RESEARCH CORE

探索性中心拨款旨在制定一项干预计划。 以改善老年非裔美国人的健康状况。为了 为年长的非裔美国人制定和评估可靠的干预措施 并且需要有效的健康状况措施。然而，大多数衡量标准 老年人的健康状况没有为以下人群制定或进行测试 非洲裔美国人。本探索性研究的核心是 中心拨款将协调措施的制定和评估 这将被用来检查干预措施的有效性 旨在改善非洲老年人的健康和独立性- 美国人。我们将在以前健康状况评估工作的基础上再接再厉， 但调整我们的评估工具，使其对老年人最敏感 使用焦点小组和专家访谈的非裔美国人。 健康状况衡量标准将在干预前进行预先测试 研究和他们的心理测量特性得到了彻底的评估。 以前使用的措施将由额外的采访补充- 根据我们制定的衡量标准和体能表现的衡量标准。这个 这项探索中心核心赠款的具体目标是： 1)制定适合使用的健康状况和家庭功能措施 与年长的非洲裔美国人合作； 2)评估这些措施的心理测量性能，包括其 可接受性、可靠性、效度和跨文化等价性； 3)制定筛查措施，供家庭成员使用，以便及早识别 痴呆症和抑郁症的症状和体征。 4)通过仔细的试点测试和数据分析，我们将检查 并在不牺牲数据的情况下选择最具成本效益的方法 质量。

The exploratory center grant seeks to develop a program of interventions to improve the health status of older African-Americans. In order to develop and evaluate interventions for older African-Americans, reliable and valid health status measures are needed. However, most measures of the health status of the elderly have not been developed for or tested among African-American populations. The research core of this exploratory center grant will coordinate the development and evaluation of measures that will be used to examine the effectiveness of the interventions designed to improve the health and independence of older African- Americans. We will build upon previous work in health status assessment, but tailor our assessment instruments to be most sensitive to older African-American individuals using focus groups and expert interviews. The health status measures will be pretested prior to the intervention studies and their psychometric properties thoroughly evaluated. Previously used measures will be supplemented by additional interview- based measures we develop and by measures of physical performance. The specific objectives of this exploratory center core grant are to: 1) develop health status and family function measures appropriate for use with elderly African-American individuals; 2) evaluate the psychometric performance of these measures including their acceptability, reliability, validity, and cross-cultural equivalence; and 3) develop screening measures for use by family members to identify early signs and symptoms of dementia and depression. 4) By carefully pilot-testing and analysis of the data, we will examine each method and select the most cost-effective without sacrificing data quality.