The likelihood of an individual being persuasively exposed to the program’s message through his or her own informal networks should increase accordingly. Supporting this strategy are a number of studies linking participation in formally organized groups to neighboring behaviors. Consequently, working with formal organizations among neighborhood citizens to recruit informal networks is a central theme […]
Research indicates that African Americans may be especially responsive to social support for behaviors such as disease management and risk reduction. For instance, a survey of residents of St. Louis conducted as a basis for evaluation of “Neighbors for a Smoke Free North Side,” a program we developed in the same neighborhoods prior to the […]
Caution is in order in too readily attributing lack of self management to failure to understand its importance. Regardless of its concrete benefits, self management represents an orientation toward disease that is very congruent with middle-class, western culture but is alien to many others. Awareness of differences in cultural perspectives need not lead to abandonment […]
One might suspect that the relationships among socioeconomic and psychological factors and morbidity and mortality in the studies noted above are somehow peculiar to how these variables are manifest in the United States. It may not be the case that economic poverty generally exacerbates asthma, but only in the circumstances surrounding economic poverty in this […]
Lack of understanding or appreciation of the importance of basic care seemed implicated in the study of asthma deaths noted above. Such misunderstanding may also be inferred from results of a study of two groups of adults with asthma, one composed of mostly white, mostly middle-class patients from a suburban practice, and one from the […]
A major problem for low-income African American audiences appears to be failure to follow very basic components of asthma management. A recent death of an African American child in one of the neighborhoods in St. Louis in which we have been working was attributable to a delay in receiving care because of failure to recognize […]
African Americans have disproportionate prevalence, morbidity, and mortality from asthma.’ Asthma management programs have reduced symptoms, attacks and emergency department usage. However, a pattern of underutilization of medical care and poor day-to-day management of asthma in cases of asthma deaths among African American children indicate the importance of promoting the following: (1) ongoing vs episodic […]