Title: Factors Influencing Self-Care Practices and Diabetes Management among African American Women with Type 2 Diabetes

Funded By: Albert Einstein Society

Status: On-going

Overview: Many studies have documented that lower socioeconomic position and minority race/ethnicity are associated with poorer health and shortened survival. With this has also come a growing interest in neighborhood or area effects on health; that being the recognition that social influences operate through many different processes, one of which may be the types of areas or neighborhoods in which people live.

This study will be conducted between January 2003 and January 2004. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted either in the home of the participant or at the Gutman Diabetes Institute. Consenting participants will be interviewed about their knowledge and understanding about diabetes, experience with complications, and their use of self-care practices related to their diabetes. Sociodemographic data, subjective views about their neighborhood and community, and medical co-morbidity data will also be collected. We will explore the role of migration experience, neighborhood experience, nutritional practices and food traditions, and multi-caregiving responsibilities on diabetes self-care practices. We will also test out the use of a neighborhood assessment tool and conduct structured observations of participants’ neighborhoods to identify neighborhood resources of relevance to health and nutrition.

This study will provide pilot data that will serve as a basis for designing a larger scale, hypothesis driven study on the effects of neighborhood environments in the greater Philadelphia region on diabetes management in populations with similar socioeconomic characteristics.

Research Team:
Etienne Phipps, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
Diana Harris, M.A., Co-Investigator
Steven Sivak, M.D., Co-Investigator