Good asthma control in children requires development and maintenance of a collaborative relationship between parents and medical professionals. For urban minority parents, often there are many challenges to forming such a relationship with their child’s healthcare provider. Inequalities between the two groups in health literacy, cultural awareness, and educational level all affect the balance that is good asthma control. Using an ecological framework, it is believed that culturally relevant asthma resources on the Internet will assist Hispanic families with adapting to caring for a child with asthma. In order to identify these resources, this research study will evaluate ten web sites aimed at parental education about asthma for relevance to the Hispanic culture. Each site will be accessed in real time and rated on a standardized form for the presence of cultural factors important to asthma management. A second rater will be used to evaluate 50% of the sites for reliability. Points will be assigned for presence of each factor and a total will be tallied for each site. Sites will then be ranked from most points to least, allowing healthcare providers to recommend the best sites to their clients. It is hoped that through identification of these resources, nurses will be able to recommend web sites to Hispanic families that will empower them to equalize their relationship with their child’s healthcare provider and as a result, achieve good asthma control for their child.
Session #1222 - Undergraduate Submissions
The 29th Annual MNRS Research Conference (April 1-4, 2005)