Understanding Trauma in the Context of Direct Care Work in Nursing Homes.

Direct care workers (DCWs) experience job quality challenges such as heavy workload, low pay, and few benefits. Layered risks such as the COVID-19 pandemic and systemic racism have impacted DCWs, made them more vulnerable, and increased turnover and the precarity of the long-term care system and residents' care. Drawing from qualitative interviews collected from 25 direct care workers, this study seeks to understand and describe the DCWs' experiences of trauma during COVID-19 and how these experiences affect their ability to provide care.

Countering Deficits: Relational Sanctification, Forgiveness, and Family Functioning Among Older, Romantically Involved African Americans.

Despite the significance of romantic relationships in later life, relatively little research has focused on older African Americans, a population highly engaged in religious behaviors. Forgiveness often mediates the relationship between relational sanctification and various positive relational outcomes. This study examined forgiveness as a mediator between relational sanctification and family functioning among older African American couples.

Enhancing undergraduate education and research in aging to eliminate health disparities (ENGAGED) - A pipeline program to advance diversity in aging research.

The Enhancing Undergraduate Education and Research in Aging to Eliminate Health Disparities (ENGAGED) program takes advantage of the broad, multidisciplinary research established in the area of aging at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and its partner institutions, Wake Forest University and Winston-Salem State University. The ENGAGED program is designed to provide undergraduate students who are underrepresented in the biomedical sciences an opportunity to participate in educational and research training in aging and health disparities. Funded since August 2019, ENGAGED has provided 73 academic year internships and 46 summer internships, with another 8 internships starting in Fall 2023.

Relational sanctification, communal coping, and depression among African American couples.

Despite the common use of religious buffers, African Americans are disproportionately affected by depressive symptoms. Communal coping may serve as one factor in helping religious African American couples alleviate the symptoms of depression. This study examines the association between relational sanctification and depressive symptoms as mediated by the communal coping of 467 African American married and cohabiting couples.

Turning It Over to God: African American Assisted Living Residents' End-of-Life Preferences and Advance Care Planning.

Objectives: Assisted living (AL), a popular long-term care setting for older Americans, increasingly is a site for end-of-life care. Although most residents prefer AL to be their final home, relatively little is known about end-of-life preferences and advance care planning, especially among African American residents. Our research addresses this knowledge gap.

Examining the Frequency of Religious Practices among Hypertensive and Non-Hypertensive Black Men.

Although Black men in the United States face high rates of hypertension, the nexus of health and religion remain understudied for this population. The present study analyzes religious variables, such as prayer, Bible reading, and religious meditation, to describe the frequency of these practices among hypertensive and non-hypertensive Black men. This study utilizes data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) 3 - Milwaukee African American Sample series, with 135 Black men (51.

Racial/Ethnic Variation in Family Support: African Americans, Black Caribbeans and Non-Latino Whites.

Objective: This study examined racial and ethnic differences in the receipt and provision of instrumental family support.

Background: Extended families provide significant levels of emotional and instrumental support across the life course. Despite their importance, extended family relationships and the assistance they provide are largely neglected in the literature.

Church-Based Emotional Support and Negative Interactions Among Older African Americans and Black Caribbeans.

Objectives: This study investigates church-based informal social support among older African Americans and Black Caribbeans. In particular, we examine the correlates of receiving emotional support as well as negative interactions (e.g.

Sanctification of couple relationships and communal coping in married and cohabiting African American couples.

Throughout history, African Americans have endured much, and their experiences with discrimination and racism continue today. Despite ongoing challenges, African Americans have also shown their resilience. Religion and spirituality are two of the largest resources of resilience that African Americans employ.

#BoomerRemover: COVID-19, ageism, and the intergenerational twitter response.

Early reports of COVID-19 often inaccurately presented the virus as a serious concern only among older adults. On the social media platform of Twitter, #BoomerRemover originated as a hashtag intended to express the age-related disparities of COVID-19. This study used a content analysis to examine tweets over a two-week period in March 2020 that used #BoomerRemover to discuss COVID-19 among older adults.

Older African American, Black Caribbean, and Non-Latino White Fictive Kin Relationships.

Fictive kin are individuals who are not related biologically or legally family members but are conferred all of the expectations, obligations, norms, and behaviors that are typically associated with family members. Early ethnographic and qualitative studies on impoverished African Americans depicted fictive kinship as a strategy of necessity used by urban poor Blacks to share scarce resources. More recent surveys of fictive kin relationships based on nationally representative samples of African Americans establish that fictive kinship occur across a range of social and economic circumstances.

Marital and Romantic Satisfaction among Older African Americans.

There remains a lack of knowledge on marital satisfaction of African Americans in general and this is particularly the case for older African Americans. In addition, only a handful of studies investigate satisfaction among couples who are unmarried. Using data from the National Survey of American Life, this study examined the correlates of romantic and marital satisfaction among older African Americans.