Research Focus

Dr. Fontenot has explored attitudes and beliefs about behaviors related to human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination among young adult populations and parents. In particular, she has focused on uncovering barriers to care and innovative ways to facilitate care to reduce vaccine disparities among sexual minority groups. Dr. Fontenot has also developed and tested novel interventions to increase HPV vaccine uptake and assessed the impact of culturally informed and affirming health delivery on health behaviors/vaccine acceptance. Dr. Fontenot explored aspects of effective provider vaccine communication/recommendation and parents’ perceptions of HPV vaccine communication. Her work has explored the importance of team-based vaccine communication strategies and strategies to overcome missed opportunities to vaccinate. A strong focus for Dr. Fontenot has been the HPV vaccine ‘catch-up’ population. It is important to understand and target vaccinations for those who have missed the opportunity as a child, and during a time when health care decision making was increasingly independent from parents. Recently, she has explored provider practice patterns, including barriers and facilitators, to adherence to up-to-date evidenced-based cervical cancer screening and management guidelines. This work has also included both provider and patient perspectives related to HPV self-swab testing. Fontenot has expertise in online and app-based recruitment and research methodologies for both qualitative and quantitative studies. She found online qualitative methods (asynchronous and synchronous-text based discussions) to produce robust data, and to be acceptable and highly effective in engaging hard-to-reach, marginalized, and diverse populations, as well as busy professionals and adolescent populations.