The Family Spirit trial aimed to evaluate the influence of the paraprofessional Family Spirit intervention concerning lowered health and behavioral risks among Indigenous American teen mothers and their children. Indigenous American populations residing within regions of Alaska have been noted to face a disproportionate amount of health disparities such as obesity, diabetes, and alcohol and drug abuse. Some of these issues were attributed to the fact that teenage parenting is quite common and often unsuccessful in maintaining health standards. The Family Spirit intervention was a program that promoted family-oriented protective factors to directly limit behavior-driven health disparities. The program primarily focused on parents and their children, with teen mothers being a notable group.
Paraprofessional care in the form of home visits was established as the most effective regarding the selected populations. The intervention ran 43 sessions of home visits for two years between 2006 and 2008 with 322 randomly selected pregnant teens (Mullany et al., 2012). Nine intervals were performed to assess the mother’s competence and social, behavioral, and emotional risks for drug use and maladaptive functioning.
The intervention functions on several health-related logic, including children’s education on health and the relationship between poverty or low economic welfare and health disparities. The majority of participants were affected adversely by poverty, being unmarried, low educational attainment, and residential instability. This is directly related to several health risks, often of a preventable nature, such as obesity, alcohol, and drug abuse.
Similarly, the young age and unpreparedness of the mothers and lack of education on health impacted the behavioral patterns of children. This can be seen in the statistics that illustrate that lifetime and pregnancy drug use was at least two and five times higher than the US All Races, respectively (Mullany et al., 2012). Teen pregnancy and parenthood have an overall adverse connection to several disparities, including postpartum depression, domestic violence, reduced access to education, and poorer employment outcomes. As such, the study was able to implement health logics that relates prevalent teenage parenting and poverty in the region with substantial health disparities.
The following intervention focused on a particular group within a setting that has substantial and prevalent health disparities. As such, teenage mothers and children are further impacted not only by societal but also demographic-specific health concerns. The people targeted within the study are impacted largely by their age and its relation to attaining necessary resources, information, and stability. Essentially, teenage mothers are unable to access adequate economic, housing, and educational resources to improve their health conditions as well as that of their children (Mullany et al., 2012). The intervention considers their particular difficulties within an interpersonal, familial, and societal context.
The intervention focused inherently on making the program community-based and assured that it would include a paraprofessional scope. This allowed for the inclusion of modern mental health information in the context and setting of the daily lives of Indigenous Americans. The intervention followed the Community Based Participatory Research, or CBPR, approach, which is defined by engagement with community members and the utilization of local knowledge and understanding of prevalent health problems in the intervention design (Mullany et al., 2012). As such, the investment of community members is integral to the function of the programs. The attainment and implementation of information regarding health disparities were led by community members and local professionals. The distress of the community concerning health was central to the intervention’s design, with preventable diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and alcohol and drug abuse being prevalent and community-specific problems.
Reference
Mullany, B., Barlow, A., Neault, N., Billy, T., Jones, T., Tortoise, I., Lorenzo, S., Powers, J., Lake, K., Reid, R., & Walkup, J. (2012). The Family Spirit trial for American Indian teen mothers and their children: CBPR rationale, design, methods, and baseline characteristics. Prevention Science., 13(5), 504-518. Web.