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Caring for Native American Elders: Grasslands and Prairie
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Patricia Holkup, PhD, RN
Principal Investigator
Montana State University
College of Nursing
Missoula Campus
pholkup@montana.edu |
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Team
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Dissemination
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Overview:
Purpose: Elder
abuse is a problem of concern among Native American communities.
This application is part of a larger, active program of research to
develop, implement, and evaluate models for family conferences for
Native American elders at risk of mistreatment. An important goal
of the larger project is to develop a model that may be adapted by other
tribal communities across the US. To date, we have worked
extensively with only one Tribal community in Montana. Before
extending this intervention to other tribes unfamiliar to us, we need to
conduct community entry and obtain preliminary data identifying aspects
of the Grasslands social structure, including gatekeepers, formal and
informal structures and networks, and whether elder abuse is perceived
by community members as a problem. The purpose of this project is
to conduct the preliminary work to be able to extend the Caring for
Native American Elders project full-scale to the Grasslands Reservation.
Aims: The specific aims are to
gather background and contextual information to
identify key community leaders, structures, networks, and strengths
salient for planning and implementing the Family Care Conference (FCC)
model. This information will assist in describing the perceptions
of elder abuse with regard to magnitude, forms, and current tribal
management strategies. In addition, our goal is to implement and
evaluate up to three FCC interventions to identify and address
logistical and feasibility issues necessary for implementing the
intervention for Grasslands elders. Such an evaluation will allow
us to determine the feasibility of establishing an intertribal FCC
facilitator support group.
Methods: Content and process data will
be collected from multiple sources including guided interviews (individual
and group), observation (direct and participant), and documents that can
be found either in the public domain or that are project generated.
Qualitative content analysis and formative and summative evaluations will
be performed. Ultimately, a full-scale, multi-site test of the FCC
intervention will be conducted on reservations through the R01 mechanism.
Continuation: This proposed pilot
project represents the fourth phase of a larger program of research to
develop and implement interventions for Native American elders who are at
risk of mistreatment. The information learned from the first three
phases of the project, combined with what we learn in this fourth phase,
will provide a solid foundation for an R01 to fully implement and evaluate
the FCC intervention on multiple reservations. Ultimately, we intend
to develop the means to make these models available to interested Native
American communities nationwide.
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