Jennifer Warren
Jennifer R. Warren has a Ph.D in Communication Arts and Sciences from The Pennsylvania State University with a concentration in health communication/prevention and group identities. Currently, Dr. Warren is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program for Health Disparities Research located in the Medical School at the University of Minnesota where, drawing upon her communication background, she focuses on tobacco control and the reduction of tobacco-related health disparities within lower income African American communities. In this context, she is specifically addressing the question of how can barriers be reduced to increase low income African Americans’ rates of tobacco use cessation and their commitment to community-level tobacco control?
For Dr. Warren barriers include access-related (content/message, channel relevance) health disparities within low-income African American communities. She believes health information is available within these communities; however, how this information is delivered and what it communicates ignores the multiple, dynamic, and interactive realities/identities of the audience. Additionally, low-income communities are usually viewed as unable/unwilling to use new technology for health. These positions have problematic assumptions and maintain a inequitable status quo both of which Dr. Warren is working to address through her funded research.
As PI, she has funding from the Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation (CRPF; now Prevent Cancer Foundation) and American Cancer Society (ACS) to develop two tailored web-based smoking cessation interventions targeting low-income, urban, African American smokers who smoke 10 or fewer cigarettes per day (ACS) and smokers in general (CRPF). These projects will culminate in a small scale randomized control trial of the intervention’s usability and user experience and offer findings to apply for a larger grant to conduct a full-scale trial assessing the effectiveness a web-based quit smoking program targeting this population. A third study funded by ClearWay of Minnesota will assess how low-income African American parents can be mobilized to address the harms of parental and other adult secondhand smoke exposure among children ages 6 weeks to 5 years of age to obtain data for a funded full scale community health campaign. Additionally, to address the risks of unidimensional (monolithic) health information tailoring, Dr. Warren has developed the Model of Integrative Community Ecologies in Ehealth (MICEE) – a process-oriented tailoring model to be applied and tested in her public health research. She has also developed and tested an instrument to measure how group identity impacts the seeking and finding of health information (article under review).
Dr. Warren also has several collaborative publications in national journals, including “Substance use, resistance skills, decision making, and refusal efficacy among Mexican and Mexican American preadolescents” in Health Communication and “Communicating prevention: The effects of the keepin’ it REAL classroom videotapes and televised PSAs on middle-school students’ substance use” in the Journal of Applied Communication Research. Dr. Warren currently has several co-authored publications under review, two of which address secondhand smoke among African American light smokers and the role of cultural and class-based identity in seeking and finding information online.