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Capturing Dynamic Processes of Change in GROW Mutual Help Groups for Mental Health.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The need for a model that can portray dynamic processes of change in mutual help groups for mental health (MHGMHs) is emphasized. A dynamic process model has the potential to capture a more comprehensive understanding of how MHGMHs may assist their members. An investigation into GROW, a mutual help organization for mental health, employed ethnographic, phenomenological and collaborative research methods. The study examined how GROW impacts on psychological well being. Study outcomes aligned with the social ecological paradigm (Maton in Understanding the self-help organization: frameworks and findings. Sage, Thousand Oa...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - November 14, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Finn LD, Bishop BJ, Sparrow N Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Moving Toward Comprehensiveness and Sustainability in a Social Ecological Approach to Youth Violence Prevention: Lessons from the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Youth violence is a serious public health problem affecting communities across the United States. The use of a social ecological approach has helped reduce its prevalence. However, those who have put the approach into practice often face challenges to effective implementation. Addressing social ecology in all its complexity presents one obstacle; the ability of private non-profit and public agencies to sustain such comprehensive efforts presents another. Here, we provide an example of our efforts to prevent youth violence. We worked with the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center (APIYVPC) and two comm...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - November 13, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Umemoto K, Baker CK, Helm S, Miao TA, Goebert DA, Hishinuma ES Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Profiling Capacity for Coordination and Systems Change: The Relative Contribution of Stakeholder Relationships in Interorganizational Collaboratives.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study adopts a network approach to explore the relative importance of dense networks of cooperative relationships among members of interorganizational collaboratives for two outcomes of effectiveness: improving interorganizational coordination and fostering systems change. Based on survey and social network data collected from 48 different collaboratives, findings indicate that, relative to other key characteristics of collaboratives identified in previous literature, cooperative stakeholder relationships were the strongest predictor of systems change outcomes. However, for coordination outcomes, stakeholder relations...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - November 10, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Nowell B Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Editor's Note.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: PMID: 19885728 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: American Journal of Community Psychology)
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - November 3, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

A Social Ecological Approach to Investigating Relationships Between Housing and Adaptive Functioning for Persons with Serious Mental Illness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper seeks to advance mental health-housing research regarding which factors of housing and neighborhood environments are critical for adaptive functioning, health, and recovery for persons with serious mental illness (SMI). Housing and neighborhood environments are particularly important for persons with SMI because of the prevalence of poor housing conditions among this population. Most mental health-housing research has been limited by a focus on problems in environments and functioning. The paper seeks to expand the mental health-housing research agenda to consider protective factors that promote community in...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 28, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Kloos B, Shah S Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Mental Health Risk and Social Ecological Variables Associated with Educational Attainment for Gulf War Veterans: Implications for Veterans Returning to Civilian Life.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examines how post-secondary educational attainment among young veterans of the first gulf war affects their mental health status. The all-volunteer military attracts recruits by offering them veterans' educational benefits. Education should help veterans adjust to civilian life. Few studies have shown whether education following military service helps improve veterans' mental health, however. Viewing resiliency, life span and life course, and social geography theories through the lens of social ecology, it is hypothesized that selected contextual factors in the personal, interpersonal, and organizational domains...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Smith-Osborne A Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Increases in Tolerance Within Naturalistic, Intentional Communities: A Randomized, Longitudinal Examination.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The authors examine differential changes in values of tolerance among 150 participants discharged from inpatient treatment centers, and randomly assigned to either a self-help-based, communal living setting (i.e., Oxford House), or usual aftercare. Participants were interviewed every 6 months for a 24-month period. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to examine the effect of condition (therapeutic communal living versus usual aftercare) on wave trajectories of tolerance (i.e., universality/diversity scores). Over time, residents of the communal living model demonstrated significantly greater values of tolerance...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Olson B, Jason LA, Davidson M, Ferrari JR Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Multiple Psychological Senses of Community in Afghan Context: Exploring Commitment and Sacrifice in an Underground Resistance Community.