This study addresses recommendations and priorities for obesity prevention research made in the Institute of Medicine report, Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in the Balance (Koplan et al., 2005) and in the Strategic Plan for NIH Obesity Research (NIH, 2004). These documents recommend for community-based, participatory approaches to be used to develop culturallyappropriate interventions to prevent childhood obesity that target parents to address nutrition, physical activity, and sedentary behaviors in their children. Both documents emphasize the value of exploring potential community-based prevention and treatment strategies that are culturally-appropriate and target diverse population groups, as a strategy for reducing health disparities in obesity and related consequences. This study addresses important gaps in the literature?namely, a dearth of research on culturally-appropriate, family-based childhood obesity prevention interventions for the Hispanic population. In our formative research phase, we adapted the We Can! program to develop a family-based childhood obesity program that is tailored for Hispanic families. The new intervention was adapted to be linguistically- and culturally-appropriate for Hispanic families to incorporate cultural values, norms, and customs of the target population, and by delivering the intervention through CHP's in a community center setting. Our formative research also found that the We Can! program materials were written at a relatively high reading level and were not easily comprehended. Thus, we made the modifications with an emphasis on making, the program accessible to Spanish-speaking persons with low health literacy levels (e.g., nontechnical language, easy-to-read materials, interactive activities). The proposed study aims to demonstrate the efficacy of this culturally-tailored childhood obesity prevention intervention through a randomized controlled trial.
Disparities Research Center of Excellence's systems framework that emphasizes understanding of the interrelationships between individual factors, community context, and macro social forces as determinants in the development, progression, prevention, and control of disease and public health conditions that lead to health disparities across the lifespan. Specifically, this study addresses on the long-term problem of racial/ethnic disparities in obesity and obesityrelated chronic conditions, by focusing on prevention of childhood obesity. Our study addresses certain community-level factors (ethnicity, culture, parent-child interactions within families) by testing a culturally-tailored, family-level intervention that targets parents to influence individual-level health outcomes in Hispanic children. While this intervention does not address structural and environmental factors at the community level and macro-societal level, the focus on the community-level factors of family and culture can later be expanded in future studies to incorporate additional multi-level interventions to prevent childhood obesity.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 67 publications
