Reducing Low Birth Weight among African Americans in the Midwest: A Look at How Faith-Based Organizations Are Poised to Inform and Influence Health Communication on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD)

View/ Open
Issue Date
2017-02-04Author
Lumpkins, Crystal Y.
Saint Onge, Jarron M.
Publisher
MDPI
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Low birth weight (LBW) rates remain the highest among African Americans despite public health efforts to address these disparities; with some of the highest racial disparities in the Midwest (Kansas). The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) perspective offers an explanation for how LBW contributes to racial health disparities among African Americans and informs a community directed health communication framework for creating sustainable programs to address these disparities. Trusted community organizations such as faith-based organizations are well situated to explain health communication gaps that may occur over the life course. These entities are underutilized in core health promotion programming targeting underserved populations and can prove essential for addressing developmental origins of LBW among African Americans. Extrapolating from focus group data collected from African American church populations as part of a social marketing health promotion project on cancer prevention, we theoretically consider how a similar communication framework and approach may apply to address LBW disparities. Stratified focus groups (n = 9) were used to discover emergent themes about disease prevention, and subsequently applied to explore how faith-based organizations (FBOs) inform strategic health care (media) advocacy and health promotion that potentially apply to address LBW among African Americans. We argue that FBOs are poised to meet health promotion and health communication needs among African American women who face social barriers in health.
Collections
Citation
Lumpkins, C.Y.; Saint Onge, J.M. Reducing Low Birth Weight among African Americans in the Midwest: A Look at How Faith-Based Organizations Are Poised to Inform and Influence Health Communication on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). Healthcare 2017, 5, 6.
Items in KU ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
We want to hear from you! Please share your stories about how Open Access to this item benefits YOU.