Mental Health
The Program for Research on Black Americans has been concerned with issues of mental health since it began with the ground-breaking study, the National Survey of Black Americans. Initially, the PRBA's mental health research focused on help-seeking for serious personal problems, including the use of general medical care, specialty mental health care, and informal social support networks. The PRBA was also concerned with the demographic and psychosocial correlates of psychological distress as measured by short symptom checklists.
In the mid-1980's, as a result of the NIMH Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) Program, the PRBA research on mental health began to shift toward the epidemiology of mental disorders, with an emphasis on depression. This shift was reflected in the Program's African American Mental Health Research Center (AAMHRC) which was funded in 1990 by the National Institute of Mental Health. The AAMHRC investigated such issues as the diagnosis (and possible misdiagnosis) of depression and schizophrenia, community conceptualizations of mental disorder, and help-seeking for serious mental illness. In the mid-1990s the AAMHRC was expanded to study issues surrounding the mental health of children and adolescents, and in 1995 the AAMHRC conducted a community psychiatric epidemiologic survey in Detroit, exploring the prevalence of such disorders as major depression, generalized anxiety, and phobia.
Research supported under the AAMHRC led to an emphasis on the chronically mentally ill in urban areas. Thus, for the past decade, PRBA researchers have worked closely with clinicians in the Detroit area to explore the quality of mental health care and treatment of African Americans. This collaboration between academic and public health-delivery-settings provided an opportunity to forge links between individuals with research expertise and "front-line" mental health professionals responsible for delivering community services.
In February 2001, the PRBA mounted a major national psychiatric epidemiologic investigation of mental disorders, The National Survey of American Life (NSAL). The NSAL is part of the National Institute of Mental Health Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys initiative that includes 3 nationally representative surveys: the NSAL, the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, and the National Latino and Asian American Study. This study is the largest investigation of the mental health of African Americans and Caribbeans of African descent ever conducted. Data from the NSAL project permit for the first time the identification of differences between African Americans and blacks from the Caribbean.Future work will continue in these directions while expanding to the investigation of the validity of epidemiologic case-finding and the importance of subjective clinical judgment within the context of ethnic culture.
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Aging and Human Development
PRBA has conducted a broad array of studies to probe African Americans' network of social support, health status, retirement, religion, stress, subjective well being and the ways in which they cope. This rich area of research includes over 50 articles on aging and life span development, as well as books on aging among African Americans. Additionally, one of the Program's faculty members (Robert Taylor) is editor of one of the leading journals in the field of aging. PRBA received funding from the National Institute on Aging for the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research (MCUAAAR). MCUAAR conducts health research on minority elders, particularly African American elders, which will contribute to health promotion and the reduction and elimination of health disparities. MCUAAAR has developed a successful mentoring program focused on building a network of minority investigators committed to becoming productive scholars in the area of health and aging. Health promotion and the reduction and elimination of health disparities are only possible with the effective recruitment and retention of African American and other minority elders in health research. MCUAAAR continues to build on research programs in these areas and to reach out to seniors in the city of Detroit with the explicit purpose of building upon our developed databases of individuals who have agreed to be contacted for health research purposes. MCUAAAR's research has a special emphasis on cognitive functioning and dysfunction, cognitive appraisal, and perception as they relate to a wide range of health outcomes and disorders, the promotion of independence, and the understanding of how demographic and social changes relate to health disparities and their elimination among older African Americans and other minority populations.
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Race and Political Participation
Over the years, PRBA has continued to look at structural socio-cultural influences on the political values, attitudes and behaviors of people of African descent. This work includes the National Black Election Study (1984, 1988) which found that the black electorate was less alienated than many had thought; African Americans were found to be more politically engaged than whites with comparable levels of education. The National Ethnic Politics Study conducted surveys prior to and after the 2004 election to investigate the influence that group attitudes and group-based organizational attachments (especially religious affiliations) have on the political preferences, perceptions, and behaviors of Americans of varying ethnic and racial descent. The NEPS is interested in increasing the knowledge of why and how attachments to one’s racial and ethnic group structures affects the willingness to participate in multiracial coalitions, the evaluations of candidates and policies, and the decision to engage in various political activities. Analysis for this study is ongoing.
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Methodology
The Program for Research on Black Americans is a leader in creating new and innovative research methods in African American communities. Some examples:
During its landmark National Survey of Black Americans, PRBA used a sampling technique that, for the first time, made all African American households -- even African Americans living in areas with a small population of blacks -- eligible to participate in a national survey, thus providing the first truly representative look at Black America. This technique is called the wide area sampling procedure.
PRBA developed a national probability sample to help investigators gather information from three generations within the same family. This has added exciting dimensions to research on the transmission of values in African American families.
Since words often have different meanings among racial groups, PRBA conducted over a dozen focus groups over the course of a year before carefully selecting the language that would be used in the questionnaires for the National Survey on Black Americans. This same approach was used in PRBA's research involving children and adolescents, where researchers carefully looked at the different meanings words may have among different age, race and gender groups, and in PRBA's mental health research which incorporated information gleaned from focus groups with African American adults exploring how African Americans think of and describe emotional and mental health concerns.
PRBA has brought together the foremost research tools to probe issues in African American mental health research. Chart reviews have complemented patient and clinician interviews, which have been combined with sophisticated experimental techniques. The final result: a more comprehensive approach to African American mental health research.
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