“For years, African-Americans have been underrepresented in research,” said lead investigator Linda Cottler, chair of the department of epidemiology at the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions and the College of Medicine. “Reasons have included mistrust of the medical community and actually not ever being asked to participate in research. Our study shows that while the participation rate among African-Americans has been very low, their level of interest in research is high. This is exciting news and may reflect the influence of the community engagement programs of the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards.”

More than 80,000 clinical trials are conducted each year in the United States, yet less than 2 percent of the population participates in them. Women, the elderly, racial and ethnic minorities and rural residents are often underrepresented.

“If we’re not getting the participation of diverse groups when we’re studying medications or interventions, then we don’t know how those treatments will work in real life in different populations,” said Cottler, associate dean for research and planning at the College of Public Health and Health Professions and co-director of community engagement for UF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. “It’s very important for people to have a voice and be represented.”

The new study was designed to learn the health concerns and research perceptions among underrepresented groups with the goal of improving inclusiveness and relevance of health research. The study was conducted by five universities that are recipients of Clinical and Translational Science Awards: Washington University in St. Louis; the University of California, Davis in Davis, Calif.; the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City; and the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y. Community health workers in those cities interviewed adults at local gathering spots, such as barbershops, parks, bus stops, churches, grocery stores, laundromats and health fairs.

Among the 5,979 people interviewed, the top five health concerns were high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, weight and heart problems. Safety and crime were two of the highest-ranked neighborhood concerns.

When asked about their overall interest in medical research, 91 percent of African-Americans expressed an interest in participating compared with 85.5 percent of whites, 84.5 percent of Hispanics and 79 percent of Asians. African-Americans were more likely than other racial groups to express a willingness to participate in research even when it may involve providing blood or genetic samples, granting access to medical records or staying overnight in the hospital.

“This is a groundbreaking study that demonstrates that members of minority communities are interested in research, especially around the diseases and risk factors that are most common in their families and communities,” said Dr. Lloyd Michener, chair of the department of community and family medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine, which was not involved in the study. “As many traditional studies struggle with recruitment, this study suggests that the problem may lie with the lack of awareness of researchers with the methods of community engagement, rather than lack of interest or willingness to engage in research among members of these communities.”

The five universities involved in the current study, along with the University of Florida, are now focused on a new study that aims to better understand outcomes of community engagement programs.

There are many barriers to participating in medical research, and not just for minorities, Cottler said, such as the time of day of required study visits and navigating university campuses. HealthStreet, a community engagement program Cottler founded in St. Louis and Gainesville, Fla., seeks to reduce disparities in health care and improve access to research studies among people who are medically underserved by meeting people out in the community and linking them to services and research opportunities.

“We’re trying to do studies in the community so that it’s much easier for people to participate,” Cottler said. “We are bringing the research to the community instead of bringing the community to the research.”

“We wanted to take a step back and do within-group comparisons of black men with prostate cancer who are native-born African-American, African immigrants and Caribbean immigrants,” said Folakemi Odedina, a UF professor of pharmacy and associate director of health disparities for the UF Shands Cancer Center. “These groups are all genetically predisposed to get prostate cancer, but when you look at their experiences in terms of how the disease affects their lives and how they cope with it, there are a lot of differences among them.”

Odedina’s three-year study, funded by a $1.02 million Department of Defense grant, is the first to compare differences in morbidity, quality of life and survival among diverse groups of black men, who experience a 60 percent greater risk of developing prostate cancer than whites, according to the National Cancer Institute. That risk more than doubles for men with a father or brother who has had prostate cancer. Black men also are more likely to be diagnosed when their cancers are at an advanced stage, and they are more than twice as likely as white men to die of the disease.

“Our study will use ‘grounded theory’ to look at the broad continuum of prostate cancer care for these men in an effort to understand how to successfully deal with the disease through every phase, including prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship and advocacy,” Odedina said.

Grounded theory is a form of ethnographical analysis wherein investigators don’t begin with a hypothesis as the theoretical framework for the study. Instead, investigators begin by collecting data — in this case, interviews with black men and their wives or caregivers about their experiences, beliefs and feelings about the detection, treatment and survival of prostate cancer. During the grounded theory process of social-science super sleuthing, hypotheses are then reverse-engineered from the data.

To capture this data, 2,000 black men will be randomly selected from the Florida Cancer Data System database. In 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, that database represented about 38,000 black men in Florida.

Investigators will contact each man via telephone or postcard in an effort to identify which group he may fall into, whether native-born African-American, African immigrant or Caribbean immigrant. Sixty of these men will be asked to participate in in-depth interviews, some of which will use a method called “photo voice.” In this method, each participant is given a disposable camera and asked to take photos over the course of a week of people, places and objects that define his prostate cancer experience. At the end of the week, the photos are printed and each man is asked to tell the stories behind the photos and their impact on his prostate cancer experience.

As part of the prostate cancer care and survivorship model for black men, the study also will produce a video documentary of 30 of the men and their caregivers talking about the full range of their prostate cancer experiences. The team also will explore the process of how men move from being prostate cancer patients to becoming prostate cancer advocates in their communities. Workshops throughout the state will take place during the final phase of the effort, to report findings back to African-American, African and Caribbean communities and to cultivate prostate cancer advocates in those communities.

“I think the whole thing we have to look at, in reality, is that for many people, the word cancer conjures up such fear that the fear often times overrides the individual’s need to get the facts that will enable them to fight the disease,” said Virgil H. Simons, a prostate cancer survivor and founder of The Prostate Net, an international, not-for-profit prostate cancer patient advocacy organization. “This study is important because it will help people understand some of those things can be controlled and dealt with on an individual basis, and identify those things that can be addressed on a community basis.

