Correlates of parent-child concordance in sexual attitudes: Does participation in the Parents Matter! Program improve this agreement?

The sexual health of America’s teens is a critical public health issue. Parents are ill- prepared and ill-equipped to fill the sexuality education gap facing today’s teens. Understanding the most effective and efficient way to teach parents how to provide this education for their children is an important step in the development of a successful parent sexuality education curriculum. Using a study population of 9-11 year old African American children and their parents, this study first looked to determine the correlates of sexual attitude congruence between these parents and their children. Consistent with previous studies that focused on older Caucasian teens, this study found that parent-child communication and parent-child closeness (as reported by the child) were correlates of concordance in sexual attitudes. Parent-child dyads with higher scores on indices that measured sexual communication and closeness were more likely to agree on 8 questions about dating and sexual activity than those with lower scores. Once these correlates were identified, this study evaluated whether participation in a parent sexuality education curriculum (Parents Matter! Program) improved either the scores on these indices or improved agreement on the 8 aforementioned questions at 6 and 12 months post-intervention. While the difference of mean change analysis found that parents who participated in the Parents Matter! Program (full intervention) scored higher on the parent-child sexual communication index than the brief intervention or the control group at 6 and 12 months post-intervention, a multilevel analysis revealed no significant differences between the three groups. Finally, this study employed a multilevel analysis to determine if there were differences in levels of agreement on the 8 dating and sexual attitude questions between the three groups at 6 and 12 months post- intervention. One question out of 8 showed a clear dose-response relationship between participating in the Parents Matter! Program and higher odds of agreement

Health Communication as a Public Health Training and Workforce Development Issue

Effective communication is one of the core competencies for public health professionals and is required for local health department (LHD) accreditation. Public health communication specialists play a critical role as conduits of health information, particularly with regard to managing relationships with media and the message that is ultimately represented by news outlets. However, capacity for engagement with traditional media in community health improvement at the local level has not been well-described. As part of a larger study examining the use and impact of the County Health Rankings in North Carolina, LHD media staffing and interaction with traditional media were examined through a cross-sectional, online survey, administered to North Carolina LHDs. Results indicate that most LHDs in North Carolina have staff designated to work with media, but few have dedicated staff or staff with an educational background in mass communication. Most communication staff enter their position with less than one year of experience, though almost all receive some training once on the job. Press releases are issued relatively infrequently, which implies that media engagement and message management are underdeveloped at the local level. These results suggest that health communication specialists are underutilized in LHDs and these skills should be emphasized in LHD hiring practices and in public health workforce development

Designing for Dissemination: Lessons in Message Design from 1-2-3 Pap

Despite a large number of evidence-based health communication interventions tested in private, public, and community health settings, there is a dearth of research on successful secondary dissemination of these interventions to other audiences. This article presents the case study of 1-2-3 Pap, a health communication intervention to improve human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination uptake and Pap testing outcomes in Eastern Kentucky, and explores strategies used to disseminate this intervention to other populations in Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia. Through this dissemination project, we identified several health communication intervention design considerations that facilitated our successful dissemination to these other audiences; these intervention design considerations include (a) developing strategies for reaching other potential audiences, (b) identifying intervention message adaptations that might be needed, and (c) determining the most appropriate means or channels by which to reach these potential future audiences. Using 1-2-3 Pap as an illustrative case study, we describe how careful planning and partnership development early in the intervention development process can improve the potential success of enhancing the reach and effectiveness of an intervention to other audiences beyond the audience for whom the intervention messages were originally designed

NC CATCH: Advancing Public Health Analytics

The North Carolina Comprehensive Assessment for Tracking Community Health (NC CATCH) is a Web-based analytical system deployed to local public health units and their community partners. The system has the following characteristics: flexible, powerful online analytic processing (OLAP) interface; multiple sources of multidimensional, event-level data fully conformed to common definitions in a data warehouse structure; enabled utilization of available decision support software tools; analytic capabilities distributed and optimized locally with centralized technical infrastructure; two levels of access differentiated by the user (anonymous versus registered) and by the analytical flexibility (Community Profile versus Design Phase); and, an emphasis on user training and feedback. The ability of local public health units to engage in outcomes-based performance measurement will be influenced by continuing access to event-level data, developments in evidence-based practice for improving population health, and the application of information technology-based analytic tools and methods