Friday, September 27, 2002: 3:00 PM-4:30 PM | |||
Heeding Adolescent Voice to Promote Health in Vulnerable Populations | |||
| Adolescent morbidity and mortality have reached crisis proportions by some accounts. Attention is focused on changing delivery of adolescent health services to emphasize primary and secondary prevention of major health threats. The theme of this symposium is heeding adolescent voice. To ensure effective change in health care delivery, it is imperative that health care providers listen to the voice of adolescents about what matters, and design delivery systems to reflect what has been heard. Assessing the health of adolescents is challenging. Technical excellence and comprehensive health knowledge, although necessary, are not enough. Efforts to deliver adolescent-centered care are needed. The importance of being there for adolescents has been found to be an important quality of health care encounters. Being there invites voice and heeding voice enables more effective nursing practice and more meaningful research. The purpose of this symposium is to offer ways to hear the voice of ethnically diverse adolescents through research. Adolescent voice uncovered through research has application for nursing practice. Adolescent research is currently predominantly descriptive, involving surveys which report the incidence, prevalence, correlates and consequences of adolescent illnesses and health related behaviors. Much of what is presented in this symposium will be descriptive. What distinguishes this research from the usual is that it attempts to listen differently by involving adolescents in critiquing measurement instruments before administration, creating questions based on adolescents' critique, querying adolescents ideas as part of the research protocol and recording bodily as well as language descriptors to ascertain meaning. The first paper will provide an overview of gender differences in adolescent disclosure about health concerns collected anonymously from 1470 high school students in a predominantly Hispanic community. This study gave voice to adolescents by including them in research planning phases and adding three health concern questions, which the adolescents identified as important. Questions were added about harassment, access to care and riding with a driver who had been drinking. The second paper reports a qualitative study addressing intervening with drinking-driving. Adolescents from a rural Appalachian community were asked to identify ways that they could stop a drunken person from driving. The study results provide specific guidance, which could be used to create an intervention for drinking/driving in this adolescent population. The paper highlights adolescents' resourcefulness. Adolescents know what to do and are willing to voice it when given a chance. The third paper pursues adolescent health concerns, risks and assets with a sample of rural Appalachian students. Health concerns and risks were collected through survey and assets were assessed with open-ended questions and linked to a nationally established asset model. The inclusion of questions about assets taps adolescent voice and adds depth to the understanding of adolescent health. Querying assets as well as risks offers balance, which is most likely to assure successful health promotion. The fourth paper presents data from a church-based sample of African-American adolescents. It uses a risk-taking tool developed and tested by the author in samples of ethnically diverse adolescents. The tool has a risk-taking and a social-adaptation scale, both of which have alpha reliabilities above .75. The paper shares the use of this psychometrically sound instrument to assess both risks and social strengths, an important quality of assets. The voice of adolescents has been structured through this instrument to enable data collection, which includes but goes beyond risk and beyond survey. The final paper considers the voice of anger expressed through the angry words, blood pressure and hostility of ethnically diverse adolescents from a large city in the South. It extends the meaning of voice to the bodily indicator of blood pressure, and introduces a statistical approach for analyzing words. It combines correlational with content analysis methods to suggest a creative approach for capturing the voice of anger. This symposium presents ways that 5 researchers invited and attended to adolescent voice. In the methods and the message are guidance for heeding adolescent voice to promote health in vulnerable populations | |||
| Organizer: | Patricia R. Liehr, RN, PhD, associate professor | ||
| Gender Differences in Adolescent Disclosure about Health Concerns Linda Summers, RN, MSN, CNS, FNP, doctoral student | |||
| Listening to what Young African-American Adolescents Report about Risk Taking Nancy Busen, RN, PhD, FNP, BC, associate professor, Marianne Marcus, RN, EdD, FAAN, professor, Kirk Von Sternberg, MSW, research associate, Thomas Walker, pastor | |||
| Rural Adolescent Voice about Health Concerns, Risks and Assets Susan Newfield, RN, PhD, associate professor, Dorothy Johnson, RN, EdD | |||
| The Voice of Anger Extending Beyond the Words of Ethnically Diverse Urban Adolescents Patricia R. Liehr, RN, PhD, associate professor, Janet C. Meininger, RN, PhD, FAAN, professor, William H. Mueller, PhD, professor, Linda Summers, RN, MSN, CNS, FNP, doctoral student, Wenyaw Chan, associate professor | |||
| The Voices of Rural Youth on Intervening in Drinking/Driving Situations Mary Jane Smith, RN, PhD, professor, Monica Kennison, MSN, doctoral student, Susan Triplett, MSW, MPA, extension faculty, Barbara Loudin, MS, MA, extension faculty, Yvonne Harp, MS, extension faculty | |||
The Advancing Nursing Practice Excellence: State of the Science