Month / November 2021

by Lu Tang

Are HPV vaccine interventions targeting racial and ethnic minorities doing a good job?

Image by vectorjuice on Freepik

Racial and ethnic minorities in the United States face higher risks of human papillomavirus (HPV) and are less likely to benefit from HPV vaccines. Effective HPV vaccine promotion efforts need to acknowledge and adapt to the cultural characteristics of these minority groups. 

We conducted a systematic review of all the published journal articles between 2010 and 2019 and found 26 studies reporting HPV vaccine intervention among minority populations. We further analyzed these studies to see whether and how they incorporated cultural adaptation in their interventions. Here are some of main findings:

  1. Almost all of these interventions involved some cultural adaptation. (Yeah!)
  2. Very often the adaptations were quite superficial, including community outreach and involvement or delivering the intervention in a location or through a venue convenient to the community.
  3. There is a lack of theoretically driven intervention or cultural adaptation.  Only 6 out of 26 studies mentioned behavioral or communication theories in guiding the intervention. Even though many of these studies discussed the concepts of social behavioral theories, such as efficacy, beliefs and attitudes, the majority of the researchers did not use theories to guide the design of the interventions and merely measured the aforementioned theoretical concepts as outcome variables. Consequently, it was difficult for the authors to explain why the intervention was successful or unsuccessful in creating significant improvements in the outcome variables.

Overall, we call for more comprehensive and better-designed cultural adaptations.

Zhang, X. & Tang, L. (2021). Cultural adaptation in HPV vaccine intervention among racial and ethnic minority populations: A systematic literature review. Health Education Research. Published online first. https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyab034 [Full Text]

by Lu Tang

How middle-aged and older African American individuals use information during the COVID-19 pandemic

I have always been interested in studying the health and healthcare experiences of minority groups. Thanks to my collaborators and recently, my doctoral advisee Felicia York, I was able to study the health experiences of middle-aged and older African American individuals in terms of chronic cardiovascular disease management and information use during COVID-19.

In a study recently published in Frontiers in Public Health, we reported the findings of an interview study exploring how middle aged and older African Americans use information during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are some of our main findings:

  1. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, these individuals primarily relied on information scanning based on their routine media consumption to acquire information about COVID-19 and seldom actively searched for information outside of their regular media use.
  2. Unlike previous studies that suggest increased social media use for information seeking and exchanging among other demographic groups [e.g., (18)], our findings show that middle[1]aged and older African Americans are less likely to use social media for COVID-19 related information.
  3. Individuals used several strategies to assess the quality of the information they received, including checking source credibility, comparing multiple sources, fact-checking, and praying.

Our study finds that middle-aged and older African American individuals overwhelmingly rely on cable news (CNN) and local television stations (ABC, CBS, and NBC) for COVID-19 related information, and they have high trust in these sources. This means that traditional TV channels are probably the most effective way to reach this particular demographic group in terms of risk communication about the COVID-19 pandemic and other public health crises in the future. For the demographic group studied in the current study, knowledge deficiency is probably not a contributing factor to the disparity related to COVID-19. In particular, since religion plays an essential role in African American’s coping with this health risk, health organizations could integrate faith-based content into health messages to attract this group’s attention.

Tang, L., York, F., & Zou, W. (2021). Information use during COVID-19: An interview study of African Americans. Frontiers in Public Health, 9:709416. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.709416