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The study of positive outcomes associated with strong psychological sense of community (PSOC) has grown worldwide. Yet most research explores PSOC as a uni-dimensional (positive) variable operating in a single referent community. Theoretical and empirical literature has suggested, however, that PSOC can be positive, neutral or negative (Brodsky in J Commun Psychol 24(4):347-363, 1996; Brodsky et al. in Psychological sense of community: Research, applications and implications. Kluwer, New York 2002) and since people live in multiple physical and relational communities, there may be multiple PSOCs (M-PSOC) operating simu...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Brodsky AE Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Local Food Environments: They're All Stocked Differently.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The obesity epidemic has widened the aims of prevention research to include the influence of local food environments on health outcomes. This mixed methods study extends existing research focused on local food environments by examining whether community members' find food accessible. Data from food store audits and one-on-one interviews were analyzed. Results reveal that most of the food stores surrounding the three research sites were convenience stores and non-chain grocery stores; interviewees did not perceive these stores to be "real" food stores. Tobacco and alcohol products were more prevalent in the food stores ...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Freedman DA Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

A Social Ecological Conceptual Framework for Understanding Adolescent Health Literacy in the Health Education Classroom.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
With the rising concern over chronic health conditions and their prevention and management, health literacy is emerging as an important public health issue. As with the development of other forms of literacy, the ability for students to be able to access, understand, evaluate and communicate health information is a skill best developed during their years of public schooling. Health education curricula offer one approach to develop health literacy, yet little is known about its influence on neither students nor their experiences within an educational context. In this article, we describe our experience applying a social...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Wharf Higgins J, Begoray D, Macdonald M Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Examining the Etiology of Childhood Obesity: The IDEA Study.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The prevalence of childhood obesity is of great public health concern. A social ecological framework that is transdisciplinary and multilevel by nature is recognized as the most promising approach for studying this problem. The purpose of this paper is to describe longitudinal research using a social ecological framework to study the etiology of childhood obesity. Individual and contextual factors are assessed in a cohort of youth and their parents including psychosocial factors, and home, school and neighborhood environments. The conceptual model guiding the research and the study design and measures used to operation...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Lytle LA Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Researching a Local Heroin Market as a Complex Adaptive System.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This project applies agent-based modeling (ABM) techniques to better understand the operation, organization, and structure of a local heroin market. The simulation detailed was developed using data from an 18-month ethnographic case study. The original research, collected in Denver, CO during the 1990s, represents the historic account of users and dealers who operated in the Larimer area heroin market. Working together, the authors studied the behaviors of customers, private dealers, street-sellers, brokers, and the police, reflecting the core elements pertaining to how the market operated. After evaluating the logical...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hoffer LD, Bobashev G, Morris RJ Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Sequence and Timing of Three Community Interventions to Domestic Violence.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study responds to the issue by introducing system dynamics as a method for modeling community interventions. The paper presents a model of domestic violence cases moving through a criminal justice response, and uses the simulation model to evaluate the impact of implementing three interventions-mandatory arrest, victim advocacy, and changes in level of cooperation-on two system-level outcomes: improving offender accountability and increasing victim safety. Results illustrate the complex nature of these relationships. Implications for community practice and future research are also discussed. PMID: 19838793 [PubMed...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hovmand PS, Ford DN Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Area-Based Socioeconomic Characteristics of Industries at High Risk for Violence in the Workplace.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examined socioeconomic factors associated with the presence of workplaces belonging to industries reported to be at high risk for worker homicide. The proportion of 2004 North Carolina workplaces in high-risk industries was computed following spatial linkage of individual workplaces to 2000 United States Census Block Groups (n = 3,925). Thirty census-derived socioeconomic variables (selected a priori as potentially predictive of violence) were summarized using exploratory factor analysis into poverty/deprivation, human/economic capital, and transience/instability. Multinomial logistic regression models indicate ...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Ta ML, Marshall SW, Kaufman JS, Loomis D, Casteel C, Land KC Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

African-American Women's Conceptualizations of Health Disparities: A Community-Based Participatory Research Approach.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examined participants' definitions of infant mortality, views on the community impact of infant mortality, and strengths and vulnerabilities in the health care service delivery system. Qualitative data were gathered in a rural North Florida community where health education groups are conducted. Eight focus groups were arranged with African-American women (n = 46), ranging in age from 14 to 35, who were pregnant, parenting children under the age of two. Respondents poignantly described personal experiences of loss associated with infant mortality. They indicated awareness of problems related to lack of accessibil...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Baffour TD, Chonody JM Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Erratum to: Acculturation of Host Individuals: Immigrants and Personal Networks.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19838796 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: American Journal of Community Psychology)
