Research Core

Allen, Walter

Abstract

The exploratory center grant seeks to develop a program of interventions to improve the health status of older African-Americans. In order to develop and evaluate interventions for older African-Americans, reliable and valid health status measures are needed. However, most measures of the health status of the elderly have not been developed for or tested among African-American populations. The research core of this exploratory center grant will coordinate the development and evaluation of measures that will be used to examine the effectiveness of the interventions designed to improve the health and independence of older African- Americans. We will build upon previous work in health status assessment, but tailor our assessment instruments to be most sensitive to older African-American individuals using focus groups and expert interviews. The health status measures will be pretested prior to the intervention studies and their psychometric properties thoroughly evaluated. Previously used measures will be supplemented by additional interview- based measures we develop and by measures of physical performance. The specific objectives of this exploratory center core grant are to: 1) develop health status and family function measures appropriate for use with elderly African-American individuals; 2) evaluate the psychometric performance of these measures including their acceptability, reliability, validity, and cross-cultural equivalence; and 3) develop screening measures for use by family members to identify early signs and symptoms of dementia and depression. 4) By carefully pilot-testing and analysis of the data, we will examine each method and select the most cost-effective without sacrificing data quality.