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What keeps people healthy?
In the early 90s, Ron Simons started the Iowa Youth and Families Project while working at Iowa State University. It included 452 families with a seventh grader and examined how a number of factors—family processes, economic hardship, etc.—affected the kids as they grew up.
But Simons was concerned about the lack of diversity, both with regard to race and family structure (all of the families included two parents). He also wanted to start working with the kids when they were younger. So he and colleagues at the Center for Family Research collaborated with African American scholars, sociologists and psychologists to design a new project that would target 10-year-olds from African American families in both Iowa and Georgia.
Then they set out to recruit participants, starting with more than 800 families that included a fifth grader. Initial data collection involved surveys with the children and their primary and secondary caregivers, assessing traits like discipline and affection as well as examining neighborhood data like the number of playgrounds and churches. They also interviewed the children’s best friends, and as they got older, they interviewed their romantic partners as well. Over time they began collecting data not just from the primary caregivers, but about the primary caregivers.
“We tried to look at the major dimensions of life, like education, neighborhood conditions, parent-child interaction, marital interaction, income and economic hardship,” said Simons, now a Regents’ Professor of Sociology in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
The researchers were also interested in issues unique to the African American experience—both positive and negative. They explored structural racism, examining the caregivers’ occupations and the schools the kids attended, noting whether college prep courses were offered in schools that predominantly served Black communities. They documented incidents of discrimination or harassment by police, as well as things like racial socialization—the ways parents guide their children in how to deal with issues related to race, counter negative messages they are likely to encounter, and develop pride in being Black.
“We’re especially interested in the way that things like racial socialization can overcome exposure to ugly incidents,” Simons said.
Steve Beach joined the project nearly a decade after it started.
“It was really an important study in that initial phase,” said Beach, Regents’ Professor of Psychology in the Franklin College. “It gave rise to some observations about what families do to help raise strong youth who are able to deal with the various kinds of challenges that confront them.”
That idea led the team to start looking at more health-related characteristics and collecting more biological measures like height, weight, BMI and blood pressure. These days, they’re also collecting saliva and blood samples.
“That really characterizes the next phase of FACHS—that shift toward trying to understand what keeps people healthy,” Beach said. “What kinds of romantic partner relationship processes? What kinds of family processes? What kinds of broader community processes or internal psychological processes contribute to people being able to stay healthy?”
The researchers were also providing health-related data to any participants whose results—high blood sugar, or high blood pressure, for example—indicated that they might need to see a doctor.
In addition, findings from the FACHS project have informed and given rise to community-based prevention programs like the Strong African American Families Program, designed to support parents and youth during the transition from early adolescence to the teenage years. The Strong African American Families Teen Program is designed for older teens, with a focus on reducing risks such as substance abuse and sexual risk taking. These programs have been implemented in 52 cities and 65 organizations, and 792 facilitators have been trained to lead them. A more recent development has been the Promoting Strong African American Families Program, designed to support two-parent families of youth in early adolescence.
This focus on putting research-based programming back into the community has its roots in the creation of the Center for Family Research. Gene Brody, Regents’ Professor in the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, organized the center around three facets: conducting research with projects like FACHS; evaluating if results can be shaped in a way that can make people’s lives better; and getting the information into the hands of people in the community.
“There are groups at CFR that are dedicated to each of those three different components,” Beach said. “That’s because of the leadership that Gene Brody provided.”
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