This is the first accurate estimate of the frequency of the proteins, called autoantibodies, the researchers say. The findings appear online and in an upcoming print edition of the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism.

“This study is a baseline that can help physicians understand, when they identify autoantibodies, how often these proteins indicate disease,” said lead author Edward Chan, a professor of oral biology in the UF College of Dentistry.

The body produces proteins called antibodies to fight against infections, but in some cases, these proteins become turncoats, attacking the body’s own tissues instead. The most common autoantibodies, called antinuclear antibodies, are frequently used as a marker for autoimmune diseases. Although antinuclear antibodies are common, their presence does not always indicate disease.

Chan, and co-lead author Dr. Minoru Satoh, an associate professor of rheumatology and clinical immunology in the UF College of Medicine, along with national colleagues, studied five years’ worth of data from almost 5,000 people, collected through the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey. The survey amasses a host of health information from adults and children around the country using questionnaires, blood tests and other medical examinations.

No previous researchers have used such a large sample, representative of the general population, to study how frequently autoantibodies occur, Chan said.

The researchers looked for the rogue antibodies in blood serum using an advanced microscope technique that uses a fluorescent dye to selectively light up antinuclear antibodies.

They found that nearly 14 percent of the study population had antinuclear antibodies. The antibodies were more common in African-Americans, women and older adults. The frequency of antinuclear antibodies tends to increase with age then level off over time. And women were more likely to develop antinuclear antibodies as they age.

Unexpectedly, autoantibodies were less common in overweight and obese individuals than in people of normal weight.

“Being obese is often considered a factor contributing to many autoimmune diseases,” Chan said. “So we expected that overweight people might have more autoantibodies. But that is not what we observed.”

Judy Van De Water, a professor of rheumatology and clinical immunology at the University of California, Davis, who was not part of the study, was intrigued that autoantibodies were less common in overweight individuals. She chalks it up to the appetite-reducing hormone leptin — which is produced in fatty tissue and acts as a marker of inflammation. Leptin is often low in people who are obese but high in people who have antibodies that attack the body’s own tissues.

Future studies might look at how exposure to chemicals and other substances in the environment affects the levels of antinuclear antibodies in the immune system, as well as how those levels change over time.

“This is an important study that will serve as the basis for future research on the causes of these antibodies and related diseases,” said the study’s senior author Dr. Fred Miller, acting clinical director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Services, which funded the study. “It’s a first step in the process.”

To assess attitudes among white voters in a southern state about Barack Obama’s historic election to the presidency, two UF political scientists analyzed results from four statewide telephone surveys — each involving between 449 and 829 respondents – conducted in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009. Their study was published in the August issue of the electronic journal The Forum.

“We didn’t see a lot of evidence that race was paramount in the way people thought about Obama,” said Michael Martinez, a UF political science professor who did the study with UF political scientist Stephen Craig. “In fact, quite a number of white Floridians – both those who are Republicans and those who are Democrats – took pride in a black man being able to secure the nomination and win the election.”

They estimated that two-thirds of white non-Hispanic Floridians surveyed – 65 percent – were “proud or inspired” by a black candidate’s ability to win his party’s nomination for president. While that sentiment was nearly universal among those who preferred Obama – 89 percent – it was also shared by a substantial number of McCain supporters, 47 percent.

“I was surprised by the magnitude of the pride factor and that it extended into the McCain camp at a time when there were plenty of hard feelings on both sides,” Craig said.

Despite these positive feelings, the study found that racism persists. An estimated one-third of the respondents – 34 percent – were upset by “blacks pushing themselves where they are not wanted,” a statement used in the survey to assess racist sentiment.

“There are still racists out there, but they appear not to be applying those attitudes to a political campaign in which one candidate happens to be an African-American,” Craig said. “It could be that for many of these people race is more important when it comes to who their daughter is dating or which family is moving next door to them than it is in a political context.”

Part of the reason that race did not emerge as a major issue in the election may stem from Obama’s biracial background and his efforts not to call attention to his blackness, Martinez said.

“During the campaign Obama went out of his way to try to overcome any anticipated problems with racially conservative white voters by noting that his mother was white and he was raised a good portion of his life by white grandparents,” Martinez said. “It was no accident that he emphasized Midwestern values as a way to connect with white America.”

Perhaps more important than Obama’s image is the growing partisan nature of American politics and tendency for voters to see the last presidential election as a referendum on the Bush administration, illustrated by the Obama campaign’s twin mantras of “change” and “no third term,” he said.

“Many people judge political candidates by the state of the economy,” Martinez said. “In 2008 this country’s economic situation was not doing well prior to September and it was doing terribly afterwards, which really handicapped McCain going into the November election.”

Measuring prejudice can be tricky because people are often reluctant to reveal socially undesirable responses, Craig said. The researchers got around this by using a technique designed to ask about racial attitudes indirectly, he said.

In each survey, participants were divided into different groups. In the first survey, for example, one group was asked to state how many of four statements, such as “the way gasoline prices keep going up” upset them – but without revealing which ones. Another group responded to the same statements as well as one additional one: “a black candidate running for president.”

Any difference in the average number of upset-generating statements given by the two groups was then attributed to the additional item about a black candidate, Craig said.

In two of the other surveys, respondents were asked to respond to the same four statements. In one, the additional statement was whether they were upset by “a black man being elected president,” and in the other if they were upset by “blacks pushing themselves where they are not wanted.”

One survey also asked respondents whether a different set of four statements, such as “American athletes participating in the Olympics” made them proud or inspired. The additional statement some respondents received was “the fact that a black candidate is able to win his party’s nomination for president.”

