Greetings From NYC

Hello CSRE Summer Interns and anyone else reading this blog! My name is Christian Ngo and this summer, I will be working with the Center for the Study of Asian American Health at NYU School of Medicine. The Center attempts to remedy the paucity of research dealing with Asian American health care. The Center’s main projects are the Vietnamese Community Health Initiative and Project AsPIRE, the latter of which I am working on. The AsPIRE in Project AsPIRE stands for Asian American Partnerships in Research & Empowerment. The health initiative attempts to bring together community members, academic researchers, and community based organizations in an effort to improve cardiovascular health in the Filipino American community.

So, now that you know about the organization, I guess the next question is what exactly do I do here? I work primarily in three areas with Project AsPIRE: analysis of data, community health needs assessments, and background research for the upcoming five-year-grant proposal. Last week, I was getting oriented with the software that the Center uses to analyse its data. The software that we use is SPSS and learning to manipulate the data with this software pack has been both rewarding and not too hard. In addition to learning about SPSS, I was also introduced to the database software, Microsoft Access, and got to see the data that has been already collected. Working with the two software programs and brushing off some of my dusty Excel skills, I did some preliminary descriptive analyses of the data and compiled the findings in a presentation handout for a community brunch held in Jersey City on Saturday. As a small aside, what I find most exciting about the research method that Project AsPIRE is using is that it really gets the community involved and participating in building infrastructures which improve the health of the cardiovascular health of its members. During the brunch, the data that has been already gathered was presented to the communities which are participating in the research and afterward, a break out session was held in order to get at how the community orgs felt the project was progressing, what they thought were the best “next steps” to be taken by the project, and what kinds of initiatives they would like to see included in the subsequent 5 year grant.

This week, I have been working more on the background research for the proposal. I’ve set up a meta-data table reviewing a good number of the articles published on cardiovascular health in Filipino populations in North America, as well as in the Philippines. Mostly, I’ve been extracting numbers from these articles for cholesterol levels, BMIs, blood pressure readings, and glucose levels, which we will be using to compare with the preliminary data that we’ve gathered on these values in the New York-New Jersey area. What makes our study unique is the fact that it is being conducted on the east coast. Most other studies dealing with Filipinos have been done in California, Hawaii, or the Philippines. I’ve pretty much reviewed most of the articles on Filipino Americans but I hope to find more on Filipinos in the Philippines.

Today, I am going to be oriented with the needs assessment section of the project. I’m really looking forward to it! I hope your internships are going well, too!