Building Research Infrastructure & Network in Chicago Chinatown

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There are marked health disparities in the US Chinese population, yet we have the most rudimentary understanding of many critical health issues. In addition, there are vast linguistic and cultural challenges that confront health sciences research in Chinese population. Moreover, there has been a lack of community technological infrastructure necessary to empower the Chinese community to build research capacity to enable health science research on many important issues to the community (i.e., mental health, social wellbeing, cancer screening, cognitive impairment, physical disability, elder mistreatment, self-neglect, and etc). These impediments necessitate the further development to build technological infrastructure for the Chinese community. In building this infrastructure, bilingual and bicultural principal investigators (Drs. Dong and Wong) and a multidisciplinary team aim to collaboratively build a Bilingual (English and Chinese) Data Resource Center that will enhance community-engaged research projects. The Bilingual Data Resource Center will be based in the Chinatown community and will efficiently integrate a highly adaptive hardware and software platform to accommodate both quantitative and qualitative research in English and Chinese language. In addition, this platform will efficiently coordinate with the bilingual programming, data management and statistical team at Rush University. Moreover, this platform holds strong potential to mitigate the need for back-and-forth translation in survey research and to challenges the existing paradigm of how health sciences research are conducted in Chinese populations. The purpose of this proposal is to build on our prior collaborations based on the principles of community-based participatory research to expand our partnership in a linguistic/culturally appropriate way and to build technological infrastructure necessary to enhance Chinatown community¿s ability to participate in wide ranges of health sciences research across disciplines, disease, and conditions. Furthermore, Rush University is deeply committed to our active role in the Chinese community, and the investigative team will tirelessly leverage all available resources to ensure the sustainability of this infrastructure, all with the common goal of improving the health and wellbeing and eliminating health disparity in Chinese communities.