Research Projects

Engage With Age: A Partnership between Southminster, UNC Charlotte and Renaissance West Community Initiative to promote Successful Aging, 2018-2020

Introduction

Collective Impact initiatives are long-term commitments by community members and collaborative organizations from different sectors to agree to a common agenda to propose solutions to ongoing challenges and encourage communities to support successful development and quality of life for people of all ages.

The Renaissance West Community Initiative (RWCI) established in 2012 in Charlotte, created the Renaissance village to address public housing using a holistic community redevelopment approach, and focusing on multiple critical factors, including mixed-income housing, educational opportunities, youth and adult development programs, health and wellness services and commercial investment (www.rwci.org). Currently the Renaissance consists of 334 units of mixed-income housing, including 132 senior housing apartments, the STEAM Academy (RWSA) and the Howard Levine Child Development Center (HLCDC) that opened this year in 2018.

The Gerontology Program at UNC Charlotte would like to contribute to the Renaissance West Community Initiative (RWCI) with a two-year program to promote Successful Development across the Lifespan at the village. The program “Engage with Age” (EWA) will provide engaging activities for adults in the village to foster intergenerational interactions, increase socialization, improve health and wellness literacy and provide information about community services and resources.  These goals are in synchrony with the mission of the RWCI as to “promote a collaborative community centered on quality housing, education, health, wellness and opportunity.”

Specific Programing goals are

1. Provide engaging programs for senior residents living at Renaissance to increase socialization, education, as well as health and wellness opportunities.
2. Connect all ages living in at the Renaissance West Community Initiative village.
3. Provide aging resources and serve as liaison to connect residents to various local services to enhance quality of life.

The unprecedented recent demographic changes including the Baby Boomer generation that begun to retire in 2011 (born 1946 to 1964) pose new challenges not only for individuals and their families but also for communities and society at large.  As Charlotte and Mecklenburg County experience rapid growth and influx of older adults it is of interest to local-governments, community-based organizations, the private sector and other community members to understand more accurately the health status and the array of programs needed to serve older adults in the community.

Goals of the Study

The Needs Assessment Study of older adults has three main goals:

1. To examine socio-demographic characteristics, health status and service use needs of Caucasians, African Americans and Latinos 60 and older in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County

2. To outline the profile of family caregivers and assess health status, support needs, psychological outcomes, and conditions under which they use community services

3. To disseminate study findings to stakeholders and community members, develop data-driven action steps, and advocate on behalf of older adults

Health Dimensions Assessed in the Study:

Section 1: Demographics

Section 2: Health

Section 4: Community Services

Section 5: Family Caregiving

  Preliminary Results @ Public Forum Data Workbook, 9 18 2018

 MECK60+ Study-English      MECK60+ Study-Spanish

PRESS RELEASE: https://health.uncc.edu/news/2018-09-05/study-provides-insight-needs-mecklenburg-county-seniors

Evaluating the Impact of a Goal Setting Intervention Program with Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, 2018-2020

Older grandparents (Generations United, 2015).  Grandparents are very important in the lives of the grandchildren they are raising and influence them in many ways.  Grandparents caring for their grandchildren also take on parental responsibilities and serve as role models to grandchildren when discussing matters of culture and issues pertinent to contemporary life (e.g., sexuality, violence in the schools, technology, and drug use).  However, grandparents also report feeling isolated from age peers, feel judged by others as failures as parents, report shame linked to the perceived stigma of having to raise their grandchildren, and may lack skills to meet these challenges and maintain their own mental and physical health and well-being.

The goal of the proposed study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a socio-cognitive intervention to improve the health and social psychological outcomes for grandparents raising grandchildren using the theory of Selection, Optimization and Compensation (Freund & Baltes, 1998).  The study will focus on the potential impact to improve the quality of the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, and it will refresh the grandparents’ communication skills and strategies to ask for help and to receive support as well as provide basic instruction in positive parenting practices.

This pilot intervention study will recruit at least 40 low income grandparents for the implementation training program which will entail of 4 to 6, two-hour sessions scheduled at a time/place convenient for the grandmothers as a whole.  Half of them would be randomly assigned to intervention group, while the remaining half would be randomly assigned to a waiting list control condition.  Each grandmother would complete a pre-and-posttest assessment interview with measures of caregiving satisfaction, anxiety, depression, well-being, caregiving strain, caregiver self-efficacy, and caregiving satisfaction, positive/negative affect (regarding her relationship to her grandchild), social support, and resilience. These measures are commonly used in the grandparent caregiving literature, and focus on both the positive and potential negative aspects of caregiving.

Media – TV:

Anthony Cirillo on Grandparents on Charlotte Today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66JiGAzVNWc&t=16s

2017 ANNUAL MEETING SOUTHERN GERONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY April 6-9, Asheville, NC

https://southerngerontologicalsociety.org/sgs-annual-meeting/

SYMPOSIUM: Marshaling Social Support for Grandmothers Raising Grandchildren

Organizers: Julian Montoro-Rodriguez & Bert Hayslip

ABSTRACT

The U.S. Census Bureau (2010) estimates that more than 1.6 million children in America are being raised primarily by grandparents, often as a result of the death, incarceration or incapacitation of the child’s parents. Caregiving is psychologically, emotionally and physical challenging; and caregiving grandparents often report more functional health problems and chronic disease incidence than non-caregiving peers.   There is consistent evidence that the perception of available support is linked to health and emotional well-being; but many grandmothers may not be able to receive the support they need since their own families are not fully functional and able to support them. Using the Selective Optimization with Compensation (SOC) framework (Freund & Baltes, 1989) and socio-cognitive strategies we developed a program to assess the grandmothers’ supportive needs and to empower them to reduce their stress, improve their communication skills and satisfaction with social support. This symposium a) describes the main components of the proposed intervention; b) presents data from 19 grandmothers who attended the four weekly sessions with individual facilitators during the past months; c) reports on the effectiveness of the intervention in decreasing the grandmother’s stress; and d) discusses the its benefits to empower grandmothers to improve their psychological adjustment and take care of their needs.  Powerpoint Presentation – Intro

PAPERS

1. Conceptual framework, goals, and methodology used to developed a program for grandmothers raising grandchildren (Anjana Nagrajan, UNC Charlotte) Powerpoint Presentation

2. Socio-demographic, health and social support characteristics of grandmothers enrolled in the study (Maryam Kazempour-Esmati, UNC Charlotte) Powerpoint Presentation

3. Communication Styles and Goal Setting Strategies to enhance grandmothers’ ability to obtain help. (Katie Kutcher, UNC Charlotte) Powerpoint Presentation

4. The impact of the intervention on grandmothers’ stress and satisfaction with social support (Julian Montoro-Rodriguez & Bert Hayslip, UNC Charlotte) Powerpoint Presentation