A Culture-Centered Community-Grounded Approach to Disseminating Health Information among African Americans

The mediating effect of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) health literacy between TCM culture promotion and residents' health status

Background

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a medical system with a long history and unique theories and techniques, playing a crucial role in maintaining and promoting human health. Disseminating TCM cultural knowledge is essential for enhancing the TCM health literacy and health status of people. This study aimed to investigate how TCM health literacy mediated the relationship between the TCM cultural ambiance and people's health status.

Methods

A multi-stage random sampling method was employed to select 22,125 permanent residents in Jiangsu Province for a survey aimed at examining the popularization of TCM culture. The survey categorized the intensity of TCM cultural ambiance into four grades (0-3) based on the promotion activities in various settings, including street/community, medical service institutions, and educational/work institutions. Furthermore, the survey evaluated TCM health literacy, overall health status, and prevalence of chronic diseases using the 2017 Chinese Citizens TCM Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire. The regression analysis was used to examine the correlation between the TCM cultural ambiance and TCM health literacy and health status. Also, a mediation model was applied to explore the mediating effect of TCM health literacy on the TCM cultural ambiance and the public's self-assessment of health and reporting of chronic diseases.

Results

The rate of popularization of TCM culture was 79.3% in Jiangsu Province, with a TCM health literacy level of 14.76%. The average score for public self-assessment of health was 37.80 ± 9.70, and the prevalence of chronic diseases was reported at 32.66%. A positive correlation was observed between cultural promotion ambiance and TCM health literacy. The impact of the cultural promotion ambiance on health literacy also increased with the increase in promotion grade (P < 0.001). The correlation analysis showed no statistically significant correlation of promotion grade 1 [β = 0.21, 95% confidence interval (CI): -0.26 to 0.67] with the health status of residents, whereas promotion grades 2 (β = 1.47, 95% CI: 1.12-1.83) and 3 (β = 4.61, 95% CI: 4.19-5.04) were positively correlated with self-health evaluation. TCM health literacy was positively correlated with self-health evaluation (β = 2.10, 95% CI: 1.72-2.48) and negatively correlated with the risk of chronic diseases (odds ratio = 0.53, 95% CI: 0.48-0.58). The analysis of the mediating effect revealed that the TCM cultural ambiance directly impacted self-health evaluation and the prevalence of chronic diseases, with coefficients of 1.131 and -0.027 (P < 0.001), respectively. TCM health literacy had a significant mediating effect on the relationship between the cultural promotion ambiance and self-health evaluation, as well as with the prevalence of chronic diseases (P < 0.001). The mediating effect accounted for 17.8% and 42.2% of the total effect, respectively.

Conclusions

TCM health literacy served as a mediating factor in the positive relationship between the TCM cultural ambiance and health status. Theoretically, it can improve the overall health of residents by intensifying the dissemination of TCM culture and enhancing their health literacy.

Bridging Culture and Language: Encouraging Bilingual/Multicultural Individuals to Act as Information Navigators for Their Loved-Ones and Communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Linguistically diverse communities face barriers to receiving appropriate health information. COVID-19 exacerbated these health-communication inequities. University of Washington researchers surveyed bilingual staff, students, and medical interpreters - desiring training to become effective communicators of COVID-19 information to their social networks and language communities. In response, the COVID-19 Information Navigator Training was developed and pre-tested with professional networks and members of the target audience. The final training comprised three interactive modules and short quizzes. Evaluation surveys measured Information Navigators' confidence in providing COVID-19 information to their social networks. Surveys included questions on the participants' language or cultural community, the perceived value of the training, and their ability to communicate COVID-19 information. Among 393 participants who enrolled in the training, 284 completed the survey. Significant differences in confidence before and after the course were found in detecting COVID misinformation in the news and social media (pre-course mean: 3.83, post-course mean: 4.63; absolute mean difference was 0.82 points higher in the post-evaluation on the 5-point likert scale, 95% CI: 0.70-0.93, p < .01). Training multicultural volunteers to disseminate information to their social networks is a promising strategy for reaching linguistically diverse communities with up-to-date information during health emergencies.

