David M. Murray, Office of Disease Prevention at the National Institutes of Health; Patrick Heagerty, University of Washington; and Melody S. Goldman, New York University
Over the last year, the National Institutes of Health has launched several initiatives focused on developing and testing multilevel interventions to address structural racism and other structural determinants as drivers of health disparities across the United States. Additional initiatives are anticipated from multiple NIH institutes, centers, and offices, as well as from ADVANCE: Advancing Prevention Research for Health Equity, a new trans-NIH effort from the Office of Disease Prevention to encourage new prevention interventions and strategies to deliver existing evidence-based interventions and preventive services in populations that experience health disparities.
Effectively addressing structural racism and other structural determinants to improve health equity requires rigorously tested and evidence-based multilevel interventions.
Effectively addressing structural racism and other structural determinants to improve health equity requires rigorously tested and evidence-based multilevel interventions. However, studies that evaluate multilevel interventions face specific challenges that require specialized design and analytical approaches. New research is needed to develop and test multilevel interventions focused on addressing structural racism and health disparities. Investigators would benefit from guidance on the appropriate design and analytic methods for evaluating these multilevel interventions, but such guidance is currently scattered across a wide range of sources and disciplines that do not often interact.
The ODP is sponsoring a supplemental issue of the journal Prevention Science, the official publication of the Society for Prevention Research, to bring together current thinking and new ideas about design and analytic methods that would be appropriate for studies aimed at reducing health disparities, including strategies for balancing methodological rigor with design feasibility, acceptability, and ethical considerations. Of particular interest are design and analytic methods for parallel group- or cluster-randomized trials (GRTs), stepped-wedge GRTs, group-level regression discontinuity trials, and other methods that are appropriate for evaluation of multilevel interventions.
Investigators should submit a two-page manuscript to ODP-Director@mail.nih.gov by September 1 outlining the design, analytic, and sample size methods they propose, together with any new research they propose to evaluate those methods.
By October 1, the guest editors will invite selected authors to submit a full manuscript. They will make recommendations to the editor for publication, and the editor will make the final decision regarding the disposition of each manuscript.
Initial manuscript drafts are due February 1, 2023, and the anticipated publication of the supplemental issue is in March 2024.
Each manuscript will need to provide an example multilevel intervention that could be proposed to address structural racism or other structural determinants and reduce health disparities. Each manuscript will also need to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach relative to existing methods.
Get details about the supplemental issue and author instructions.
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