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.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — For black people, it doesn’t matter whether their color shows up in pigments or pixels. Doctors may be less likely to heed their complaints either way.

So suggests a new study that used virtual patients — computer-generated people able to carry on a limited conversation with human counterparts — to test how medical students respond to white- and dark-skinned patients. The study found that the white third-year students were less empathetic with dark-skinned than light-skinned virtual patients during brief one-on-one interviews, suggesting racial bias extends from real people to their virtual representations.

“You are seeing a transfer of bias come through the screen,” said Benjamin Lok, an assistant professor of computer and information science and engineering.

Lok is one of five authors of a paper on the study set to appear this fall in the journal Intelligent Virtual Agents.

He also is the lead investigator of a four-year-old research project, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, aimed at using racially diverse virtual patients as a new tool to train medical students to identify and avoid racial bias — a kind of human-relations equivalent to the equipment used to train pilots.

“We’re hoping that in the future, we will be able to automatically detect bias and, then and there, help medical students out,” Lok said. “That’s really our goal: An interpersonal simulator, just like a flight simulator, to help people get better at this skill of interacting with people who come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.”

Deeply embedded racial bias against minorities has been a hot issue in medicine since at least 2002, when “Unequal Treatment,” a national study of the phenomenon commissioned by Congress, was released.

The study found that racial and ethnic minorities consistently receive lower quality health care than their white counterparts and attributed the problem in part to bias or prejudice — bias all the more pernicious because it may be unconscious. Such unequal treatment is thought to be one reason that minorities, especially blacks, consistently suffer higher rates of many serious diseases.

Lok said medical schools use actors or actresses in role-playing scenarios for a wide range of medical training, including helping future doctors combat racial bias. While the actors can be highly effective, they also come with logistical challenges, he said. For one, actors may not be available, especially in states or cities with low minority populations. They are expensive. And they cannot offer all the students exactly the same experience, he said.

Virtual patients pose none of these problems, Lok said. But before educators can embrace them, they must know practitioners respond to virtual people as they do real people.

The researchers used virtual patient technology developed in Lok’s UF laboratory. The technology taps voice recognition software to allow people to speak normally with the virtual patient, who appears on a projected screen. The human subject wears a hat studded with special tape that reflects infrared light. Detectors pick up the reflections, informing the computer of the motions of the subject’s head. This allows the virtual patient to move his or her head in response andmaintain eye contact during conversation.

The researchers divided a group of almost two dozen third-year medical students at medical school in the Southeast, with half the students interviewing a light-skinned virtual woman, the others a dark-skinned woman. But for the skin tone, the virtual women had the same voice, animation and appearance. Medical faculty and other observers watched recorded videos of the students in the interviews, but the observers were blinded to the skin color of the virtual patient. They then rated the students’ empathy toward the woman’s medical complaints, using a standardized scale.

The observers rated the students interviewing the dark-skinned woman as consistently less empathetic. The results correlated with standard psychological tests of the students, tests that showed they had an unconscious bias against minorities.

The technology is so new that Lok said it “barely works” – for example, the virtual patient may misunderstand the human user and respond with a non sequitur. But Lok said he is confident it will improve rapidly.

Brent Rossen, another author of the paper and a UF graduate student, said most of the medical students in the trial were keen to use it, because they recognized its intrinsic value.

“These are people who want to treat others equally, but racial bias is a very subconscious thing, and in the end it really has to be trained out,” Rossen said. “One way to do that is through repeated exposures to the subject of the bias, which is where this research comes in.”

Lok, Rossen and Kyle Johnsen, a graduate student at the time of the study who has since earned his Ph.D., collaborated on the study. The two other authors were Dr. Adeline Deladisma, a medical resident, and Dr. Scott Lind, chief of surgical oncology, both of the Medical College of Georgia.

“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.”

The Sunshine State produces half the fresh tomatoes eaten in the United States. The task requires more than 30,000 farm workers, growers and packers — all of whom will be required to undergo training in food safety practices developed by the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Florida Tomato Exchange, in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

The effort has gained strong support from state Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, who today announced $253,000 in USDA Specialty Crops Block Grant funding toward the training.

The program could begin as early as this month. Similar programs will extend to leafy greens, berries and melons next year.

“People are worried about how safe their food is to eat, and this really is a case where education is a big step toward improving prevention,” said Keith Schneider, the IFAS food safety researcher who will lead the statewide effort to train tomato workers in the best ways to safely handle produce.

In a Sept. 7 report on foodborne illnesses in restaurants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that four widespread cases of raw-tomato-spread Salmonella infection between 2005 and 2006 led to more than 450 illnesses in 21 states.

Schneider said these kinds of reports aren’t signs of new and unheralded outbreaks, but rather examples of an improved ability to finger foodborne pathogens as the culprits.