The study is accessible online at http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol8/iss2/art4/.

The study also showed that taking stock of socio-cultural factors might improve our understanding of how genes influence individual health — regardless of race.

Consider high blood pressure, a complex disease governed both by genetic and environmental factors. Not only was social classification better than genetic-based ancestry at predicting disease status, it also brought to light a link between a particular gene and blood pressure that was not apparent when only genetic ancestry was considered.

The study, published today in the journal PLoS ONE, is the first to rigorously combine both socio-cultural and genetic data to simultaneously test the relative contributions of each to racial inequalities in health.

“What’s really groundbreaking is that we’ve got both types of data and they’re of equivalent sophistication,” said co-author Connie Mulligan, an associate professor of anthropology and an associate director of the UF Genetics Institute.

The results suggest that previously reported associations between genetic ancestry and health might be accounted for by socio-cultural factors related to race and racism, and not necessarily to genetic differences between races. It also suggests that including socio-cultural factors can strengthen genetics studies and help reveal how social inequalities can lead to biological differences.

“We have to take seriously the way race shapes people’s experiences, the environments they live in and their life chances,” said lead author Clarence C. Gravlee, an assistant professor of anthropology at UF. “In day to day life, people often assume that race exists as biology. Most anthropologists and geneticists reject that idea and see race instead as a cultural construct. The point of our paper is that race is so embedded in our society that it affects biology by shaping the types of environments that people live in.”

How social and or genetic factors drive racial inequalities in health and the role of race in genetic and biomedical research are the source of much controversy and study. Some scientists see race as useful for pinpointing gene-based susceptibility to complex diseases, but others caution that looking at race from a purely genetic standpoint can mask social causes of racial inequalities.

“We have to look at these in a way that will allow us to tell the whole story, not from one side or the other,” said Jay Kaufman, an associate professor of epidemiology, biostatistics and occupational health at McGill University and author of the upcoming book “Racing in Circles: Myths about Genes and Race in Biomedical Research.” Kaufman was not involved in the UF study.

In general, members of racial minorities in the United States suffer poorer health, and more die prematurely compared with their white counterparts. African-Americans are three times more likely than whites to die from high blood pressure, according to the American Heart Association.

“The sheer scale of inequalities in sickness and death deserves our attention,” Gravlee said. “Researchers have an obligation to explain the origins of these inequalities and to identify social factors that could be targeted for policy change.”

To examine the link between African ancestry and blood pressure, the UF team studied 87 adults in Puerto Rico, using two variables for which “race” is often used as a surrogate: genetic ancestry and social classification.

Genetic ancestry was assessed using gene variants that show large frequency differences among groups from different continents. Social classification was assessed by observers to estimate how people are perceived in everyday life in terms of skin pigmentation, or “color” (pronounced coh-lohr). The researchers found that the three major “color” categories had overlapping genetic ancestry, and that there was a strong link between “color” and blood pressure, but not between genetic ancestry and blood pressure.

Next, they looked at whether taking account of social factors changed our understanding of genes thought to affect hypertension. When only genetic ancestry was considered, no association was evident between candidate genes for hypertension and blood pressure. But when “color” and socio-economic status were included in the analysis, a significant association between the gene variant and blood pressure was uncovered.

“One of the important points here is that you can have an association between two biological variables like genetic ancestry and blood pressure, but it could be that the social and cultural implications of having African ancestry is what is driving this association,” Gravlee said.

Health differences could arise from differing stresses people face based on how society sees and treats them.

“There’s no doubt about the fact that perceptions matter,” Kaufman said. “This article reinforces the idea that if you don’t pay attention to how people are perceived you miss a big chunk of the story.”

The researchers found that the group of people who carried the associated genetic variant also contained multiple categories of “color” and socio-economic status. When these different socio-cultural categories were separated, the protective effect of the genetic variant became evident.

”What’s exciting about our study, is that we can show the value of including socio-cultural data by revealing a genetic association that would otherwise have been missed,” Mulligan said. “This is important in convincing other researchers that it is worthwhile to include nongenetic data in a genetic study rather than simply controlling for nongenetic factors.”

Many pundits claimed that newly registered black voters inspired by Obama’s candidacy to flock to the polls resulted in states narrowly approving amendments that opposed legalizing gay unions, said Daniel Smith, a UF political science professor and the study’s co-author.

However, Smith’s study found that education levels were about five times as important as race in Florida counties’ approval of Amendment 2, which defined marriage as a legal bond strictly between a man and a woman in the state’s constitution. Smith is scheduled to present the findings to the American Political Science Association in Toronto on Thursday.

“Our research challenges the assumption that the surge of black voters who turned out in unusually large numbers in support of Obama were also in favor of banning gay marriage,” Smith said. “We found that it really wasn’t race that led to an increased support for a ban on gay marriage but whether or not someone was educated.”

Controlling for other socioeconomic and political factors, for each additional 1 percent of a county’s population with a bachelor of arts degree, there was nearly an equal 1 percent decrease in support for Amendment 2, Smith said. By comparison, every 1 percent increase in a county’s black population led to only two-tenths of a percentage point increase in support for Amendment 2, he said.

“Education is so important because it increases exposure to those who are different,” he said. “Studies show very clearly that the more educated people are the more tolerant they are of differences.”

Because blacks tend to be conservative on social issues and attend church in large numbers, blacks were expected to hurt prospects for legalizing gay marriage, Smith said. Dozens of post-election news stories and political blogs drew upon exit polls to blame the surge of black voters for the passage of anti-gay marriage measures in California and Florida, he said.

