Friday, May 9, 2025
5/9/2025
Promoting Resilience and Reducing Health Disparities: Towards a Shift-and-Persist Intervention - PROJECT SUMMARY Stark racial/ethnic disparities in chronic disease reflect greater exposure to deleterious contextual stressors, including cultural stressors (e.g., racial discrimination) and low socioeconomic status. Over the life course, these stressors “get under the skin” via maladaptive psychological and behavioral coping and persistent activation of stress response systems, leading to uneven chronic disease burden by race/ethnicity. By adolescence, cultural and socioeconomic stressors can produce the physiological, behavioral, and psychological precursors to chronic conditions among minoritized youth. Thus, effective coping skills in adolescence are critical to ameliorating the early signals of chronic disease and pre-empting chronic disease progression among minoritized youth. Shift-and-persist (S&P) coping, where one reappraises life stressors (i.e., shifting), while finding meaning and maintaining optimism (i.e., persisting), shows promise as a successful coping strategy to mitigate the early signs of chronic disease among racial/ethnic minority adolescents, yet more investigation is needed prior to designing S&P coping interventions for minority youth. Using data Project PISCES, a 6-wave study of racially/ethnically diverse adolescents, in combination from data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this project addresses three aims: 1) to understand how socioecological assets predict unique trajectories of S&P coping across adolescence 2) elucidate how the health effects of configurations of contextual stress may vary by distinct trajectories of shift-and-persist coping across adolescence and, 3) design and conduct a feasibility study of a digital S&P coping single-session intervention targeting racial/ethnic minority youth. The findings from this program of research will uncover key factors that contribute to the long- term development of S&P coping, provide further clarity on the responsiveness of S&P coping over time to the broader landscape of stressors that shape minoritized youth’s health outcomes, and contribute to evidence regarding intervention modalities that can enhance S&P coping among racial/ethnic minority adolescents. The proposed project combines an interdisciplinary program of research, mentorship, and education/apprenticeships to provide robust training in the following areas: 1) mixture modeling analyses, 2) content expertise development in biopsychosocial models of health and use of biomarkers in research, 3) participatory intervention design and evaluation, and 4) professional development. Training in these domains will propel the candidate towards a long-term career goal of becoming an independent investigator with the ability to develop evidence-based health interventions which address contextual drivers of health among racial/ethnic minority adolescents. Such interventions are crucial to facilitating healthy transitions to adulthood for minoritized youth and disrupting pathways to chronic disease, consistent with the priorities of NIMHD.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).