John S. Luque

2011 was a good year, here is the wordcloud of my 2011 publication abstracts.

Chad Morris (Roanoke College) and I co-edited a special issue of the Annals of Anthropological Practice (formerly NAPA Bulletin) for the November 2011 issue, on the Anthropology of Community-Based Coalition Practice. We hope you enjoy it! Here is the link to the issue:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.2011.35.issue-2/issuetoc

This fall, both of my professional conferences were in Washington D.C. First, I was a member of the Scientific Review Committee for AACR – Cancer Health Disparities Conference so I attended in September. I had a poster presentation on the pilot study we did on HPV vaccine barriers for VFC providers in Georgia. There was a large Moffitt HOB presence and I enjoyed seeing everyone. There were some anthropologists there again. This time Yolanda Moses talked about the R.A.C.E. exhibit at the Smithsonian and Juliet McMullin talked about her cancer research.  I did get a chance to visit the new M.L.K. memorial, as you can see below.

In October, I attended APHA for the first time. I attended many sessions on cancer disparities and farmworker health. I also had poster presentation on the NIH grant to present the development of the Salud es Vida flipchart educational tool for cervical cancer education. I probably ran into more than 100 people that I know. It was easy to run into people in the exhibition hall and poster sessions. Fellow anthropologists, Ricardo Contreras, Jason Lind, Antonio Tovar, and Georges (Atlas.ti) and I went to the Lincoln Memorial and then Asian Fusion for dinner. The next night, there was a USF reception at the Hyatt, so I saw a lot of alumni, faculty, and current students. Brett and I had a picture taken in front of inflatable Rocky (thanks Natalie!).

This summer I attended the 11th Annual NIH Institute on Randomized Controlled Trials for Behavioral Interventions for 2 weeks in Warrenton, VA and the NSF Short Course in Research Methods – Text Analysis for 1 week at DUML in Beaufort, NC. Aside from getting a lot of needed exercise on the volleyball court, both trainings were very valuable short courses and I strongly recommend both of them (although the latter is only open to anthropologists). For the NIH Institute, one of the most valuable modules for junior investigators related to the function of pilot studies. There was an article by Leon (2011) that argues that we should not be using pilot studies to generate effect sizes for larger RCTs such as would be funded by an R01.  I am using the reference in an R21 I am revising for resubmission. Delia West gave an energetic presentation on retention and recruitment in clinical trials that was very helpful also. Regarding the SCRM, it was my third course, and I find these courses extremely valuable for teaching research methods and for thinking about my own research. I am now a complete convert to MAXQDA, and I know we all look forward to Lance Gravlee’s next web tutorial for teaching purposes.

Some brief updates from recent conferences attended:

At SfAA in rainy Seattle, Chad Morris (Roanoke College) and I put together a panel on the anthropology of coalitions. We put together the panelists as well as other contributors for a special volume we are proposing for the Annals of Anthropology Practice (formerly NAPA Bulletin). The issue is currently under review. In addition, I presented my research on the promotora curriculum training, Salud es Vida, on a panel organized by Juliet McMullin on the Anthropology of Prevention. This research will be published in an upcoming special issue of the American Journal of Public Health, special issue on community health workers.

At the 21st annual Social Marketing Conference in sunny Clearwater Beach, I co-presented with Moya Alfonso on the Believe in All Your Possibilities campaign. I had a short introductory part on brand renewal for social marketing brands.  I was fortunate to hear inspiring talks by such luminaries in the social marketing field as Nancy Lee, Bill Smith, Doug McKenzie-Mohr, and others. Carol Bryant won a prestigious award as well, so we were all happy for her. Nancy Lee said the 4th edition of the social marketing textbook will be coming out in October.

I attended my first INSNA conference in St. Pete Beach, FL from Feb 8-13, 2011. For the pre-conference workshops I attended the UCINET/NetDraw workshops 1 and 2, taught by Dan Halgin and Rich Dejordy, and Martin Everett and Steve Borgatti.  One tip which is probably obvious to many, is to calculate your centrality measures in UCINET then import into NetDraw, rather than using NetDraw’s algorithms, which function differently. In the advanced workshop, we covered the matrix algebra tool, QAP regression, cliques, factions, core-periphery, equivalence, egonet change, two-mode centrality measures, among other topics. The first course was a good refresher, and the advanced course introduced some recent changes to the latest version of UCINET. During the conference, I attended sessions primarily in the Social Networks and Health track. Presentations at the conference I particulary liked were by Tom Valente on “Overlap and Distinctiveness in Adolescent Social Networks,” and another by Patricia Kissinger on “Sex and Drug HIV-risk Networks amonth Latino migrant men in New Orleans.” The last day of the conference, I presented my work during the poster session on the SNA of 3 years of data from the Tampa Bay Community Cancer Network. The poster expands the findings of my brief research article published in the Journal of Community Psychology and will be published in a future issue of the Annals of Anthropology Practice.

