Gandara, Eduardo G (2021-04). Assessing Facilitators and Barriers of Conducting Adult Health Programs within the African-American Church and Re-examining Religious Based Constructs Using Items from the Religion, Aging, and Health Survey. Doctoral Dissertation.
Thesis
In this study, a systematic review was conducted to assess the facilitators and barriers of conducting adult health programs within the African-American church. Findings from this study were stratified by using the socio-ecological model. This study noted that facilitators and barriers were identified for disease/behavior specific health programs primarily at the intrapersonal level as well as the organizational level for most of the health topics in the study. There were also community and interpersonal level factors that were identified. However, no policy level factors were noted as findings of this study. The second study re-examined the factor structure of religious based constructs using items from the Religion, Aging, and Health survey as well as examined the nomological network structure of the factors identified through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. This study found that many of the religious-based constructs, such as spiritual connectedness, religious commitment, and religious music support matched what was in the literature. However, constructs for positive and negative religious coping, as well as God-mediated control did not match what was in the literature. In addition, the items for factors of private religious practices, and organizational religiousness did not load onto two separate factors which is different from what is in the literature as organizational religiousness is theorized as a factor that occurs within a religious based setting. In contrast, private religious practices is theorized as occurring outside of a religious-based setting. Instead, the items loaded onto one factor, faith-building activities, which could be used to measure how to build one's faith from a one-faith perspective amongst elderly Whites and African-Americans. The third study was conducted by interviewing African-American women church leaders and pastors to assess facilitators and barriers of conducting adult health programs within the African-American church. This study found that facilitators and barriers exist at the intrapersonal, organizational, community, and policy levels of the socioecological model. This study also found that church policy awareness was an organizational level facilitator and barrier, as well as church-policy alignment, and policy influence which were three themes that had not been explored in the literature.