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Domínguez S, Maya-Jariego I Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

The Importance of the Community Context in the Epidemiology of Early Adolescent Substance Use and Delinquency in a Rural Sample.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Considerable research has demonstrated that substance use and delinquency during early adolescence can have long-term negative health consequences. As the correlates of these behaviors cross levels and contexts, it is likely that a social ecological approach will provide insight to inform community prevention. This approach informs the present study, which focuses on developing a multiple-method measurement strategy to examine associations among community risks, resources, and rates of early adolescent substance use and delinquency in 28 rural and small town communities. Measures include five domains of community risk,...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Chilenski SM, Greenberg MT Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

A Community Responds to Collective Trauma: An Ecological Analysis of the James Byrd Murder in Jasper, Texas.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The brutal murder of James Byrd Jr. in June 1998 unleashed a storm of media, interest groups, high profile individuals and criticism on the Southeast Texas community of Jasper. The crime and subsequent response-from within the community as well as across the world-engulfed the entire town in a collective trauma. Using natural disaster literature/theory and employing an ecological approach, Jasper, Texas was investigated via an interrupted time series analysis to identify how the community changed as compared to a control community (Center, Texas) on crime, economic, health, educational, and social capital measures coll...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - October 14, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Wicke T, Silver RC Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Introduction to Special Issue on Social Ecological Approaches to Community Health Research and Action.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We have the potential to make new, substantive contributions to resolving our most pressing community health problems. However, to do so we must adopt a philosophy of science that is directed towards understanding the dynamic complexity and full contextual reality surrounding these issues. A social ecological approach to science is ideally suited to this challenge. This framework is systems-oriented and defines research problems in terms of structures and processes, generating research outcomes that give insight into the dynamic interaction of individuals with their environment across time and space. Though community p...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - September 23, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Lounsbury DW, Mitchell SG Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

VERB Summer Scorecard: Findings from a Multi-level Community-based Physical Activity Intervention for Tweens.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study explored the influences of a multi-level community intervention aimed at increasing physical activity among tweens (youth 9-13). Two Florida school districts far apart served as intervention and comparison sites in a quasi-experimental post-test design. Youth in grades 5 through 8 in the intervention community (n = 1,253) and comparison community (n = 866) completed an anonymous post-intervention survey. An intent-to-treat analysis did not show any statistically significant group differences for the physical activity outcomes examined. However, a subset analysis revealed that students who reported participating ...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - September 23, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Debate RD, Baldwin JA, Thompson Z, Nickelson J, Alfonso ML, Bryant CA, Phillips LM, McDermott RJ Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Global Aging: Challenges for Community Psychology.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19644750 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: American Journal of Community Psychology)
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - July 30, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Cheng ST, Heller K Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Addressing the Challenges Faced by Early Adolescents: A Mixed-Method Evaluation of the Benefits of Peer Support.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this article, we describe a mixed-methods study used to examine the effectiveness of a widely-used peer support program designed to facilitate the transition to adolescence and high school by enhancing self-concept and other desirable outcomes. For the quantitative component, a longitudinal design was employed (930 Grade 7 students, 3 schools, 2 years), with control group and baseline (i.e., pre-program) data against which to compare the effects. Using a multilevel approach, the results provide evidence to suggest that the program was largely successful in achieving its aims of enhancing students' school self-concep...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - July 13, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Ellis LA, Marsh HW, Craven RG Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Family and Neighborhood Fit or Misfit and the Adaptation of Mexican Americans.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, a person-environment fit model was used to understand the independent and combined roles of family and neighborhood characteristics on the adjustment of adults and children in a sample of 750 Mexican American families. Latent class analysis was used to identify six qualitatively distinct family types and three quantitatively distinct neighborhood types using socioeconomic and cultural indicators at each level. The results showed that members of single-parent Mexican American families may be particularly at-risk, members of the lowest-income immigrant families reported fewer adaptation problems if they lived ...