I was able to reconnect with fellow Mellon professors at the recent postdoctoral retreat in San Diego in January.  Fellows attended sessions on tenure and promotion, transitioning to administration, book publishing, and the future of Mellon. A couple of tips I found helpful. On the tenure and promotion panel, Charles Beatty suggested that we have an editor of our portfolios. Someone who is very well organized to let you know about the presentation of the portfolio is a vital asset.  Charles also suggested that related to teaching, when handing out teaching evaluations, it is useful to instruct students to make comments about the course and that comments on your persona are not particularly helpful toward improving the course, e.g. “this is the best/worst professor I have ever had.”  In sum, for postdoctoral Mellons approaching tenure, I highly recommend attending this bi-annual conference retreat.

There were particular talks which I found most helpful in the meeting, so I will highlight these ones in this blog. The first was by Dr. Larry Green.  His talk highlighted an amazing fact, that it takes 17 years to turn 14% of original research to benefit patient care. He advocated for more natural experiments, and used the example of the California and Massachusetts tobacco control programs using the tobacco tax. He stressed the many weaknesses in the paradigm of evidence-based medicine, and that we need to think outside of the box, since many of our interventions are not directly translatable to other cultures and socioeconomic situations. As a medical anthropologist and community health professor, the most relevant session to me was “Blending Methodologies to Optimize Cancer Disparities Research.” Dr. Rena Pasick, like Dr. Larry Green, questioned the generalizability of evidence-based interventions developed in controlled settings. She also stressed the importance of qualitative methods, that one should never undertake a RCT without a qualitative component. She also provided alternatives to the conventional RCT approach. For example, instead of performing a RCT on a colorectal cancer screening intervention, one might assess intervention efficacy by employing observations and in-depth interviews with participants of counseling sessions. Dr. Tony Onwuegbuzie presented an overview of mixed methods research approaches, and Dr. Sheba George read her paper on the social context of transnationalism. An important session in the Miami AACR conference was titled Global Cancer Research and Training.  I was particularly impressed with the presentation by Dr. Groesbeck Parham. He realized that the type of program he wanted to do could not be done as a parachute researcher and ended up moving to Zambia six years ago.  His network of clinics has successfully screened 50,000 women over four years for cervical cancer.  This is no small feat for a country with a very poor healthcare infrastructure. As I am also a cervical cancer researcher with experience in global health – Andean South America – these international research efforts are very important as we look forward to reduce the global cervical cancer burden. Finally, the two Sunday morning sessions on CER and Breast Cancer Disparities were further opportunities to hear about the latest in behavioral and secondary data analysis cancer disparities research. Dr. Electra Paskett presented a systematic review which was particularly informative as my own research involves developing cancer screening interventions for cervical cancer prevention. The take home message from her talk was that researchers need to compare the cost of interventions with effectiveness, tailor interventions to understudied, underserved minority populations, and create more interventions for prostate cancer. Dr. Debbie Erwin’s presentation was an excellent example of how a quantitative RCT might be strengthened with qualitative components to enhance trust in the research from the participant angle and be able to interpret the meaning of the study outcomes.

I returned last weekend from the Advanced Training Institute on Health Behavior Theory.  The faculty did an excellent job preparing for all the lectures and the 35 or so students were engaged in the learning experience.  The highlight for me was hearing David MacKinnon, http://www.public.asu.edu/~davidpm/ who was a very entertaining teacher.  While we received a little bit of information on mediation analysis in Dressler and Oths NSF SCRM, you can’t beat hearing from it from the person who wrote the book on mediation analysis.  The key message for me was to make sure you measure the intermediate psychosocial variables if your intervention does not work, you can explore the other causal pathways.

I am going to Tampa again, this time for Advanced Formative Research in Social Marketing. The professor is Dr. Tait Martin. With this course, my graduate certificate in social marketing will be complete.
http://www.cme.hsc.usf.edu/fsjune/