1. After reading the article by Thomas et al., comment on where your research, or your research interests, fitinto the generational framework for health disparities research. If your work is 1rst or 2nd generation, comment on how your work could lead in the future to 3rd or 4th generation work. If your work is 3rd or 4th generation, comment on what 1rst and 2nd generation work was necessary as a foundation for your current work (or current interests).
I am passionate about conducting health disparities research. My goal is to do it in a way that makes the communities a central part of the work instead of my own research goals. For future projects my research interest is in 3rd generational work. However, I am currently conducting second generational work. I am working on a project to determine whether or not racial discrimination impacts the biological age of African American women. I am conducting this research by measuring the telomere lengths as a measure of biological age. This kind of work is only possible because of the first generation work that already established that black women have significantly shorter telomere lengths than their white counterparts. I am hoping that my work will be able to consider the social and structural issues that may be causing this accelerated aging in African American women.
2. The barbershop hypertension intervention, while essentially a clinical services intervention operating at either the fence or safety-net level as described by Jones, has some engagement with the social determinants of health. What aspects of this program might be generalizable to other areas of health? How might this apply to your area of research?
The barbershop hypertension intervention created a community based approach to healthcare. In communities where there is great mistrust of healthcare professionals, interventions such as this are crucial to the health of the community. This program uses social cohesion and community guided awareness campaigns that tackle problems at the social levels instead of expecting the individual to do it on their own.
The most generalizable part of this intervention was the community organizing. Healthcare information and possible screening has to be made accessible to community leaders and organizers in order to reach the people who need it most. The authors even mentioned that this intervention was only appropriate for middle class individuals who can afford to get their hair cut this often. However, interventions like this can inspire communities to use more accessible spaces to do the same types of work.
Research in health disparities cannot be removed from the communities dealing with the disparity in the first place. In order for my research to actually begin changing these disparities it is necessary to have community organizing and engagement in the research. Centralizing marginalized populations in every generation of health disparities research is critical to conducting research and setting up interventions that will actually work.