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 26, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Roosa MW, Weaver SR, White RM, Tein JY, Knight GP, Gonzales N, Saenz D Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Socio-Demographic Correlates of Fear of Crime and the Social Context of Contemporary Urban China.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Previous research in the West has established major socio-demographic correlates of fear of crime. The interpretation of these correlates is typically based on the concept of physical or social vulnerability of individuals. These correlates are implicitly regarded as invariant to social or community contexts, reflecting universal human behavioral patterns. The present study argues that social change may alter patterns of perceptions associated with fear among socio-demographic groups, thus affecting socio-demographic correlates of fear of crime. We explore how social changes in China have created a generational gap tha...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 24, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Liu J, Messner SF, Zhang L, Zhuo Y Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Exposure to Violence, Support Needs, Adjustment, and Motivators Among Guatemalan Humanitarian Aid Workers.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Indigenous aid workers carry out the majority of humanitarian aid work, yet there is little empirical information available on their support needs in different contexts. Focus groups (N = 26: Study 1) and a survey (N = 137; Study 2) were conducted with Guatemalan aid workers to explore their exposure to violence, posttraumatic stress symptoms, burnout, support needs, and motivators. Participants reported experiencing an average of 13 events of community violence and 17% reported symptoms consistent with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Direct community violence exposure and levels of emotional exhaustion were posi...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 24, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Putman KM, Lantz JI, Townsend CL, Gallegos AM, Potts AA, Roberts RC, Cree ER, de Villagrán M, Eriksson CB, Foy DW Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

The Impacts of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic and Socioeconomic Development on the Living Arrangements of Older Persons in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Country-Level Analysis.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigates whether socioeconomic development and the HIV/AIDS pandemic are associated with living arrangement patterns in older persons in 23 sub-Saharan African countries. Country-level aggregate data were taken from previous household surveys and information provided by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. Results showed that 13.5% of older persons (aged 60 years or over) were living with grandchildren but not adult children (i.e., skipped generation households). Countries higher in HIV/AIDS prevalence had more skipped generation households, and also more older persons livin...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 18, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Cheng ST, Siankam B Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Adolescent Place Attachment, Social Capital, and Perceived Safety: A Comparison of 13 Countries.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In adolescence, children become increasingly independent and autonomous, and spend more time in neighborhood settings away from home. During mid-to-late adolescence, youth often become more critical about the place they live. Their attachment to home and even community may decrease as they explore and develop new attachments to other specific places. The aim of this study is to understand how 15-year-old students from 13 countries perceive their local neighborhood area (place attachment, social capital and safety), and how these different community cognitions are interrelated. We hypothesize that their place attachment...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Dallago L, Perkins DD, Santinello M, Boyce W, Molcho M, Morgan A Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Building International Collaborative Capacity: Contributions of Community Psychologists to a European Network.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article describes the steps taken to develop and evaluate the activities of an international network promoting collaborative capacity among regional partners involved in the prevention of labor discrimination toward immigrants in three European countries-Spain, Belgium, and Italy. An international team of community psychologists proposed an empowering approach to assess the collaborative capacity of the network. This approach consisted of three steps: (1) establishing a collaborative relationship among partners, (2) building collaborative capacity, and (3) evaluating the collaborative capacity of the network. We concl...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: García-Ramírez M, Paloma V, Suarez-Balcazar Y, Balcazar F Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Participatory Research in Systems of Care for Children's Mental Health.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The children's system of care initiative in the United States requires the participation of caregivers of children with emotional or behavioral problems in conducting research and evaluation. This entails a restructuring of traditional power dynamics among families served by the community mental health system and other system stakeholders, including researchers. However, evidence indicates that system of care research may not currently embrace the different types of knowledge possessed by caregivers and may be frustrated by traditional power hierarchies, resulting in research findings that are not useful for the commun...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Pullmann MD Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Global Aging: Challenges for Community Psychology.