outreach core, which will involve youth and community members from Langley Park in health literacy programs, as well as the development of messages, news items and a mobile technology campaign to help “brand” the intervention.
“We’re hoping to gain experience, knowledge and science that could help any community facing these kinds of issues,” Dr. Edberg said.
The ADELANTE intervention builds upon similar work completed in the Langley Park community between 2006 and 2010 and funded by the Centers for Disease Control. This pilot study identified some of the factors that contribute to youth violence in a socially marginalized community setting, including issues of family conflict/ cohesion, school barriers, low community efficacy, and norms related to gangs and violence. It also provided data on how to measure factors in Positive Youth Development. The ADELANTE intervention expands the knowledge gained from that study to address other related health risks.
“[PYD] means that instead of looking only at the bad things and the risks kids are exposed to, we’re looking at the good things that are there in the community that we can build upon, to promote resilience and serve as a counter,” Dr. Edberg explained.
The ADELANTE component will involve close collaboration with the Maryland Multicultural Youth Center, which will include the training of Latino youth peer advocates, a drop-in center for youth and families, community capacity-building activities and developing other social support systems for young people.
“The most common thing we hear from youth about gang involvement is ‘the gang has my back,’” Dr. Edberg said. “It’s a social support system where they don’t have one. So one thing we’re doing is to build a youth-related social support system that we hope will reduce the need for gang involvement and other high-risk activities.”
Dr. Edberg’s team will also conduct community research surveys both in Langley Park and in a similar community in Culmore, Fairfax County, Va., which will not have an intervention program. The data from these surveys will help the researchers measure whether the ADELANTE intervention was successful in addressing health disparities.
GW Vice President for Research Leo Chalupa said the sizable grant highlights the university’s increasing stature in research.
“This is apt recognition by the National Institutes of Health that Dr. Edberg is a leading scholar in the field of prevention and community health, and that George Washington is a high-intensity research institution worthy of such a prestigious award,” he said.
Dr. Edberg said he and his team are eager to continue their work with the Maryland Multicultural Youth Center and other community partners.
“We’re trying to establish evidence that you can’t solve these problems without working at various levels. Too often, programs work at just one level—like a school curriculum or a family intervention,” he said. “This may be effective within a narrow domain, but does it translate to the real world? We want to help marginalized communities grow their own capacities.”
Complementing the work involved in the NIH grant, the team also recently gained approval for a center within SPHHS to focus on the promotion of social well-being in the Latin America-Caribbean region. Related to this new center, a collaboration has already begun with UNICEF in the Central American country of Belize.