Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health Services among Black LBQ+ WomenPI: Maria Venetis, Meghana Rawat; Ashleigh Shields; Jyoti SethCollege women from two regions of northern India provided survey and focus group data about cultural and family predictors of talk or...
IAPP-Greece: Advancing Health Communication Across the Health Professions
The core objective of this joint initiative by Rutgers’ School of Communication & Information and the School of Health Professions, working together with Rutgers Global, is to Advance Health Communication Research, Education, and Practice Across the Health Professions in Greece and the U.S. We are pursuing this vision through a broad array of activities and in close collaboration with institutional partners in Greece. Our initiative was developed in the context of our participation in the International Academic Partnerships Program – Greece (IAPP-Greece); an academic incubator program sponsored in 2020 by the Greek Ministry of Education, the U.S. Department of Education, the Institute of International Education, and the Fulbright Foundation, among other organizations, designed to promote international collaboration between U.S. and Greek institutions of higher education
Building Communication Infrastructure to Support Health in Urban Communities in Greece in the Aftermath of the Economic Crisis
This community-engaged research project and intervention aims to strengthen communication ties among local stakeholders—primarily between residents, on one hand, and leadership and staff of local health and other social services, on the other—and generate a blueprint for how to improve the communication infrastructure of an urban community. The study is unfolding in the Municipality of Egaleo, in the metropolitan region of Athens, Greece, in partnership with the city and the Greek National Center of Social Research (EKKE, in Greek).
Intersectionality Policymaking Toolkit: Key Principles for an Intersectionality Informed Policymaking Process to Serve Diverse Women, Children and Families
Health and economic inequities among U.S. racial/ethnic minority women and children are staggering. The maternal mortality rate for Black women was nearly three times that of White women. Black women also have the highest rates of infant mortality in the U.S.; an inequity that persists among highly-educated and middle class women. In line with burgeoning advocacy about the need to emphasize intersectionality’s potential for praxis, particularly in the U.S., we propose to develop the Intersectionality Checklist (IC), a user-friendly tool that U.S. policymakers and/or their aides, practitioners, and other interested stakeholders can use to develop and/or enhance more equitable maternal and child health (MCH) policies and programs for diverse women and children in the U.S. In this three phase project we use community engaged participatory methods to develop, refine, and concept test the toolkit. We anticipate that policymakers and practitioners who use the toolkit will be equipped to develop and improve policies and programs that address the racial inequities in MCH.
Sisters Informing Sisters about Topics on AIDS and Prevention (SISTA-P): Adaptation of the SISTA intervention to include PrEP information and skills building for Black women who are risk for HIV
We will adapt Sisters Informing Sisters about Topics on AIDS (SISTA), a widely implemented gender- and culture specific HIV prevention EBI. SISTA is a 5-session cognitive-behavioral intervention to increase condom use through gender and ethnic pride, HIV education, condom negotiation and assertiveness skills training, sexual self-control, and condom use efficacy in the context of partner resistance. This 3-phase study aims to understand social-structural and contextual barriers to Black cigender women’s PrEP uptake (Aim 1), adapt SISTA to address overcoming these barriers (Aim 2), and determine the acceptability and feasibility of the adapted intervention, SISTA-P (Aim 3). This research is conducted in Washington, DC in collaboration with The Women’s Collective, a community-based organization that provides health and social services for women of color who are living with or at risk for HIV.
Project ASPEN
a collaboration between a team of researchers from Rutgers University and the National Alliance on Mental Illness New Jersey (NAMI NJ) that is funded by a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation (Active Surveillance of Policy Ecosystems and Networks (ASPEN) to Enhance Brokering of Research Evidence into State Policymaking). This three-year project will develop and implement an intervention to facilitate policymakers’ access to and use of research evidence that is relevant to adolescent mental health policy, specifically implementation of universal adolescent mental health screening in New Jersey public schools.