“Our food is safer than ever,” he said. “But part of that safety — and a bigger part of improving that safety — is being able to detect when these pathogens are a problem, thinking about how to solve that problem and then taking that to the growers and packagers.”

“There are elements as simple as the fact that tomatoes need to go through something like a chlorine bath after being picked,” he said. “But there are a lot of details ranging from worker conditions to how fast the product is shipped — they all need to be taken care of if that salad or taco you’re going to get at a local restaurant is safe to eat.”

The statewide mandate comes from the tomato industry working with state and federal regulators.

“This is a step forward that this state’s tomato industry saw it needed to take, and so essentially took it upon itself to make food safety a priority,” said Martha Roberts, the former Florida deputy commissioner of agriculture, now special assistant to the director of the Florida Experiment Station, IFAS.

Many tomato growers already follow safe food-handling practices, she said.
“But there are still some that can use our help — this isn’t necessarily going to be a simple task to reach everyone now covered by these requirements,” she said.

Roberts added that new tools will need to be developed, such as training materials for the large number of Spanish-speaking workers.

Additionally, the CDC reports state that “current knowledge of mechanisms of tomato contamination and methods of eradication of Salmonella in tomatoes is incomplete,” thus making “tomato safety research a priority.”

The tools and expertise developed by IFAS for tomato training will be applied to other produce next year when similar education will be instituted on a volunteer basis for the leafy greens, berry and melon industries.

“It seems like every other day you see something in the news about food contamination. If it’s not tomatoes, it’s spinach…or peanut butter, or dog food. I think most people ask themselves ‘will this ever stop?’” Schneider said. “The truth is that there our food supply is safer than it’s ever been, but there will always be issues with food safety — it’s all of our jobs to keep trying to make it better.”

In the study of Hispanics enrolled in Medicare-managed care programs, Spanish-speaking patients reported more negative experiences with care than did English-speaking Hispanic patients. However, Spanish speakers in Florida were more satisfied with their health-care experiences than their peers in California and the New York/New Jersey region — a finding that could be attributed to the “Miami effect.” The results appear in the October issue of the journal Health Services Research.

“Eighty-six percent of the Spanish-speaking survey respondents from Florida live in the Miami area, the U.S. city with the highest proportion of Hispanic residents,” said lead investigator Robert Weech-Maldonado, an associate professor in the department of health services research, management and policy at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Spanish is one of the primary languages in Miami and there is an excellent network of Spanish-speaking health providers.”

The study is the first to examine health-care experiences of Hispanics — a population vulnerable to health disparities — by regional and language differences.

The Medicare-managed care program, known as Medicare Advantage, was designed to give beneficiaries the option of enrolling in a variety of private plans, including health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, and preferred provider organizations, or PPOs. Patients’ out-of-pocket costs associated with the Medicare Advantage plans are relatively lower than those associated with traditional Medicare. Although most Medicare recipients use the traditional fee-for-service program, about 5 million Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in the managed care program in 2004, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 50 percent of enrollees were Hispanic.

UF researchers analyzed data from the Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems Medicare managed care survey, conducted in 2002. The survey focused on five aspects of care: timeliness of care, provider communication, office staff helpfulness, getting needed care and health plan customer service. Of the more than 125,000 Medicare-managed care recipients who completed the survey, 7 percent, or 8,463, identified themselves as Hispanic. The survey was available in English and Spanish.

Hispanic English speakers reported more negative experiences than whites for all aspects of care except provider communication. Hispanic Spanish speakers had more negative experiences than whites with timeliness of care, office staff helpfulness and provider communication, suggesting language barriers in the clinical setting.

However, the researchers were surprised to find that Hispanic Spanish speakers reported more positive experiences with getting needed care than their English-speaking counterparts.

“This was an unexpected result; we haven’t found this in other studies,” Weech-Maldonado said. “We speculate that Spanish-speaking Hispanics, who may be less acculturated, could be more tolerant of the managed care practices because they are less familiar with the U.S. health-care system.”

Overall, the UF study demonstrates that differences in Hispanics’ health-care experiences exist and there is room for improvement, especially given the regional differences, Weech-Maldonado said.

“Our study suggests that managed care companies should implement quality improvement programs to reduce disparities in patient experiences with care, and one area they can target is interpreter services,” he said, adding that the Hispanic Spanish speakers in the survey were more likely than English speakers to rate their health as fair or poor. “Managed care health plans cover a well-diversified population, so it is important for them to look at disparities in care.”

The UF study provides important information for legislators and policymakers, said Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, director of the Columbia University Center of the Health of Urban Minorities and co-founder of Latinos for National Health Insurance.