Engaging in Health Activism through Neighbor-to-Neighbor Communication

Given the importance of local organizing to environmental health advocacy and activism, we need more understanding of how neighbors communicate about health risks. Individual residents in a neighborhood can be agents of social change, communicating about common health concerns and ways to cope with them, potentially leading to health activism. In this study, we used a grounded theory approach to analyze Pennsylvania residents' (N = 407) responses to open-ended questions that asked their thoughts on engaging in conversations with neighbors about the risk of lead exposure. Our findings describe (a) what respondents would want to share with neighbors about health risks and how they would communicate with their neighbors, (b) what actions they would like to promote to neighbors, and (c) what additional factors would facilitate conversations with neighbors. Based on the critical examination of the findings, we discuss communication strategies that can motivate health activism to bring about social structural changes.

The Interplay of Trust and Subjective Norms in Telemedicine Adoption by a Minority Community at Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia

Telemedicine is not released into a social vacuum. In some communities - such as the underserved, low income, mostly minority community served by Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia (EMCP) - the social context presents the medical center with unique challenges centered on a strong community sense of historical discrimination. That context is manifested in people being less inclined to trust symbols of external authority and in their strong reliance on subjective norms. Analyzing 540 survey responses by EMCP emergency department (ED) patients shows that trust in the EMCP portal was the strongest predictor of its acceptance. Being an African American had no effect on portal acceptance compared to others in the community. Importantly, there was a negative interaction effect of subjective norms and trust on portal acceptance - meaning that increasing this trust can reduce the importance of subjective norms or, alternatively, that lower subjective norms may increase the importance of trust in determining acceptance. This moderation may have very practical implications for EMCP because, while it might be challenging for EMCP to change long established subjective norms, it is within their power to increase trust in the portal. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The Excluded Voices from Africa's Sahel: Alternative Meanings of Health in Narratives of Resistance to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in Northern Nigeria

Although previous inquiry into resistance to the polio vaccines in northern Nigeria has been launched from several disciplines, inquiry has been limited to the 2003 revolt and has rarely been informed by theory. This study drew on the culture-centered approach to health communication to argue that the exclusion of marginalized communities from decision-making by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) resulted in a vaccine resistance which found expression in health activism that engaged the local news media. To recover the excluded voices, this study examined community members' narratives of resistance to the vaccines in Nigerian news from 2012 to 2018. Upon providing a backdrop for these narratives through a chronology of GPEI milestones in northern Nigeria developed from Nigerian newspapers, the study then engaged with 168 speech acts of resistance in Nigerian news to co-construct alternative meanings of health. Drawing on a local cultural meaning of the vaccines as covertly carrying out a Western family-planning agenda, narrators negligibly associated "family planning" with health. Narrators further articulated health as access to foods and as religious practice. These findings have implications for the inclusion of voices from sub-Saharan Africa in GPEI decision-making.

Community members trusted by African American parents for vaccine advice

Exposure to pro-vaccination messages from nonmedical peers and others perceived to share a similar value system for society (referred to as worldview outlook) improves vaccination attitudes. Nonetheless, a minority of African American parents have friends and family members who provide them with vaccine advice. The aims of the current study were to identify the presumed worldview outlook of eight types of community figures as perceived by African American parents, and determine parents' trust in these figures for vaccine advice, and whether trust varied according to the figures' racial concordance. A cross-sectional survey was administered to 110 African American parents in 2015. Parents perceived the community figures to represent a spectrum of worldview outlooks. Although levels of trust in the community figures differed overall (p < .001), it was high in the school nurse, pediatrician, mother, father, disease survivor, and vaccine scientist. All trusted figures except the father were perceived to hold a communitarian outlook. Parents shown race-concordant figures had higher levels of trust in them than those who were shown race-discordant equivalents (p < .01). These findings suggest that vaccination campaigns geared toward African American parents may be strengthened by including other nonmedical, African American spokespersons who convey their community contributions in messages.