The Native Elder Research Center (NERC) will be organized in terms of four core components: an Administrative Core (Core A), a Community Liaison Core (Core B), an Investigator Development Core (Core C), and a Measurement Core (Core D). Jan Beals, Ph.D., Associate Director for Research, NCIANMHR, and Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, UCHSC, will serve as Senior Investigator and will lead the Measurement Core. Dr. Beals, a social psychologist, trained at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and is nationally recognized for her psychometric and psychiatric epidemiologic research in areas directly relevant to this RCMAR. The Measurement Core will provide varying levels of direction and support to each of the native Investigator and supporting faculty in the development and course of the Pilot Studies and related research.
The specific aims of this Core are to: 1) improve the overall design of the Pilot Studies and subsequent R01-like research grant applications to be developed; 2) assist in selection of appropriate measures for operationalizing the key constructs relevant to these studies and research grant applications; 3) demonstrate strategies by which to accommodate cultural variation likely to affect the reliability and validity of said measures; 4) review all draft instrumentation for formatting and coding efficiency; 5) introduce state-of-the-art data collection procedures (e.g., structured protocols, computer-assisted methods) that minimize information. , method, and interviewer sources of variation; 60 anticipate sensory limitations (e.g., visual and hearing impairments) among older adults that may require specialized data collection procedures; 7) ensure adequate consideration of options regarding sampling plans and their relative merits; 8) highlight personnel and policy issues that frequently arise in the course of fielding studies in AI/AN communities; 9) acquaint participants with analytic techniques that address the psychometric performance of study measures and that are appropriate to the questions to be asked of the data, and 10) encourage attention to qualitative as w ell as quantitative research methods, their integration, and relative merit in explicating the phenomena studies. As noted in Section 2: Summary Research Plan for the Entire Application, the resources available through this RFA are inadequate to sponsor Measurement Core of sufficient size and sophistication to meet these specific aims on an independent, stand-alone basis. Thus, the proposed NERC links directly to the pre-existing Research nd Methodological Core of the National Center for American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research (NCAIAMHR), which also is lead by Dr. Beals.
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