According to CNN exit polls in Florida, 71 percent of black voters cast ballots for Amendment 2, compared with 60 percent of white voters, Smith said. Even among young people between the ages of 18 and 29, who tend to be more supportive of same-sex marriage, 71 percent of blacks supported the measure, compared with 49 percent of whites, he said.

But respondents may feel pressured to give socially acceptable answers in exit polls, and the margin of error is high because of the small sample of blacks, Smith said.

“Our analysis suggests that these public opinion polls may have overstated the extent to which black and white voters differed on the issue of same-sex marriage,” he said. “We found that party identification, education and religiosity were much stronger predictors of a respondent’s attitude toward gay marriage than race was.”

Gay rights groups have questioned whether the black community is worth engaging in their efforts to win approval for same-sex marriages, Smith said. States that have passed these measures, including Iowa, New Hampshire and Maine, are largely white, he said.

“A very vibrant debate is going on in the gay and lesbian community about whether there should be any outreach towards minorities, particularly African-Americans,” he said. “Our research shows that writing off the black community, especially these newly mobilized voters that Obama brought into the fold, is very short-sighted.”

Equality Florida, one of the two major organizations in the state to campaign against Amendment 2, targeted blacks in its efforts to oppose the measure, Smith said. In studying polling data before the election, the group’s leaders believed blacks, though socially conservative, could be persuaded to align themselves with the gay rights cause, he said.

“They were able to approach and engage the African-American community that this is an issue of importance to the black community by making arguments along civil rights lines,” he said. “Equality Florida just lacked the financial resources to make the case to Obama supporters.”

Smith collaborated with Stephanie Slade, a political science graduate student at American University who did the research while an honors undergraduate student at UF.

In a study of 63 elementary schools in Chicago, researchers found there were 29 alcohol ads on average in the two-block radius surrounding schools with larger Hispanic populations compared with an average of four ads around schools where less than one-fifth of students were Hispanic. In all, the researchers counted 771 alcohol ads around the 27 schools with more Hispanic students and only 160 ads around the 36 schools with fewer Hispanic students, the researchers recently reported online in the journal Ethnicity & Health.

“This is a concern because we know from past research that exposure to ads is associated with alcohol use and intentions to use alcohol,” said Kelli Komro, an associate professor of epidemiology in the UF College of Medicine and Institute for Child Health Policy and the study’s principal investigator. “We also know from previous research that Hispanic children are at increased risk for alcohol use at young ages.”

The ads around these schools were also more likely to contain cartoon images and animals, which other studies have shown can influence children, Komro said. Some of the ads, which ranged from billboards to signs around stores and bus stops, also seemed to attempt to tie into Hispanic culture by featuring Spanish words and the colors from the Mexican flag. About 70 percent of Chicago’s Hispanic residents are Mexican, the study states.

The schools the researchers studied were all located within the city limits of Chicago and most housed kindergarten through eighth-grade classes. Most of the students in these schools were from racial minorities — about half the children were African-American, while about 25 percent were Hispanic — and came from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

One key difference was that schools with more Hispanic students tended to have fewer African-American students and vice versa.

Overall, students were about seven times more likely to see advertising if they attended a school with at least a 20 percent Hispanic student body.

There are more than 45 million Hispanic people living in the United States, about 10 million more than there were in 2000, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. A report the center released this month shows that the bulk of the population boom stems from more Hispanic children being born here rather than immigration. About 20 percent of public school students across the country are Hispanic, the report shows.

“According to previous studies, Hispanic youth are at higher risk for alcohol use than either white or African-American youth,” said Keryn Pasch, an assistant professor of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas and the study’s lead author. “Exposure to alcohol advertising has been shown to increase alcohol use and intention to use alcohol, and marketers are aggressively capitalizing on the rapidly growing Hispanic population, targeting their marketing efforts at this group. Given these facts, I think it’s critical to determine if alcohol advertising around schools is related to the ethnicity of the students and, if it is, to take steps to reduce the exposure of high-risk groups to this negative influence.”

To combat the problem, communities could band together to demand to have fewer alcohol ads around schools. This occurred in several African-American communities in Chicago where organizers were able to successfully lobby for fewer alcohol ads, Komro said. Also, ordinances that limit advertising around schools could be strengthened to further shield children from alcohol advertising, Komro said.

“Policies could be expanded to a wider range around the schools, especially given what we know about how effective ads are, both alcohol and tobacco ads, in influencing children’s behavior,” Komro said.

But before you write off a nonreligious teen as one not bound for college, take note: Researchers still aren’t sure why “religiosity” and college graduation are connected.

“For most religious communities represented in our study, there is a strong correlation between religiosity and degree attainment,” said Ana Puig, research director and affiliate faculty member in counselor education at UF’s College of Education. “However, correlation does not mean causality.”

Puig and UF counselor education professor Mary Ann Clark joined UF alumnus Sang Min Lee in an analysis of data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, a massive, federally funded study of student outcomes that began 20 years ago. Lee, who is now a professor at Korea University, was the principal investigator on the project.

The study, which appeared late last year in the journal Counseling and Values, won the Biggs-Pine Award for Writing Excellence this spring from the Association for Spiritual, Ethical and Religious Values in Counseling.

The researchers used data from a survey of 11,551 eighth-grade students in 1988 – a survey that asked a number of lifestyle-related questions, including questions about religious faith – and compared it with information collected from the same students eight years after they graduated from high school.

They found that among most religions or denominations, students who self-identified as “very religious” in eighth grade were far more likely to have, or be on their way to getting, a college degree – when compared with students who said they belonged to a religious faith, but identified as “not religious” or “somewhat religious.”

The effect was most pronounced in the Muslim community, with “very religious” Muslim students nearly four times as likely to attain a degree as “nonreligious” Muslims. All other groups in the study showed a statistically significant increase in degree attainment among “very religious” students.

