Rush University Medical Center

Junior Investigator, Vulnerable Populations

Project Title: Promoting Paternal Involvement in African-American Non-resident Fathers Via Faith-Based Parent Training

"I applied for the New Connections Award because I saw the program as an opportunity to expand my career as a whole and my abilities as a researcher. I'm proud to be a recipient of this award and to be a member of the RWJF family. The entire experience has been stellar. The New Connections Award has had the greatest impact upon my ability to manage a large statistical database. The skills that are needed for successful data base management are totally separate from the skills you need to analyze data, and this study has afforded me the opportunity to become more proficient in both. I feel like I'm now more of a partner with my statistician, rather than solely a recipient of his expertise."

Project Description

Paternal Involvement is important to the development of healthy children and the well-being of fathers and families. However, two-thirds of African-American children do not live with their fathers, and we know little about the reasons fathers and children are separated. Julion hypothesizes that church-partnered initiatives hold great promise as implementation sites for parent training interventions, based upon the historically important role of African American churches in implementing change in the African American community.

Her research specifically aims to examine socio-demographic and contextual variables related to parental involvement with the aim of developing strategies that can be implemented within or in partnership with church-partnered settings to increase and maintain parental involvement among young African American fathers who do not live in the same home as their children.

She will conduct a secondary data analysis using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, the largest study examining relationships among unmarried couples with a specific emphasis on learning more about fathers. Julion will conduct structural equation modeling to examine the relationships between study variables and parental involvement.

Factors that are found to be associated with greater parental involvement can subsequently guide effective and contextually-relevant interventions for young African American fathers who do not live in the same home as their children.

Biography

Wrenetha Julion, D.N.Sc., M.P.H., is a registered nurse who has worked in the areas of women's and children's health and community health for her entire nursing career. She earned her bachelors of science in nursing from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville; dual masters degrees in nursing and public health from the University of Illinois at Chicago; and her doctorate in nursing from Rush University in Chicago.

Julion has actively been involved in nursing education for the past 10 years and serves as an assistant professor at Rush University College of Nursing. In addition, Julion is co-investigator on a study funded by the National Institutes of Health to examine parent participation in preventive parent training programs; and she is co-author of the Chicago Parent Program. Her individual research efforts focus on learning more about factors that influence African American fathers' involvement with their non-resident children, and her ultimate goal is to develop and implement fatherhood programs to increase father involvement. Julion is married with three children.

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