Community Health Through Engagement and Environmental Renewal

Summary

Community Health from Engagement and Environmental Renewal (CHEER) will leverage previous Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) community engagement projects to reach and intervene on a high need population. Disadvantage and poverty have long-term and transgenerational adverse impacts on social interaction and cohesion and residents' emotional and physical health. Mothers living and raising children in these conditions face multiple stressors without the community support previous generations relied on. Decades of research on American cities have connected the social, economic, and physical characteristics of neighborhoods with a lack of social cohesion, inability to maintain shared norms of acceptable behavior,and increases in health disparities and risky behaviors. Social cohesion and collective efficacy inversely associate with depression among youth. In a parallel manner, improved parenting practices and youth behavior directly associate with neighborhood social interactions and social cohesion. While these associations are suggestive, CHEER will directly test causal hypotheses at the neighborhood and family levels in a randomized control trial, that can significantly advance the evidence base for public health interventions: Family Youth Intervention (FYI) and an Environment: Social and Physical Intervention (ESPI) to increase social interaction, social cohesion, and collective efficacy and influence wellbeing of mothers and their youth.

Conditions

• Family Relations
• Blight

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Community Health through Engagement and Environmental Renewal (CHEER)

FYI and ESPI intervention activities will be implemented in the overall study, CHEER. It will also allow us to examine possible synergistic effects of both interventions when implemented in the same neighborhoods. Separate sets of participants will be selected for the FYI comparisons and for the ESPI comparisons. Because the FYI intervention focuses on mothers and their children, participants for the FYI comparisons will be selected by Respondent Driven Sampling of eligible families from the neighborhoods in all four cells. The ESPI intervention targets the whole neighborhood, and thus a random sample of neighborhood residents will be enrolled in each of the four cells. Because the primary outcomes for FYI and ESPI are connected but differ from each other, the FYI samples will be assessed for the FYI outcomes in all four cells and the ESPI samples will be assessed for the ESPI outcomes in all four cells.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

  collaborator FED

• University of Alabama at Birmingham

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Jeff T Walker, PhD · University of Alabama at Birmingham

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

FACTORIAL

Eligibility

Min Age

11 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-05-21

Primary Completion

2024-08-10

Completion

2025-09-01

Countries

• United States

Study Locations