There is an urgent need to improve nutritional health in health disparity communities
such as the growing Hispanic and Latino populations. However, efforts focused on complex
nutritional health issues, such as obesity and food insecurity, can be more difficult
in underserved and at-risk communities, such as Mexican-origin residents living in
communities along the Texas–Mexico border.
1
,
2
Some of these challenges include:
- •establishing trust and rapport with community residents who are markedly different from the university-based research team;
- •working with communities to recruit from a specified sampling frame and to minimize attrition across the life course of a study;
- •adapting data collection protocol and instruments to culturally appropriate and reliable measures of dietary and environmental exposures;
- •accommodating logistics-related challenges of study participants (eg, family, social, employment conflicts, and transportation challenges) to acknowledge the time commitment, minimize attrition, and complete timely and comprehensive assessments; and
- •capturing contextual factors for understanding food- and health-related behaviors.
Keywords
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Biography
C. M. Johnson is a doctoral degree student in the Department of Nutrition and a research assistant, Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; at the time of the study, she was a research associate with the Program for Nutrition and Health Disparities, School of Rural Public Health, Texas A&M Health Science Center, College Station.
Biography
J. R. Sharkey is a professor of health promotion and community health sciences, and founding director, Program for Research in Nutrition and Health Disparities, Comidas Saludables & Gente Sana en las Colonias del Sur de Tejas, School of Rural Public Health, Texas A&M Health Science Center, College Station.
Biography
W. R. Dean is a research scientist and an assistant professor, Comidas Saludables & Gente Sana en las Colonias del Sur de Tejas, School of Rural Public Health, Texas A&M Health Science Center, College Station.
Biography
J. A. St John is South Texas regional director and certified community health worker instructor, Comidas Saludables & Gente Sana en las Colonias del Sur de Tejas, School of Rural Public Health, Texas A&M Health Science Center, College Station.
Biography
M. Castillo is promotora coordinator and certified community health worker, Comidas Saludables & Gente Sana en las Colonias del Sur de Tejas, School of Rural Public Health, Texas A&M Health Science Center, College Station.
Article info
Publication history
Published online: February 01, 2013
Accepted:
November 20,
2012
Available online 1 February 2013Footnotes
FUNDING/SUPPORT This research was supported in part with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (grant no. 5P20MD002295) and by Cooperative Agreement No. 1U48DP001924 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Prevention Research Centers Program through the Core Research Project and Special Interest Project Nutrition and Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation Network. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH and CDC.
STATEMENT OF POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Identification
Copyright
© 2013 Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
