Shirley M. Timmons

Communicating HIV/AIDS Through African American Churches in North Carolina: Implications and Recommendations for HIV/AIDS Faith-Based Programs

This study explores HIV/AIDS communication strategies among church leaders at predominately African American churches in a metropolitan city and surrounding areas in North Carolina. The church leaders contacted for the study are members of an interfaith-based HIV/AIDS program. The researchers used semi-standardized interviews to explore how church leaders address HIV/AIDS in the church. The findings indicate that the seven church leaders who participated in the study use a variety of communication channels to disseminate HIV/AIDS information for congregants and their surrounding communities, which include both interpersonal and mass media.

African American church health programs: what works?

The church is a community resource that can help address areas of health disparity for African Americans by offering programs focused on primary prevention. Use of a logic model as a program evaluation tool highlights church priorities and program linkages (problems, goals, objectives, activities, outputs, and outcomes), providing clear evidence about meeting program expectations. Faith community nurses can lead program development, easily incorporating logic models within programming efforts. Church-based programs that document positive outcomes enhance program usefulness and value as a community health resource.

An Agent-Based Model of Healthy Eating with Applications to Hypertension

Changing descriptive social norm in health behavior (“how many people are behaving healthy”) has been shown to be effective in promoting healthy eating. We developed an agent-based model to explore the potential of changing social norm in reducing hypertension among the adult population of Los Angeles County. The model uses the 2007 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) to create a virtual population that mimics the joint distribution of demographic characteristics and health behavior in the Los Angeles County. We calibrated the outcome of hypertension as a function of individual age and fruits/vegetable consumption, based upon the observed pattern in the survey. We then simulated an intervention scenario to promote healthier eating by increasing the visibility (i.e. descriptive social norms) of those who eat at least one serving of fruits/vegetable per day. We compare the hypertension incidence under the status quo scenario and the intervention scenario. We found that the effect size of 5% in social norm enhancement yields a reduction in 5 year hypertension incidence by 10.08%. An effect size of 15% would reduce incidence by 15.50%. In conclusion, the agent-based model built and calibrated around real-world data shows that changes descriptive social norms in healthy eating can be effective to reduce the burden of hypertension. The model can be improved in the future by also including the chronic conditions that are affected by changes in fruits/vegetable consumption.