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Older persons are among the major marginalized, disenfranchised citizens worldwide, yet this group has generally been ignored in the community psychology literature. In this paper, we trace the demographic trends in aging worldwide, and draw the field's attention to the United Nations Program on Aging, which structures its policy recommendations in terms of concepts that are familiar to community psychologists. A central theme of the paper is that community psychology can have a role in producing the conceptual shifts needed to change societal attitudes now dominated by negative age stereotypes. PMID: 19533332 [Pub...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Cheng ST, Heller K Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Sense of Community in Hong Kong: Relations with Community-Level Characteristics and Residents' Well-Being.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Sense of community (SOC) has been one of the most studied topics in community psychology. However, no empirical study to date has investigated SOC in Hong Kong and its relations with community characteristics and residents' psychological well-being. A representative sample of 941 Hong Kong Chinese based on a randomized household survey was conducted in all 18 districts in Hong Kong. Results of hierarchical linear modeling indicated that SOC was not associated with sociodemographic indicators on both the individual-level (i.e., gender, age, family income, education level, type of residence, and area-to-capita ratio of r...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 16, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mak WW, Cheung RY, Law LS Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

The Role of Lay Health Advisors in Cardiovascular Risk Reduction: A Review.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The objectives of this review were to: (1) provide a comprehensive review and evaluation of the roles, evaluation, and effectiveness of LHA in community-based programs with an emphasis on cardiovascular risk reduction; and (2) provide recommendations for future research involving LHA in such programs. Computer and manual searches were conducted of articles in the English-language literature from 1980 to 2007. Twenty articles were evaluated, which emphasized the role of the LHA in cardiovascular risk reduction. A review of research literature provides a starting point for determining salient approaches for intervention and ...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 15, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Fleury J, Keller C, Perez A, Lee SM Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Parental Engagement and Barriers to Participation in a Community-Based Preventive Intervention.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examined parent characteristics and barriers to participation in a community-based preventive intervention with a sample of 201 parents from low-income and predominantly ethnic minority backgrounds. Person-centered analyses revealed five subgroups of parents who demonstrated variability in their parent characteristics, which included psychological resources and level of parental involvement in education. Group membership was associated with differences in school involvement and use of the psychoeducational intervention at home, after accounting for the number of barriers to engagement. For the intervention atten...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 15, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mendez JL, Carpenter JL, Laforett DR, Cohen JS Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

International Community Psychology: Development and Challenges.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19526208 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: American Journal of Community Psychology)
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 12, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Perkins DD Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

The Social Conditions for Successful Peer Education: A Comparison of Two HIV Prevention Programs Run by Sex Workers in India and South Africa.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Peer education is a community-based intervention being implemented worldwide as an approach to HIV prevention. However, its results are inconsistent, with little consensus on why some projects succeed while others fail. Considering peer education as an 'intervention-in-context', we systematically compare the context and the implementation of two peer education interventions run by sex workers, one in India and one in South Africa, which produced contrasting outcomes. In so doing, we aim to identify key factors in the projects' successes or failures that may inform future peer education efforts. The Indian project's rel...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - June 11, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Cornish F, Campbell C Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Multilevel perspectives on community intervention: an example from an Indo-US HIV prevention project in Mumbai, India.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper explores the meaning and applicability of multilevel interventions and the role of ethnography in identifying intervention opportunities and accounting for research design limitations. It utilizes as a case example the data and experiences from a 6-year, NIMH-funded, intervention to prevent HIV/STI among married men in urban poor communities in Mumbai, India. The experiences generated by this project illustrate the need for multilevel interventions to include: (1) ethnographically driven formative research to delineate appropriate levels, stakeholders and collaborators; (2) identification of ways to link int...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - May 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schensul SL, Saggurti N, Singh R, Verma RK, Nastasi BK, Mazumder PG Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Building Xperience: a multilevel alcohol and drug prevention intervention.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