The effect was negligible or nonexistent in groups with high across-the-board degree attainment, including Jewish students, Episcopalians and students who identified as belonging to the broad group of “Eastern religions.”

When the results were broken down by ethnicity, the researchers found that a high degree of religiosity was related to degree attainment in white, African-American and Hispanic students. Lee noted that religiosity was not a significant factor in degree attainment in the Asian-American population.

The researchers say relationship between religiosity and degree attainment may be due to certain positive behavioral effects related to participation in a religious group. They cite previous studies that link religious participation to reduced delinquent behavior – a factor likely to affect educational outcomes.

They also note that some parents of academically successful children cite religious values as a factor in their success. Clark has been conducting interviews with parents of secondary school students for an unrelated study on gender and school achievement, and she says the topic of religiosity comes up quite often.

“I’ve been surprised at how often parents brought up religion as a factor in their child’s academic performance, even though we weren’t even asking about it,” Clark said. Even so, it is possible that good grades and religious involvement stem from the same root cause, such as a specific parenting style, the researchers said. The researchers also note that the survey suffers the same flaws as any other study using self-reported data, and that the results may reflect a tendency, among high-achieving students, to portray themselves in a positive light.

While the study shows outcomes of students who identify with a religion and still describe themselves as “nonreligious,” it does not reflect the religious outcomes of atheists or agnostics. While the survey allowed students to select “none” as their religion, respondents in that category were too few to be included in the analyses. The same was true for Mormon respondents and those who identified as “other Christian” and for Native American students.

However, the study does offer insights that teachers and counselors can use in improving student performance, Clark said. Because religious differences are often too hot a topic for the classroom, Clark said, educators may feel inclined to steer conversation away from the topic of faith. However, it is important that educators listen to what students are saying, and acknowledge the role religion may play in their school lives.

“Students and parents are saying that religion is an important part of their academic lives, and we need to listen to that,” Clark said.

“Within African-American and Latino families, children follow a cultural tradition that places a high value on respecting, obeying and learning from elders, and in our study they did indeed show more respect for parental authority,” said Julia Graber, a UF psychology professor.

However, when African-American and Latina girls do act up, their mothers consider the arguments more intense than those reported by white mothers who clash with their daughters, said Graber, whose study is published in the February issue of the Journal of Family Psychology.

Hispanic and black mothers, who value strong family connections, a deep sense of family loyalty and the importance of extended family and social support networks, seemed to be much more upset if daughters fell short of cultural, good girl expectations, Graber said. “It may be just the kind of issue that pushes their buttons more, thinking of their daughter as no longer being the good, respectful daughter,” she said.

For all girls, discipline was the only factor that influenced how much conflict they perceived in the relationship. The stricter and harsher mothers were, the less conflict their daughters reported, Graber said. However, as girls get older, stricter discipline may lead to greater conflict if girls try to disagree, she said.

The study differs from other research on mother-daughter conflict in that instead of looking at adolescence, it examines girls in middle to late childhood, at an average age of 8½, Graber said. The teenage years are naturally turbulent times for families, but understanding what happens immediately preceding them sets the stage for a smoother or rockier transition, she said.

Teen conflict is a risk for other behavior-related problems, Graber said. “It does seem that when there are higher levels of conflict, those daughters are more likely to have adjustment problems in terms of feeling more depression, sadness, anxiety and those problems,” she said.

The intensity of the conflicts aside, the study found that mothers’ and daughters’ reports of the frequency of conflict were similar, Graber said. The study, which Graber did with Sara Villanueva Dixon, a St. Edward’s University psychology professor, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a Columbia University child development professor, involved 45 African-American, 23 Latina and 65 white girls recruited through fliers while in the third grade and their mothers. The girls and their families were from racially integrated, working and middle-class communities in a large metropolitan area.

The girls’ respect for authority was observed during a series of videotaped interactions with their mothers. Daughters were scored on their listening behaviors, which included attending to their mothers when their mothers were speaking, acknowledging their mothers’ comments and not interrupting their mothers. They also were evaluated for defiant behaviors, such as disobeying their mothers’ requests, being unwilling to cooperate with their mothers and ignoring their mothers during the interaction.

Not only do children need to be more aware of the expectations their parents have for them, but mothers may also want to reassess their feelings about particular issues, she said.

“The challenge for African-American and Latina mothers is they are in an environment where their children are potentially getting messages at school, on television and elsewhere about what normal childhood behavior is like that may conflict with their own expectations for these behaviors,” Graber said.

“In the higher conflict families where mothers and daughters are arguing much more often there seems to be less productive resolution going on and less learning of those skills,” she said. “Everybody feels mad afterwards rather than feeling the potential of moving forward.”

“This is a fascinating study that enhances our understanding of ethnic and racial differences in parent-child relationships,” said Judi Smetana, a University of Rochester psychologist. “One of its strengths is that it examines in a very careful and detailed way how different cultural values are expressed in mother-daughter interactions and how those values influence the quality of family relationships.”

The University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute in cooperation with King’s alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta kicked off the first of the webcasts at 10 a.m. EDT on April 4, when experts from UF and Morehouse, along with institutions in China, India, Kenya and South Africa, discussed in real-time King’s meaning for the 21st century, said James Oliverio, director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute. The other three programs are also scheduled at 10 a.m. on successive Fridays in April, and all can be viewed on the Internet at www.worldhouse.morehouse.edu.

In his “World House” speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King said “modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”

The outreach developed from a collaboration between UF and Morehouse College, the recipient of about 10,000 pieces of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal writings in 2006. Terry Mills, a former UF dean who moved to Morehouse last year to become the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the idea came in discussions he had with Oliverio about how the two institutions might use the acquisition in educational programming.

