Rural Intervention and Prevention Services Grant

Personnel
Gene H. Brody, Ph.D.
Velma McBride Murry, Ph.D.
Anita C. Brown, Ph.D.

Description

The Rural Intervention and Prevention Services Grant (CFR-RIPS), a Developing Center Grant, is a five-year NIMH-funded project designed to enhance the Center’s development of effective family-centered preventive interventions for African Americans by strongly grounding its work agenda in scientific concepts and methodology. Five work groups consisting of twenty-five University of Georgia faculty members who represent eleven academic departments from five colleges on campus are studying specific problems related to preventive intervention research. These multidisciplinary groups also draw on the varied expertise of community leaders from our Community Advisory Board and well-known researchers from outside institutions who serve on our Science Advisory Board. This expansion of the organizational infrastructure of the Center will facilitate the development and implementation of multi-disciplinary collaborative research projects regarding the effective delivery of family-centered preventive interventions to rural African Americans.

Community Context Work Group
This group is conducting theoretical and empirical analyses of the ways in which rural communities’ characteristics impact or moderate the implementation of family-centered preventive interventions. Existing and newly developed measures of community characteristics will be applied to the SAAF effectiveness trials to investigate how rural community parameters moderate implementation quality and efficacy. This work group will also conduct several pilot studies. Results from these studies will inform the development of adjunct prevention components focusing on malleable community characteristics that could be added to the SAAF program to ameliorate community processes that impede prevention implementation and efficacy.

Engagement Work Group
This group is exploring the barriers and incentives that influence rural African-American families’ engagement in preventive intervention programs. They will be developing a theoretical model of potential influences on involvement based on literature reviews and focus group discussions among rural African-American participants in the SAAF program. A measure of engagement influences has been developed and is being pilot tested in an ongoing research project. The results of that study will be used to identify factors relevant to the delivery and dissemination of preventive interventions to rural African-American communities.

Dosage Response Work Group
This group is working on a theory and model of dosage in family-centered prevention programs. They will develop methods and measures for assessing dosage, and these measures will be tested and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively through pilot work with families participating in the SAAF prevention training sessions. Analytic models will be developed to determine whether these refined dosage measures yield more information than the traditional dosage measure – number of prevention sessions attended – in predicting change following participation in the SAAF program.

Statistics Work Group
This group supports the ongoing work of the Center in collaboration with each of the other work groups by addressing their data analytic needs and by examining important issues in the analysis of longitudinal randomized prevention trial data. It also works to contribute methodological innovations that will be useful within the preventive intervention field. This group brings together a diverse group of scholars with interests in research methodology to see what new applications can be developed and disseminated for preventive intervention researchers. Issues to be addressed over the next several years include (1) the development of statistical models that represent individual-level change, correlates of change and program effects in an integrated and informative manner; (2) the extension of previous conceptions of change to examine correlates of beyond-mean levels; (3) alternative modeling approaches derived from operations research for analyzing longitudinal preventive intervention data; and (4) multi-level analyses with an emphasis on simulation studies.

Links
Child Welfare League of America
Alan Guttmacher Institute
Public Health Institute’s Center for Research on Adolescent Health and Development
Institute for Youth Development
Future of Children
Nat’l Assoc. for Rural Mental Health
Southeastern Rural Mental Health Research Center
Nat’l Center for Cultural Competence
Center for Evaluation Research and Methodology
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
Nat’l Center for Health Statistics
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry