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A changing society: Economic and social trends over the past decade

March 29, 2010 By 1 Comment

We all know it’s been a wild decade. But what really happened in areas like immigration, employment, and poverty? An extremely useful report has been issued by the Population Reference Bureau called  U.S. Economic and Social Trends Since 2000. It’s written in easily understandable “layperson’s” language, and succinctly summarizes the last 10 years of economic and social trends in the United States.

The 10 key findings about the last 10 years from the report can be summarized as: 1) There are wide-ranging effects of the recession; 2) some short-term trends are adaptations of recession; 3) fertility rates expected to decline; 4) education levels increase, especially among women; 5) if current gaps in school enrollment and completion rates among blacks and Hispanics persist, the United States may not have the workforce it needs to succeed; 6) job losses and housing market declines have disproportionately affected blacks and Latinos; 7) there is a growing poverty gap between children and the elderly, but children without health insurance dropped sharply; 8) more people are delaying marriage; 9) fewer people are moving; 10) the largest concentration of out-migration occurs in rural communities. (Thanks to ASA Footnotes for this summary.)

The report is a quick read, and contains fascinating boxed inserts on topics like “”Industrial Restructuring,” “Health Insurance Coverage,” and “Food Stamp Participation.” It is very helpful background for extension and outreach folks, as well as anyone else interested in what’s been going on in our country during the past decade.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, policy Tagged With: ,

Rethinking Trauma: George Bonanno on Resilience

March 28, 2010 By 10 Comments

“Bad things happen.” That’s the way that George Bonanno often begins his presentations on trauma and resilience. And bad things do indeed happen, from individual tragedies like the death of a loved one, loss of a job, or a serious illness to major disasters like the bombing of the World Trade Center or the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. What happens to people after traumatic events and why? We were treated to fascinating answers to these questions during his visit to Cornell this week.

 I’ve always been personally intrigued by why responses to difficult life events are so dramatically different. I think it’s because of what I would call “A Tale of Two Grandmothers.” My maternal and paternal grandmothers were roughly the same age, and both had been through tragic life events when they were younger. “Nan” and “Grandma” had both lost much of everything they had during the Great Depression, and both of their husbands died young, leaving them widowed and alone. But my mother’s mother, Nan, thrived despite loss. She lived healthily and happily to age 93, helping my own widowed mother to raise my three brothers and me. Grandma, on the other hand, was emotionally disturbed by her losses, unable to shake pervasive grief and loneliness, often repelling the people who tried to help her.

 When George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, began working in the field of bereavement, many people working in the field either believed in fixed stages of grieving (such as those popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) or that people must always express and work through grief. In contrast, his research has identified resilience as the core experience of most people who experience trauma. By resilience is meant the ability of individuals exposed to a potentially highly disruptive event to maintain both healthy psychological and physical functioning and the capacity for positive emotions.

 All of us have known people like that, and it turns out they are in the majority. Applying rigorous research methods to trauma and grief, George found that many people recover well on their own. Further, in such cases, offering treatment to people who don’t need it can actually cause them harm, leading to the kinds of symptoms grief counseling is supposed to prevent.

 In an interview about what such people should do after a trauma, George noted:

 People who are not showing grief symptoms, don’t do anything — they’re fine. In fact, they can be harmed by intruding on their lives. They don’t need to talk about it, but I think in this culture we have this sense that people need to talk about it — if they don’t talk about it, something is wrong — no, leave those people alone. In people who are showing moderate levels of grief symptoms, it is sometimes a matter of getting used to the pain, which passes with time.

 George has courted some controversy with his research, because professional counselors find it hard to believe that people do not need treatment of some kind after a tragic loss. But his astonishing array of studies – ranging from people who experience the 9/11 terrorist attack, to Hong Kong residents affected by the SARS epidemic, to people living under chronic stress in the Palestinian territories – show that of all reactions to trauma, resilience is the most common.

 Rather than focusing on the pathologies that are supposed to follow trauma, George’s research points us toward looking at how to promote resilience and positive emotion after loss. One way, interestingly, is smiling and laughter (and George himself laced his talk with humor, despite the difficult topic).  Although people who can smile and even laugh shouldn’t be accused of not grieving enough – George’s research shows that laughter almost always has a positive effect.

In sum – good news for us all, since every one of us will experience loss at some point. George’s work points toward strengh-based approaches to coping with traumatic events, and demonstrates the human capacity for resilience most humans share. I highly recommend George’s recently published book, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. Written for a general audience, it’s a model of research translation on these issues.

 

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness Tagged With: ,

Health care reform: Here’s a source of up-to-date, objective information

March 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Some readers of Evidence-Based Living may be in professional situations where you are asked about the health care legislation passed by the House yesterday. And all of us, of course, are personally interested in the topic.

The Kaiser Family Foundation website is  the best place I’ve seen for clear, objective information. You can already find an excellent summary of the just-passed legislation, as well as a comparison of House and Senate bills (and a wealth of other information on the main page).

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness Tagged With: ,

Exercise and health: Another media mix-up

March 27, 2010 By 3 Comments

Is there anything more aggravating than when the media take a sound research study and distort the findings just to attract attention? (Okay, this season’s American Idol and the “five-dollar footlong” jingle are probably more aggravating, but still . . .) And it’s even worse when the public may take the incorrect message and change their behavior as a result. I’m thinking we should sponsor a contest for the worst reporting (stay tuned).

So take this article from the London Daily Mail. The headline: “Fitness flop? It’s all down to the genes, say researchers.” The first line of the article carries on the same theme:  ”Spent hours sweating it out in the gym but don’t feel any fitter? Blame your parents.” The article was then picked up by other sources and reported as fact (for example, by Fox News). Much of the reporting seems to suggest that some people shouldn’t exercise, as this cartoon accompanying the Daily Mail suggests.

We at Evidence-Based Living, of course, had to track down the original article and take a look (here’s the reference). Now, a lot of the article is close to unintelligible to the lay person (here’s one for you: “Target areas for the SNP selection was defined as the coding region of the gene 269 plus 20kb upstream of the 5’ end and 10 kb downstream of the 3’ end of the gene.”). However, the major finding is pretty straightforward.

 One important indicator of fitness is oxygen uptake, and exercise such as running and biking can increase your ability to take in oxygen.  This is commonly referred to as “aerobic fitness.” However, in the study, for about 20% of people intense exercise didn’t improve their oxygen uptake. All the subjects (around 600) in this study did a cycling exercise program.  On average, people’s aerobic capacity improved around 15 percent, but in approximately 20 percent of those studied, improvement was minimal (5 percent or less). The failure to improve was related to specific genes. The study will have practical value, because doctors may be able to tailor special programs to people who don’t respond to exercise.

All in all, a nice study. However, when you saw the extensive media coverage, your take-home could easily be: Why exercise? In fact, there is still every reason to hit the gym or track, or get on the bike several times a week. First and foremost, let’s turn it around and note that 80 % of people DID improve aerobic capacity. What the misleading headlines and coverage don’t tell you that for most of us, exercise works, and works well.

And even if you are in the minority, the study only looked at a couple of outcomes. However, exercise has multiple other benefits, from weight loss, to improving mood, to increasing flexibility, to reducing the risk of osteoporosis. The excellent  evidence-based medicine blog Bandolier summarizes all the benefits of exercise concisely.

So for those of you working to promote healthy behaviors like exercise, make sure people know that it’s still definitely good for people. And for everyone involved in disseminating research to the public: Let’s remember to keep a skeptical eye on media one-liners about scientific findings, especially as they relate to human health. It’s almost always more complicated, and there’s no excuse not to go to the source of the information, rather than relying only on the press.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness, In The Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Evidence-based basketball II: Does research point to a Big Red win?

March 24, 2010 By 4 Comments

Because we usually deal with such weighty issues here at Evidence-Based Living, we hope we can be permitted a light-hearted post (but still about research evidence in the real world, of course!). Our recent post on “evidence-based basketball” received a lot of interest, and we wondered: How else can science enlighten us about basketball? We were interested to find that a surprisingly large body of research has been done about the hoops world. .

But more important: Does the research point to victory for the Cornell Big Red in tomorrow’s NCAA game against the daunting Kentucky Wildcats? Of course, we can’t tell you that, but we’re willing to say that from a translational research perspective, things don’t look that bad for us! (All this is speculative, of course, so don’t place your bets on it.) A few reasons, in no particular order:

1. Cornell’s team bonding gives it a special advantage. Much has been made in the media of the high degree of bonding among the Big Red’s players, most of whom live, work, and play together. A recent study shows how important this can be.  Psychologist Michael Kraus and colleagues at UC-Berkeley painstakingly coded NBA games over the 2008-2009 season, looking for signs of cooperation among teammates (you can find the article on Kraus’s web site).

 Behaviors indicating cooperation included: talking to teammates during games, pointing or gesturing to one’s teammates, passing the basketball to a teammate who is less closely defended by the opposing team, helping other teammates on defense, helping other teammates escape defensive pressure (e.g., setting screens) – basically, behaviors that show a reliance on teammates at the expense of one’s individual performance. Precisely this kind of cooperation between teammates predicted better individual and team performance over the season.

 One fascinating part of the study: Tactile communication — physical touch between players — was a key factor in promoting cooperation. The researchers coded twelve distinct types of touch that occurred when two or more players were in the midst of celebrating a positive play that helped their team (e.g., making a shot), including “fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.”  This study controlled for a lot of important other factors, and found that how much the players touched each other predicted greater performance for individuals as well as teams later in the season. So keep up the celebrations, Big Red!

 2. Cornell’s brand of perfectionism is the good kind. There’s been a lot of research on the role of perfectionism in athletic performance, defined as “striving for flawlessness and the setting of excessively high standards for performance accompanied by tendencies for overly critical evaluations of one’s behavior and an over-sensitivity to mistakes.” But it turns out that there is a good kind of perfectionism in sports: positive striving for excellence and setting high personal standards for performance.

 Now anyone who has followed the Big Red (and the national media coverage of their positive attitude toward performance while downplaying the negative) knows they embody this kind of perfectionism (no bias on my part!). Using a basketball training task in an experiment, Oliver Stoll and colleagues found that good perfectionism leads to better basketball performance. So chalk another one up for the Big Red. 

 3. We’re closer to home. The Big Game will be played in nearby Syracuse. Now, that’s not exactly home court advantage, but it’s a lot closer than Kentucky. Interestingly, in sports there has been something of a debate about a “home choke” disadvantage in big games, rather than the traditional home court advantage. But what you suspected all along is true: the home court advantage is no myth. After crunching a huge amount of NBA and college basketball data over 50 years, John Tauer and colleagues (in an article in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology) found that the big advantage goes to the home basketball team (Tauer writes an interesting blog on sports psychology).

 Okay, none of this makes us a lock to advance in the NCAA tournament. But based on this (admittedly highly selective) evidence, dare we hope?

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living

Reimagining Extension and Outreach at Cornell: Strategic Plan for “Public Engagement”

March 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Have you heard about “Reimagining Cornell?” Universities like to reimagine themselves every once in a while, and Cornell is no exception. In Cornell’s case, this strategic planning process will have profound and long-term effects on the university – and not least for extension and outreach. Cornell’s approach should be of key interest to Cornell Cooperative Extension educators, as well as to others interested in university outreach efforts.

Reimagining Cornell is the name for  a coordinated planning and implementation effort upon which, as the leaders put it “the future health of our great university depends,” There are two main goals:  (1) to position Cornell for excellence in priority areas, and (2) to ensure the ongoing financial health of the university. Over the past year, activities have included gathering ideas from throughout Cornell, launching 20 task forces, and releasing a draft strategic plan. They’ve done a great job of putting all the information together on a user-friendly Reimagining Cornell web site.

There is major attention in the plan to the area of extension and outreach, included under the broad area of “Promoting Excellence in Public Engagement.”

The plan strongly endorses the importance of engaging with the community and extending the work of Cornell to benefit citizens of New York State and beyond. It also points to goals for extension that may imply a shift in focus. The plan proposes to integrate extension activities more closely with the many other public engagement activities at Cornell, including departments not part of the land-grant side of the university. It also calls for better integration of extension activities with the research and teaching efforts at Cornell, and an emphasis on evidence-based programming and evaluation of extension programs.

The five main recommendations are:

  1. Construct a unified concept and coherent organizational model for the University’s outreach and public engagement mission.
  2. Strongly connect extension and outreach to on-campus research and educational strengths.
  3. Develop rigorous, systematic evaluations of all outreach and extension programs.
  4. Promote stronger collaborations and partnerships between the University and stakeholders that can make use of and strengthen Cornell’s research (e.g., industry, K-12 schools, nonprofit organizations, government).
  5. Make public engagement a distinctive feature of education at Cornell.

You can read more detailed discussion of these points on the web page.

What do you think? Feel free to start a dialogue by posting comments here. We are very interested in your reactions and thoughts about these recommendations and their relevance to work in the counties.

Filed Under: Cornell Cooperative Extension, Evidence-Based Living Tagged With:

Scientific Fact-Checking is a Click Away: The Amazing Cochrane Collaboration

March 12, 2010 By 4 Comments

There’s a famous scene in the film Annie Hall, where Woody Allen is standing in line in a movie theater. Behind him, a pretentious professor is loudly proclaiming his opinions about the famous media thinker Marshall McLuhan. Allen’s character reaches the boiling point and from behind a film poster produces Marshall McLuhan himself, who proclaims to the pompous intellectual: “You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!” Woody tells the camera: “Boy, if life were only like this!”

We all wish that we had an impeccable source of information like that at our fingertips, especially when it comes to research on human health and well being. Imagine if you were in a debate – at work or with family and friends – about an issue pertaining to health. What if you could pull up a website and say: “I have the definitive scientific opinion right here!”

Actually, you can. It’s called the Cochrane Collaboration. I urge you to make the first of what I am sure will be many visits today. It is the true mother lode for objective scientific evidence on hundreds of issues relevant to mental and physical health and human development. You really can know what science has to say about many issues.

In the Cochrane Collaboration, teams of scientific experts from around the world synthesize the research information and issue reports offering guidance for what both professionals and the general public should do. It’s a non-profit, entirely independent organization, and that lets it provide up-to-date, unbiased information about the effects of health care practices and interventions.

The site is organized so you can, free of charge, get the abstract of any Cochrane review. What you will get is a clearly-written abstract of the review, written in layperson’s language. These can be used in to help answer your clients’ questions and in any situation where it helps to show the scientific consensus on an issue. They even have podcasts you can download of the reviews.

The number and scope of reviews is mind-boggling, and the Cochrane reviews take a very broad view of health (so you are sure to find ones relevant to your work). Here are just a few examples of the conclusions of reviews:

The media are taking notice of the Cochrane Collaboration, in part because these objective reviews can help figure out what our health care system should be paying for — a nice report appeared in Sharon Begley’s Newsweek blog.

So hey – why are you still here and not looking at the reviews? The easiest place to start is on the review page, where you can search for topics or just browse through the reviews.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness, The Learning Center Tagged With: , , ,

Stop the presses! Let’s learn from journalists about communicating research

March 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

All of us who are professionally or personally interested in translating research evidence to the public struggle with how best to do it. Fortunately, we don’t need to “reinvent the wheel” – there are great web resources to help us!

Bruce Lewenstein, Professor of Science Communication at Cornell has put together a terrific list of sites that provide nuts-and-bolts ideas and information for how to communicate with the public about science topics. These are geared in part for journalists who make a living communicating about research, or for scientists who are trying to communicate with the public. However, they provide information that is highly useful to extension educators and others who inform citizens about research. Prof. Lewenstein also maintains a web page with basic resources for better communication about scientific research. 

Take a look — I found I got several new ideas with just a few clicks!

http://communicatingscience.aaas.org/ (produced by American Association for the Advancement of Science, includes webinars, tipsheets, etc.)

 www.wfsj.org/course/en/index.html (online science journalism course, developed by World Federation of Science Journalists; primary audience is science journalists in developing countries)

http://www.scidev.net/en/science-communication/ (SciDev.net’s “Communicating Science” section, focused on science journalism for the developing world, but relevant for anyone communicating science)

http://www.pantaneto.co.uk/issue28/thomas.htm Tips for great (science) media interviews (from Patricia Thomas, Knight Chair in Health & Medical Journalism, Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Georgia)

 http://www.scienceliteracyproject.org/Science Literacy Project (a workshop for science reporters working in public radio; some resources online, especially the “tip sheets”)

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, In The Media Tagged With: , ,

So many decisions, so little time . . .

March 2, 2010 By 7 Comments

I have to admit that, as a busy person, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the multitude of choices that I have to make on a daily basis. Coming home after a rough day at work, deciding what to have for dinner is not one of my most pleasant moments. I was reminded of this the other day when I read an article by Dr. Brian Wansink, professor in Cornell’s Applied Economics and Management Department, where he is Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. The article reported on a study that Wansink conducted with Dr. Jeffery Sobal, professor in Cornell’s Division of Nutritional Sciences. In the study, the researchers surveyed 139 people and asked them to estimate how many decisions they made about food and beverages in one day. Participants were also asked more detailed questions about when, what, and how much they ate. When asked to estimate how many decisions they made about food in an average day, they guessed an average of 14.4 food-related decisions. After creating an aggregated index of food decisions the participants actually made, they found that the average participant made an estimated number of 226.7 decisions about food per day.
Whew, no wonder I’m tired at the end of a busy day! The take away on this research is that we are unaware of just how often we are faced with decisions about eating and equally unaware about how much our environment influences our choices. In other research, Wansink has investigated how much factors such as package size, plate size, and serving size can bias how much we consume. The consistent finding from this research is that various aspects of our “food environment” -such as the way food is labeled, stored, and eaten-can have a big influence on our eating habits and preferences.
These results can be pretty alarming and discouraging, when you consider how much effort advertisers put into manipulating our choices. But, there is hope. Wansink and some of his colleagues have also found that we can have better nutrition and eating habits by making small changes to our homes and being more mindful of our eating habits. He is collaborating with Human Ecology professors Carol Devine and Elaine Wethington on a new study called Small Changes and Lasting Effects, which the team hopes will lead to the development of mindful eating strategies aimed at reducing weight through small, sustained changes in eating behavior combined with increases in physical activity.

Wansink, Brian and Jeffrey Sobal (2007), “Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook,” Environment and Behavior 39:1, 106-123.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness Tagged With:

The navel-piercing battle — and how research helped me win it

March 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

Several of you have asked me when I’m going to make good on a promise to post a personal account of how research influenced my life. Several intrepid souls have already posted their experiences using research in their family life or work (see the “Your Stories” page – and please add your own!). I agree that it’s my turn.

And  I believe I have a compelling story to tell. It involves family conflict, body parts usually covered up by clothing, even blood. And yet, thanks to access to scientific evidence, it had a happy ending. (And even a moral for research translation, but more about that at the end.)

 When my daughter, Sarah, was 15 (now at 23, she has agreed to let me tell this story), she became determined to have her belly button pierced. When I say “determined,” I mean determined. All of you who have children have probably learned to distinguish between a request that you can divert or deflect (“Let’s talk to Mom about it,” “Let’s wait a month and see”) and one that your offspring will fight for tooth and nail. The look in his or her eyes says:

 –I really want to do this.

–I really want to do this, and if you don’t let me, my life will be irrevocably, irreparably ruined for ever.

–You really can’t stop me, because I can figure out a way to do this no matter what you say.

–Okay, maybe you can stop me, but do you really want to experience all the unpleasantness you are in for over the coming months if you do?

 Such was the case with this issue. Scholarly opinion is still out regarding how getting a belly-button ring was the most important thing in my daughter’s life. It may have been the result of seeing a celebrity or  athlete, or the influence of a peer – as I say, we do not (and may never) know. But there it was.

 Now, I could have had the series of knock-down, drag-out fights these things often entail, but I searched for a different path. And there were two things on my side. First, Sarah was (and is) a fundamentally reasonable person, who could objectively look at the facts and make a decision.

 Second, and more important, she had (and has) an aversion to medical procedures, and especially those that involve getting stuck with needles. My task was to develop an argument that took advantage of both traits.

 So I did what any translational researcher would do: I went to the library. Through the magic of scientific search engines, I found exactly what I needed about belly button piercing. I created a handout of the key findings and copied the articles on which they were based.

 And the findings were clear. Without going into all the details, I was able to highlight the following facts: (1) piercing creates a hole near the navel that can be a pathway into the abdominal cavity for infection. (2) infections of this kind are really gross.  (3) It takes up to six months to completely heal. (4) Severe pain can result if the navel piercing doesn’t heal properly. (5) Navel piercings are irritated by tight clothing. (6) Athletes (like Sarah, a soccer player) can get injured and bleed profusely if something (like a soccer ball) hits the piercing site. (A good, more recent article summarizes piercing complications in general, if you’re interested.)

 We sat down at the kitchen table, and I made my presentation. I could see her resolve wavering as the evidence mounted (and it fortuitously turned out that she knew someone who got hit in the stomach with a soccer ball and whose piercing bled all over the place). We came to the best compromise I could hope for – a decision to wait. (And wait we did, until about a year later, when I accompanied Sarah for the less risky nostril piercing, by mutual agreement and based on the evidence).

 The moral of the story: Yes, there is a moral. When we communicate scientific information to audiences, why don’t we tell our own stories about how research changed our lives? One way to interest people in using scientific research findings is to say how our own lives are “evidence-based.” As we try to convince others of the power of the evidence, it can’t hurt to reflect on how we ourselves have modified our own actions because a potent research finding popped up at the right time. And hey, if it helps you win an argument with one of your kids, isn’t it worth it?

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living
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