Int J Circumpolar Health
December 2024
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed long-standing gaps in health service systems and realities of environmental changes impacting Native nations and Indigenous communities in the US and circumpolar regions. Despite increased awareness and funding, there is limited research and few practical resources available for the work. This is a scoping review of the current literature on social determinants of health (SDOH) impacting Indigenous peoples, villages, and communities in the US and circumpolar region.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) people, and AI/AN people have the highest rate of smoking of any racial or ethnic group in the US. There is limited research to inform culturally-relevant strategies for lung cancer prevention inclusive of lung cancer screening (LCS). The objective of this study was to understand determinants of LCS and tobacco cessation care in at-risk urban-dwelling AI/ANs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrior research suggests that culturally aligned, accessible and lower-barrier interventions are well-placed to align with the needs of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) people with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Taking into account community members' suggestions and the need for physical distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, our team developed a protocol for virtual Harm Reduction Talking Circles (HaRTC) to incorporate these points. The aims of this 8-week, single-arm pilot were to initially document feasibility, acceptability, and outcomes associated with attendance at virtual HaRTC, which integrates the accessibility of virtual connection, a lower-barrier harm-reduction approach, and a culturally aligned intervention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealthy Indigenous child development is grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Attachment theory has been influential in understanding the significance of parenting for infant development in Western science but has focused on child-caregiver bonds predominantly within the parent-child dyad. To bring forth Indigenous perspectives regarding understandings of parenting, the attachment bond, and the well-being of Indigenous children, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 members of a Northwest tribal community (21 female) in spring and summer 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In recent years public health research has shifted to more strengths or asset-based approaches to health research but there is little understanding of what this concept means to Indigenous researchers. Therefore our purpose was to define an Indigenous strengths-based approach to health and well-being research.
Methods: Using Group Concept Mapping, Indigenous health researchers (N = 27) participated in three-phases.
Am Indian Alsk Native Ment Health Res
April 2023
We examined prevalence of mental health treatment utilization among 447 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and Two-Spirit (LGBTT-S) American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) adults and the association of mental health treatment utilization with socio-demographic factors, social support, and mental health diagnoses. We derived data from the HONOR Project, a multi-site cross-sectional survey of Native LGBTT-S adults from seven U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: This study examined levels of substance-specific risk factors such as perception of harm from substance use among young adults in a range of cannabis-permissive environments. The main objective was to inform future preventive interventions aimed at reducing cannabis use in the context of increasingly permissive environments.
Methods: Data came from the Community Youth Development Study (CYDS) collected in 2016 when participants were about 23 years old ( = 1,722 participants residing in 46 U.
Despite the growth of research on community-engaged research (CEnR), recent reviews suggest there has been limited development of validated scales to measure key contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes, impairing testing and refinement of theoretical models. The purpose of this study is to present the psychometric properties of scales from the Engage for Equity (E2) project, stemming from a long-term research partnership examining community-engaged research projects. This study used a three-stage, cross-sectional format: (a) a sampling frame of 413 CEnR projects was identified; (b) 210 principal investigators completed a project-level survey and nominated partners for another survey; (c) 457 investigators and partners completed a survey about project contexts, processes, interventions, and outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm Indian Alsk Native Ment Health Res
August 2021
This paper explores drug and alcohol policies at Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). A research team conducted a needs assessment of Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) use and policies in 27 TCUs, surveying key informants on perceived AOD prevalence. Student body size did not affect levels of AOD training or treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommunity-based participatory research (CBPR) and community-engaged research have been established in the past 25 years as valued research approaches within health education, public health, and other health and social sciences for their effectiveness in reducing inequities. While early literature focused on partnering principles and processes, within the past decade, individual studies, as well as systematic reviews, have increasingly documented outcomes in community support and empowerment, sustained partnerships, healthier behaviors, policy changes, and health improvements. Despite enhanced focus on research and health outcomes, the science lags behind the practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe developed a set of four community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership tools aimed at supporting community-academic research partnerships in strengthening their research processes, with the ultimate goal of improving research outcomes. The aim of this article is to describe the tools we developed to accomplish this goal: (1) the River of Life Exercise; (2) a Partnership Visioning Exercise; (3) a personalized Partnership Data Report of data from academic and community research partners; and (4) a Promising Practices Guide with aggregated survey data analyses on promising CBPR practices associated with CBPR and health outcomes from two national samples of CBPR projects that completed a series of two online surveys. Relying on Paulo Freire's philosophy of praxis, or the cycles of collective reflection and action, we developed a set of tools designed to support research teams in holding discussions aimed at strengthening research partnership capacity, aligning research partnership efforts to achieve grant aims, and recalling and operationalizing larger social justice goals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTribal Institutional Review Boards (TIRBs) in the United States assert their rights within sovereign nations by developing ethical research processes that align with tribal values to protect indigenous knowledge systems and their community from cultural appropriation, exploitation, misuse, and harm. We reviewed six TIRB applications and processes to gain a better understanding about their requirements and research ethics. We located 48 activated and deactivated TIRBs in a database, mapped them in relation to tribal reservation lands, and then conducted in-depth content analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProg Community Health Partnersh
August 2020
Objectives: In the first nationwide study of community- academic research partnerships, we identified contextual and partnership practices that were significantly correlated with successful partnership outcomes guided by a community-based participatory research (CBPR) conceptual model.