“This study will serve as a wake-up call to those minority organizations that have been strong advocates of these Medicare Advantage plans,” Carrasquillo said. “The analysis by Dr. Weech-Maldonado and colleagues shows that even with the extra payments these Medicare Advantage plans receive, large disparities between Latinos and non-Hispanic whites exist. On many measures, the extra money these plans are getting is not providing added value to Latinos in many parts of the country.”

A UF study described in the current issue of the Journal of Women’s Health revealed that when treated with either of two commonly prescribed medication strategies, Hispanic women achieved greater blood pressure control and were half as likely as white women to suffer adverse outcomes such as heart attack, stroke or death from any cause. The findings provide new data on a population of ethnic women who have been all but absent from such research.

“The study is unique in that we enrolled a substantial number of women and a substantial number of Hispanic patients from a variety of different Hispanic regions. As a result, we have data that enabled us to really fully evaluate the treatment of hypertension in this ethnically diverse group,” said Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff, a research assistant professor of medicine and associate director of the clinical research program in cardiovascular medicine at UF’s College of Medicine.

UF researchers studied 22,500 patients enrolled in the landmark International Verapamil SR-Trandolapril study, known as INVEST, and tracked a subgroup of 5,017 Hispanic and 4,710 non-Hispanic white women who were randomly assigned to a drug strategy containing either a sustained release form of the calcium antagonist verapamil or the beta-blocker atenolol.

The INVEST study enrolled more Hispanic patients than any other hypertension trial to date, Cooper-DeHoff said, and included Hispanic participants from the mainland United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Panama and El Salvador.

After 24 months of follow-up, researchers found that both treatment strategies worked — and worked better in the Hispanic women.

Blood pressure control, defined at less than 140/90 mmHg, was achieved in 75 percent of Hispanic women and 68 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

And despite having a higher prevalence of diabetes at baseline, only 5.7 percent of Hispanic women suffered from adverse cardiovascular outcomes, compared with 12.3 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

Cooper-DeHoff attributed the low incidence of adverse outcomes to the fact that Hispanic women enrolled in the study were younger. If follow-up had continued over a longer period of time, adverse outcomes in the Hispanic women may have increased, she said.

However, these women remained at a lower risk for these outcomes even after statisticians adjusted for age and other factors. Still, she warned that problems associated with diabetes are likely to show up in these patients down the road.

“Diabetes in and of itself imparts significant future adverse cardiovascular outcomes,” she said. “These women should be well-monitored under the care of a physician so that they can prevent future cardiovascular morbidity and mortality related to hypertension and diabetes. Importantly, because the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States, Hispanics — especially women — should be included in future cardiovascular research in order to further our understanding of these high-risk diseases in Hispanic patients.”

High blood pressure is becoming more prevalent in women across all ethnic groups, Cooper-DeHoff said. And although it is thought to actually be less common in Hispanic women, fewer Hispanics have been included in hypertension studies.

“The INVEST findings are important because they demonstrate that this treatment for Hispanic women really pays off,” said Dr. Thomas G. Pickering, director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center. “They’ve got something really interesting with this study, and it wasn’t something that could have been expected.”

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.

Educators have long believed that a “critical mass” of like students is vital to making minority students feel at home on college campuses – but this study, appearing in the February issue of the journal Research in Higher Education, may be the first to find statistical evidence to confirm that belief.

“These data suggest that if colleges are really serious about reaching out to minority groups, they need to think in terms of clusters, not individuals,” said professor Linda Serra Hagedorn, chairwoman of UF’s Department of Educational Administration and Policy. “If you’re the only Latino or African-American on your college campus, you can certainly succeed academically – but if you’re surrounded by people who share your cultural background, your chances of success improve.”

Hagedorn is the lead investigator and director of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (or TRUCCS) project, a multiyear, comprehensive study of the educational outcomes of 5,000 community college students at the nine community college campuses in the Los Angeles area. Investigators queried the students on their backgrounds, attitudes and experiences, and compared that data to the students’ transcript records.

When they looked at students who self-identified as Hispanic, the researchers found that students at largely Hispanic community colleges had better educational outcomes than students at colleges where Hispanic students were rare. The differences were small but statistically significant. Age, involvement in campus activities and even ability to speak English were less predictive of Hispanic students’ success.

Researchers have long suspected that the size of a school’s minority population plays a key role in the academic experience of minority students. The education field has even borrowed a term from nuclear physics – “critical mass” – to describe the point at which minority students become plentiful enough to change the campus climate and give a school a more welcoming feel.

The study produced some surprising findings. For instance, while students at colleges with large Hispanic colleges were more likely to stay in school and succeed academically, they were also less likely to enroll in remedial English or math classes.

In schools where Spanish speakers are few, teachers may be more likely to refer students to remedial classes, Hagedorn said. And a large community of bilingual students may help struggling English speakers learn the language without formal intervention.

The researchers also found that first-generation immigrants – students born in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries – tended to do better in school than students born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.

