Jeong-Yeob Han partners in grant funded by Office on Violence Against Women

Jeong-Yeob Han, director of the Strategic Health and Risk Communication certificate, joins Joon Choi, an associate professor at the School of Social Work, in receiving a two-year, $477,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women to address domestic violence in the Asian immigrant community.

Known as Korean Americans for Healthy Families, the program will seek to change norms around domestic violence in that community, striving to both prevent domestic violence and expand access to needed resources and services for immigrant survivors of domestic violence.

Han said the project will increase scientific understanding of the effectiveness of culturally specific and technology-informed strategies to change community norms.

“It has the real potential to reduce the disparity of accessing resources and services for Asian victims of domestic violence by identifying barriers and facilitators to access the criminal justice system and get valuable services,” said Han, an associate professor of advertising.

This community-level intervention effort features two components — a virtual simulation training along with in-person workshops to better equip faith leaders who assist Asian survivors of domestic violence, as well as a communications campaign focused on strengthening community attitudes that both condemn domestic violence and facilitate access for survivors to necessary services.

Han is an expert on the implementation and evaluation of communication campaigns and will increase the amount of information to the immigrant Asian community members and survivors in the metro Chicago area. The multimedia campaigns will involve daily newspapers, radio and television and will be supplemented by promotional materials displayed at local stores and a social media campaign partnering with a local agency.

Choi is the principal investigator and Pamela Orpinas from the College of Public Health serves as a co-investigators.