Methods: Data collection included three stages: 294 community-engaged research (CEnR) projects in 2009 identified from federally funded grant databases; 200 (68.0%) principal investigators (PI) completed a key informant survey that included measures of power/resource sharing and structural characteristics of projects; 312 (77.
This research addressed gaps in the literature by testing relationships between perceived descriptive alcohol use norms and individual's own alcohol use and consequences among tribal college and university (TCU) students. Survey data were collected from 3239 tribal college students in 22 TCUs across the United States in 2015 and 2016, of whom 3174 provided usable data on the variables of interest for the current manuscript. Results indicated students misperceived the descriptive norms for alcohol use at their TCU, on average estimating students at their college drank more frequently, more per occasion, and more total drinks per week relative to the observed averages on these outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals responsible for carrying out research within their diverse communities experience a critical need for research ethics training materials that align with community values. To improve the capacity to meet local human subject protections, we created the research Ethics Training for Health in Indigenous Communities (rETHICS), a training curriculum aligned within American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) context, culture, and community-level ethical values and principles. Beginning with the Belmont Report and the Common Rule that defines research with human subjects (46 CFR 45), the authors convened three different expert panels (N = 37) to identify Indigenous research values and principles common across tribal communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFYoung adulthood (ages 18-25) is a developmental period characterized by numerous transitions in social roles. This period is also associated with increased risk of substance use and negative-consequences. Changes in developmental social role status can be related to changes in substance use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch in indigenous communities is at the forefront of innovation currently influencing several new perspectives in engaged intervention science. This is innovation born of necessity, involving efforts to create health equity complicated by a history of distrust of research. Immense diversity across indigenous cultures, accompanied by variation in associated explanatory models, health beliefs, and health behaviors, along with divergent structural inequities add further complexity to this challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (Tribal MIECHV) Program provides federal grants to tribes, tribal consortia, tribal organizations, and urban Indian organizations to implement evidence-based home-visiting services for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) families. To date, only one evidence-based home-visiting program has been developed for use in AI/AN communities. The purpose of this article is to describe the steps that four Tribal MIECHV Programs took to assess community needs, select a home-visiting model, and culturally adapt the model for use in AI/AN communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe data-sharing policies of the National Institutes of Health aim to maximize public benefit derived from genetic studies by increasing research efficiency and use of a pooled data resource for future studies. Although broad access to data may lead to benefits for populations underrepresented in genetic studies, such as indigenous groups, tribes have ownership interest in their data. The Northwest-Alaska Pharmacogenetic Research Network, a partnership involving tribal organizations and universities conducting basic and translational pharmacogenetic research, convened a meeting to discuss the collection, management, and secondary use of research data, and of the processes surrounding access to data stored in federal repositories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrent human subject research training modules fail to capture ethically relevant cultural aspects of research involving American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) community members. Applying a Community Engaged Research (CEnR) approach, we adapted the Collaborative IRB Training Initiative training module "assessing risk and benefits." In a two-arm randomized controlled trial, followed by debriefing interviews, we evaluated module acceptability and understandability (test scores) among 40 reservation-based community members.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Indian Health Service (IHS), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was responsible for providing federal health services to 1.
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