“One might expect students who grew up in the U.S. to perform better because they understand the social climate better,” Hagedorn said. “But in fact, many immigrant students were in very good schools in Mexico before they moved here – while many students who were born in the U.S. live in impoverished urban communities with substandard school systems.”

Alberto Cabrera, a University of Maryland education professor, co-authored an earlier large-scale study which found that parental involvement was one of the best indicators of academic success among Latino students. Cabrera said Hagedorn’s study sheds new light on his findings.

“Latino students often rely on their families for social support in school because they do not feel represented among the faculty or students,” Cabrera said. “In light of Linda Hagedorn’s findings, I would hypothesize that a critical mass of Latino students can create a support system that mimics the effect of support from one’s family.”

The study reinforces the benefits of the community college system. Hagedorn notes that among the colleges in the study, every institution with a large Hispanic population was located in a largely Hispanic neighborhood – providing additional social support for students.

“They’re called ‘community’ colleges for a reason,” Hagedorn said. “They’re supposed to serve the community in which they reside, and create a comfortable learning environment for students in that community.”

“Parents need to be able to talk to a counselor about their child’s progress,” said Professor Harry Daniels, chairman of the counselor education department at UF’s College of Education and a co-author of the study. “They need a place in the school system where they feel safe, where they feel their child’s needs are understood.

“These things may seem small, but they have a huge effect on academic success.”

Daniels and co-author Sondra Smith-Adcock, an associate professor of counselor education at UF, led a team that surveyed school services administrators in school districts across Florida on the counseling provided to Hispanic students. The researchers published their results in this month’s issue of the journal Professional School Counseling.

Fifty-nine percent of the administrators said their Hispanic students were at risk of not receiving needed counseling. Eighty-four percent said their district needed more Spanish-speaking bilingual counselors to address the personal needs of students, and 80 percent agreed that their district needed more Spanish-speaking counselors to guide students in making career decisions.

The results, researchers say, were worrisome but not surprising. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that while Hispanics made up one-eighth of Florida’s student population at the time, only 2 percent of school counselors were Hispanic. In the past decade, Smith-Adcock said, every single county has seen its Hispanic population increase by at least 30 percent – but there is no evidence of a similar increase in the number of Hispanic counselors.
“When school administrators think of the needs of Hispanic students, they tend to think in terms of language acquisition for new immigrants,” Smith-Adcock said. “There’s a whole stratum of services that is being missed.”

Hispanic students who face mental health issues may find it difficult to trust or open up to non-Hispanic counselors, and often need someone who speaks their first language, Smith-Adcock said.

However, mental health counseling is just one responsibility for counselors, Smith-Adcock said. They also help students define their career goals and navigate the increasingly complex academic world in a way that will help them achieve their goals. These services are particularly difficult to provide students who are new arrivals to the country, or whose parents are first-generation immigrants with limited English skills.

“Simply choosing electives is a new experience for many people in the Latino community,” said Jennifer Gonzales Young, a district-level bilingual counselor for Hillsborough County Public Schools. “In many Spanish-speaking countries, students take a prescribed schedule of courses, and don’t get to choose their classes. Some parents are overwhelmed by the system, and if it isn’t explained to them properly, their children can miss some important opportunities.”

Similar problems can arise when students apply to college, apply for financial aid or try to interpret the results of standardized tests, Young said.

Hillsborough County has one of the fastest-growing Hispanic populations in the state. Young said there are an estimated 51,000 Hispanic children in Hillsborough County’s school system, and more than 36,000 speak Spanish as their first language. Until recently, Young was one of only a few Hispanic counselors serving that population.

“There seems to be a shortage of bilingual counselors everywhere in the state, and Hillsborough is just one example,” UF’s Daniels said. “At the elementary level, for instance, the ideal ratio is one counselor per 300 students. I don’t know of a single place in Florida that comes close to that ratio for Spanish-speaking students.”

UF is attempting to relieve the shortage. The College of Education recently completed a three-year, grant-funded program that brought 17 bilingual Hillsborough County teachers to UF to study for the educational specialist degree in counselor education. All of those teachers were Spanish-speaking and most were either of Hispanic origin or had prior experience living in a Spanish-speaking country.

Daniels said the project, titled “Consejeros: Levantando El Pueblo” (or “Counselors Lifting the Community”) was more than simply a degree program. Students followed a culturally relevant course of study designed to give equal focus to the three major influences in the life of Hispanic families: the school, the family and the community.

Based on the success of that project, Daniels and Smith-Adcock are considering the creation of a permanent distance education program that would allow bilingual teachers to study for a counselor education degree in the county where they work.

“Many bilingual teachers are already serving as a contact point between the school system and the families of their Hispanic students,” he said. “By becoming full-time counselors, they can fill that role more effectively, for more people.”

“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.