The innovativeness of the technology at Digital Worlds Institute, which Mills called the “Imac Theater of Videoconferencing” for its ability to allow multiple partners around the globe to engage in an interactive, unified virtual space, made UF the natural choice to help produce the program, he said. “There are also geographic and historical reasons for the connection, notably Gainesville’s close proximity to St. Augustine where Dr. King had led freedom marches as well as its location near the site of the Rosewood massacre,” Mills said.

The purpose of the global discussions is not only to remind the world of King’s legacy but to keep his vision alive, as his message continues to have relevance today, Oliverio said.

“This is a memorial to Dr. King, not just in the sense of looking backward to some academic papers in a museum, but honoring his life’s work in the hopes that students of today at Morehouse, UF and the other participating institutions will reassess their involvement with their own societies in the same way that Dr. King took a stand against oppression of African Americans in the United States,” he said. “Even at the beginning of the 21st century human kind is still butchering each other in tribal conflicts over economic materialism and resources.”

Although King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is well-known among college students, many are not familiar with the “World House” concept mentioned in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and his writings where he discusses the need to fight racism, war and poverty, he said.

“Many people who are involved in the labor movement see African-American workers, other minorities and women as being the key to any hopes of unions recovering some of their organizational strength,” said Robert Zieger, a UF history professor. His new book “For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865” was published this fall by University Press of Kentucky.

With the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy, growing numbers of jobs are emerging in places such as hospitals, nursing homes and entertainment complexes, with minorities taking many of these positions, Zieger said. “If unions don’t organize these workers, they’re not going to be able to sustain a very viable and extensive labor movement,” he said.

As organized labor continues its decline by representing an increasingly smaller segment of the American work force, a bright spot has been the Service Employees International Union, which counts janitors, hospital and nursing home workers and home care staffers among its members, Zieger said. “They are the fastest growing union in the country, with about a million and a half members, and they have had a number of outstanding successes in recent years,” he said.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union, which represents police officers, building inspectors, grounds workers, maintenance workers and administrative and clerical workers and others in the nonfederal public sector, also has a large membership, much of it consisting of women and people of color, he said.

“It’s important to recognize that even in a state like Florida, which we don’t normally think of as being a union-friendly state, there are 400,000 union members, and they, along with their families, represent an important potential political voting bloc,” he said.

In the 2000 presidential election, a coalition of organized labor and blacks worked together to target the minority vote, Zieger said. The formation of this black-labor coalition is an important historical development that has received little attention, he said.

“If a Democratic president is elected in 2008, that, along with legislation now pending before Congress that would make the process of union recognition easier, could generate a rebirth of organized labor,” he said. “If it does, it is likely to feature minority workers.”

Until the 1930s, organized labor’s record on race, particularly that of the American Federation of Labor and the railroad unions, was poor, Zieger said. Many unions explicitly barred blacks from membership and even those that did not actively discourage them from joining maintained collective bargaining agreements with employers that excluded blacks, he said.

An exception was the integrated United Mine Workers, the largest union in the first half of the 20th century, which had black officers, even in the South, he said.

In the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, actively recruited blacks to work in the rapidly growing auto, steel, textile, meatpacking and rubber tire industries that marked the rise of industrial unionism, Zieger said. “CIO leaders realized that blacks had come to play an important part in these mass-production industries and that if you wanted to organize these industries, you had to organize black workers,” he said.

Even so, blacks tended to occupy less-skilled positions in the factories and often felt that even those unions dedicated to the principles of racial egalitarianism, such as the United Auto Workers Union, weren’t sufficiently responsive to black workers, Zieger said.

“There were tensions going through the post-World War II period and these continue in some ways even today,” he said. “But I think if you look at the current AFL-CIO, which is the primary labor organization in the country, with headquarters in Washington, it seeks to be very responsive to black workers.”

Paul Ortiz, a community studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wrote “Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920,” said Zieger’s book is a crowning achievement. “Professor Zieger’s ‘For Jobs and Freedom’ is the premiere historical synthesis on the complex relationships between African Americans and labor unions from the 19th century to the present,” he said. “It will be the standard text in this field for years to come.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Restrictions to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States are having the perverse effect of encouraging those who are already here to stay by any means necessary, a new University of Florida study finds.

The culprit is tightened post 9-ll security, which has prompted immigrants to skip visits to their homelands because of the risk of not being allowed back into the U.S., said UF anthropology professor Maxine L. Margolis.

“These draconian measures do not deter undocumented immigrants from trying to enter the country so much as discourage those who are already here from returning home,” said Margolis, whose research is scheduled to be published in the January issue of the journal Human Organization. “The restrictions are doing exactly the opposite of what they intend to do by locking these people in place.”

The research is based on interviews with Brazilian immigrants and applies to other nationalities as well, Margolis said. “Whether they are Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans or any other group with a large undocumented population, they are experiencing the same problems,” she said.

Unlike in the past, when most illegal immigrants made a single, permanent move to the United States, in the last few decades they have tended to move back and forth between their home and host countries for a variety of economic and social reasons, Margolis said. Many foreigners come here temporarily for jobs paying anywhere from four to 10 times as much money as they would earn in their native countries in order to support their families, but they may return home briefly to see a sick relative or to attend a family wedding or funeral, she said.

It has become increasingly difficult, however, for immigrants to leave the United States and return since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the government tightened restrictions for tourist visas, increased deportation of undocumented foreigners, strengthened border patrols and made it harder for immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and other legal documents, she said.

