The long-term objective, to develop research along with faculty engaged in research, to meet the needs of Ethnic/Racial Minority (E/RM) research in ADM with initial emphasis on mental health and social work, stems from (1) University of Hawaii at Manoa's (UHM) initiative to serve as the research center for the Asian/Pacific region; (2) the Social Work profession's need to establish a theoretical sphere for social work with E/RM groups in mental health.
The specific aims are to increase the capacity of the University of Hawaii School of Social Work (UHSSW), through consistent, unified, coherent, developmental process, to conduct rigorous ADM research; strengthen, develop, expand ADM research; provide relevant drug abuse research; test the usefulness of the ecological approach for the development of ADM and specific E/RM mental health research related to social work practice with these groups; provide a logically coherent system of propositions for a beginning development of a theory of E/RM social work; consider a system of E/RM diagnostic categories through a series of conferences, to be held initially with Asian/Pacific women healers; enhance the Hawaii ADMHA-MARC program at UHSSW. To accomplish these specific aims, the following have been developed: (1) an apprentice program for both the proposed MIRDP faculty, their student research assistants/supervisee (2) four proposed research sub-projects conducted by the faculty as they participate in their apprentice research program. the investigators propose to study culture-specific relation among stress and mental health factors. Although the particular ethnic group and source of stress differ across each study, all investigators have paid attention to the problems of item construction and reviewed norms to develop psychometrically sound measurement devices, appropriate for cross-ethnic studies. The modest objectives of the exploratory pilot projects are to: describe and identify individual E/RM adaptations to aging (Browne); identify stressors and coping behaviors of Chinese American children in Hawaii (Fong); cause and effect patterns between economic change and quality of life of a rural Hawaiian community (Matsuoka); refine selected instruments to reflect accurately, stress, mental health and coping strategies among Native Hawaiians and Samoans (Mokuau).