Many of these people have children, investments, jobs and apartments in this country and don’t want to risk being unable to return, Margolis said. Even with valid passports and visas, they can be denied re-entry if they previously overstayed the limit on their visa, she said.

One Brazilian immigrant, who owned a floor tile company in New York and had lived in the state for several years with his wife and American-born daughter, flew to Brazil when he learned his elderly father was seriously ill, Margolis said. On his return, he was stopped at JFK International Airport and was deported to Brazil for having previously overstayed his tourist visa, she said.

Some undocumented immigrants have found creative ways to get around the regulations and avoid detection, often at considerable expense, she said.

One Brazilian woman living in North Carolina who was desperate to visit her family returned to the U.S. through the Caribbean islands where she boarded a cruise ship bound for Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, Margolis said. Correctly assuming authorities were unlikely to search for illegal immigrants aboard cruise ships, she got through with her Brazilian passport and flew back to the states, she said.

Margolis’ study also revealed immigrants developing schemes to circumvent the requirements for driver’s licenses. Typically, Brazilian immigrants in the Northeast load up in minivans and drive to states such as Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina, which do not require a green card or valid Social Security card for a license, but some have traveled as far as the West Coast, she said.

So far none of the proposed federal, state or local immigration bills has included a provision that would allow immigrants to travel home to visit family and friends and be assured re-entry into the United States, she said.

Conrad Kottak, a University of Michigan anthropology professor, said Margolis “provides a valuable case study of how one group of transnational migrants — Brazilians in the United States — have been affected by changes in American border policies since the 9/11 attacks. Many of her findings no doubt apply as well to other new immigrant communities.”

Pilgrimages, retreats and conventions are fast becoming one of the most reliable and desirable forms of income for the travel industry, said Harrison Pinckney IV. He did the study for his master’s thesis in UF’s department of tourism, recreation and sports management. Participants usually bring along their families and stretch their visits over three to four days, making a mini-vacation out of the affair by shopping, visiting museums and eating out, Pinckney said. He is now working on a doctoral degree in recreation, parks and tourism at Texas A&M University.

“There may be 80,000 people in town, but they’re not the kind to show up at bars and drive home drunk,” he said. “Because they have their kids with them they might go to a family restaurant or catch a movie afterwards.”

Another advantage of these religious gatherings is they are less likely to be canceled because many churches’ bylaws require congregations to hold annual conventions, Pinckney said. “After 9-11 there was a decline in attendance at professional conferences, but the numbers stayed steady for church conferences and in some cases even increased,” he said.

Although greater attendance at large church-oriented events is part of a broad social trend, Pinckney focused on black churches in his study. Historically, the church has assumed great importance to blacks because it was one of the few places in society that welcomed them, particularly before desegregation, when black-owned businesses were rare, he said.

“More than just a church, it became whatever the African-American community wanted it to be — a civic center, an after-school program and then a summer camp, even a homeless shelter,” he said.

Pinckney distributed questionnaires at seven Church of God by Faith congregations in Florida and Georgia during 2004. A total of 102 participants returned the surveys at the end of the church service or gave them to their pastors the following week.

Eighty-two percent reported having traveled to at least one Church of God by Faith national event. Sixty-one percent said they attended the four-day national convention for its entire length, while 26 percent said they were there for three days. The remaining 13 percent of churchgoers reported going for two days, with no one reporting a shorter visit.

While at the conventions, churchgoers reported sampling a variety of outside events such as sightseeing, shopping, visiting family or friends, and attending local performances or sporting events. The most popular activity was shopping– 30 percent reported heading for retail outlets –followed by visiting family and friends, 21 percent. Attending sports events was least popular, attracting only 5 percent.

Like major sporting events, church-oriented special events have been a financial boon to cities, with some attracting more than 80,000 visitors at a time and generating as much as $18 million for the local economy, Pinckney said. MegaFest, a religious event in Atlanta, draws about 150,000 a year, he said.

Lori Pennington-Gray, director for UF’s Center for Tourism Research and Development and a professor in UF’s tourism, recreation and sports management department who supervised Pinckney’s research, said the travel industry is recognizing the importance of such events by assembling more meeting planners specializing in this type of market, she said.

Because church-oriented special events operate on such a grand scale, they must usually be planned at least a couple of years in advance, Pennington-Gray said. “That makes them less vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy than segments of the leisure market where people’s discretionary income is affected if the economy takes a downturn,” she said.

DeWayne Woodring, executive director of the Religious Conference Management Association headquartered in Indianapolis, said a survey conducted by his organization shows that the number of religious meetings grew 195 percent in the past 10 years.

“Meetings are becoming more and more important because within this increasingly complex and global society, people feel a need to meet with others with whom they share a common faith, bond or purpose,” he said.

“A man and a woman of different races in the movies have a greater statistical probability of dying than of getting married or dating seriously,” said Nadia Ramoutar, who did the research for her doctoral dissertation in mass communications at UF and is now a communications professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine.

White women have not appeared in an interracial relationship in a top-selling film since “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, she said. American Indian women have not been portrayed this way since “Dances with Wolves” in 1995, and the last time an American Indian man was part of such a union was in “The Trial of Billy Jack” in 1974.

The findings are important, Ramoutar said, because popular films do more than entertain: They are a powerful means of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

“The results of this study sadly show that racial and ethnic segregation in romantic relationships is heavily practiced in Hollywood blockbuster films and has become more common rather than less common in the past four decades,” Ramoutar said.

The study analyzed interracial relationships in blockbuster Hollywood films between 1967 and 2005, beginning with the landmark social commentary “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Ramoutar selected the 15 top-grossing box office hits of each year for her sample. Of these, she found 36 films with interracial couples.

Forty-two percent of the women in such partnerships were victims of violence. “Lying on the table like a piece of sushi” is how police described Cheryl, the drug-addicted, sexually deviant female character in “Rising Sun” responsible for three men’s deaths who dies herself.

The scripts use certain interracial combinations more than others and avoid some entirely, the study found. No Arabic or eastern Indian appears in any film, for example.

The most common racial coupling was a white male with an Asian female, who was often portrayed as a “model minority,” in that she was smarter, more compliant and less sexually aggressive than women of other races, Ramoutar said.

But while Asians were the most common women of color, representing nearly one-quarter of interracial romances, Asian men were practically invisible, Ramoutar said. The only major Asian male in such a relationship in nearly four decades was Jackie Chan’s character in the 2001 movie “Rush Hour 2,” she said.

And a Hispanic woman playing a CIA double agent who briefly falls in love with Chan’s character marks the first time a Hispanic female appears in an interracial relationship at all during those years, said Ramoutar.

Hispanic men also were marginalized, cast in only three movies, Ramoutar said. The women they were paired with, including Michele Pfeiffer’s character Elvira in “Scarface,” were drug addicts with no purpose in life but getting high, she said.

“Despite the large number of women actively employed in the American workplace, the most commonly portrayed occupation of all the women in these films is that they have no identifiable occupation,” Ramoutar said. The second most popular occupation was working as a spy, followed by a tie between prostitute and entertainer, she said.

While white women in interracial relationships came across as either morally corrupt or socially inept or as victims of physical or sexual abuse, women of color who become involved with white men were often presented as erotic, exotic and possessing exceptional talents, she said.

“(Chinese-American) Alex in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ is a sky-diving, computer-hacking, black belt martial artist who can defeat a room full of men – her only misgiving is that she is a bad cook,” she said. “And Charlotte Lewis’ character in ‘The Golden Child’ can leap over tall walls or from high buildings, usually just wearing Eddie Murphy’s shirt and her underwear.”

The majority of black women on the big screen were pale skinned like Halle Berry, with dark-skinned actresses rarely cast except as villainesses or femme fatales, she said.

Terry Francis, a film studies professor at Yale University, praised Ramoutar’s choice of a topic. “It might be the quintessential American narrative,” she said.

Anemia, a reduction in the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood that can cause fatigue, weakness and dizziness, is common in old age. But its signs are often subtle, and doctors need to be sure they carefully consider it as they evaluate older patients, say study authors, writing recently in The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

“Considering anemia should be part of an overall patient’s risk assessment even if the person is without symptoms or apparent clinical disease,” said Marco Pahor, director of the University of Florida’s Institute on Aging and a study’s co-investigator.

The study revealed that even a mild case of anemia increases an elderly person’s risk, indicating that treatment recommendations may need to be adjusted for older patients, Pahor said. Researchers found an association between late-life anemia and heart conditions, cancer, infectious diseases and diabetes.

The World Health Organization defines anemia as a concentration of the oxygen-ferrying molecule hemoglobin that is below 12 grams per deciliter in women, and below 13 grams per deciliter in men.

“Those older patients having mild anemia have not been considered at higher risk, but our data show that even those patients with low or even close to normal range do have higher risk for death and hospitalization and they should be considered for more in-depth screening for other conditions,” Pahor said.

To more fully understand its detrimental health effects, the researchers studied the relationship of anemia to hospitalization and death in 3,607 people aged 71 years or older who participated in the National Institute on Aging-sponsored Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly. About 13 percent of people 70 or older are anemic, and those percentages increase with age. Most cases occur in association with underlying diseases such as stomach ulcers, chronic infections, cancer, chronic kidney ailments and congestive heart failure or due to malnutrition or iron deficiency. However, up to a third of the time, anemia is not attributable to these factors, so people with pre-existing conditions that could have caused it were excluded from the study.

In the study, 451 participants were anemic. They were more likely to be older black men and women with a lower body mass index. During the four-year follow-up period, 37 percent of those with anemia died, compared with 22 percent of the other study participants. In addition, two-thirds of anemic participants were hospitalized at some point in the study period; only half of those without anemia were.

“We hope this study will promote clinical awareness of anemia as a risk factor for other conditions,” Pahor said. “It is a risk factor for mortality, hospitalization, loss of independence, lower muscle strength and increased inflammation. We would like to do further studies to find out whether, if you could correct anemia, could you prevent these events?”

The first step toward correcting anemia is to, when possible, identify and then treat the underlying disease causing it, Pahor said. Treatment also may involve giving iron when iron levels are low, vitamin supplements to replace folate and vitamin B12 in people with poor eating habits, erythropoietin to increase red blood cell production in people with kidney problems and antibiotics to treat infections.

Dr. Paulo Henrique M. Chaves, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University’s Center on Aging and Health, said the paper provides insight into anemia as a strong prognostic factor for major health complications.

“A little bit of anemia is often perceived as a benign finding in older adults,” Chaves said. “However, results from this study by Penninx, Pahor and colleagues – as well as consistent and recently published findings that link mild anemia and even low-normal hemoglobin levels to a status of increased frailty and greater functional decline in older adults – suggest otherwise, at least in terms of prognostic significance.

“What remains to be established now is whether pharmacological correction of mild anemia in older adults may help slow the disablement process, preventing the onset and progression of frailty and disability, improving quality of life and prolonging survival,” he added. “Randomized clinical trials will be necessary to address these important questions.”

The multicenter team spearheading the current study was a partnership with industry and the federal government. It included researchers from the National Institute on Aging, UF’s Institute on Aging, the Netherlands and Ortho Biotech Products in Bridgewater, N.J., which manufactures Procrit, a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production. Pahor has served as a consultant for the company.