"Xperience" is an innovative alcohol and drug prevention program that has adopted a multilevel, community-based strategy to promote drug-and-alcohol free social activities, venues and norms among urban youth ages 14-20. The intervention aims to strengthen protective factors and reduce risk factors for alcohol and other substance use among high school age youth by addressing multiple factors at the individual, peer, community and city level. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the process of building the different levels of this intervention during the 3-year formative phase. We will explain: (1) Why we chose to ado...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - May 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Diamond S, Schensul JJ, Snyder LB, Bermudez A, D'Alessandro N, Morgan DS Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Introduction to multi-level community based culturally situated interventions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This introduction to a special issue of the American Journal of Community Psychiatry is the result of a symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, 2006, that brought together anthropologists and psychologists involved in community based collaborative intervention studies to examine critically the assumptions, processes and results of their multilevel interventions in local communities with local partners. The papers were an effort to examine context by offering a theoretical framework for the concept of "level" in intervention science, and advocating for "multi-level" approaches to social/...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - May 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schensul JJ, Trickett E Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Multi-level intervention to prevent influenza infections in older low income and minority adults.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this paper we describe a successful multi-level participatory intervention grounded in principles of individual and group empowerment, and guided by social construction theory. The intervention addressed known and persistent inequities in influenza vaccination among African American and Latino older adults, and associated infections, hospitalizations and mortality. It was designed to increase resident ability to make informed decisions about vaccination, and to build internal and external infrastructure to support sustainability over time. The intervention brought a group of social scientists, vaccine researchers, g...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - May 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schensul JJ, Radda K, Coman E, Vazquez E Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Youth Action Research for Prevention: a multi-level intervention designed to increase efficacy and empowerment among urban youth.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We describe the YARP intervention and employ qualitative and quantitative data from the quasi-experimental evaluation study design to assess the way in which the YARP approach empowered individual youth and groups of youth (youth networks) to engage in social action in their schools, communities and at the policy level, which in turn affected their attitudes and behaviors. PMID: 19387823 [PubMed - in process] (Source: American Journal of Community Psychology)
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - May 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Berg M, Coman E, Schensul JJ Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Community, culture and sustainability in multilevel dynamic systems intervention science.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper addresses intertwined issues in the conceptualization, implementation and evaluation of multilevel dynamic systems intervention science (MDSIS). Interventions are systematically planned, conducted and evaluated social science-based cultural products intercepting the lives of people and institutions in the context of multiple additional events and processes (which also may be referred to as interventions) that may speed, slow or reduce change towards a desired outcome. Multilevel interventions address change efforts at multiple social levels in the hope that effects at each level will forge synergistic links,...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - May 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schensul JJ Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Theorising interventions as events in systems.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Conventional thinking about preventive interventions focuses over simplistically on the "package" of activities and/or their educational messages. An alternative is to focus on the dynamic properties of the context into which the intervention is introduced. Schools, communities and worksites can be thought of as complex ecological systems. They can be theorised on three dimensions: (1) their constituent activity settings (e.g., clubs, festivals, assemblies, classrooms); (2) the social networks that connect the people and the settings; and (3) time. An intervention may then be seen as a critical event in the history of ...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - May 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hawe P, Shiell A, Riley T Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Challenges of Evaluating Multilevel Interventions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article uses the Comprehensive Mixed-Methods Participatory Evaluation (CMMPE; Nastasi and Hitchcock Transforming school mental health services: Population-based approaches to promoting the competency and wellness of children, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press with National Association of School Psychologists 2008; Nastasi et al. School-based mental health services: creating comprehensive and culturally specific programs. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association 2004) model as a framework for addressing the multiplicity of evaluation decisions and complex nature of questions related to program success in multil...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - April 8, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Nastasi BK, Hitchcock J Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Sex Differences in the Effects of Neighborhood Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Social Organization on Rural Adolescents' Aggression Trajectories.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We determined whether effects of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage on trajectories of aggression were moderated or mediated by neighborhood social organization and examined sex differences in neighborhood effects for rural adolescents. We used five waves of survey data collected over 2.5 years linked with neighborhood data from interviews with parents and the US Census. The sample (N = 5,118) was 50.1% female, 52.0% white and 38.3% African-American; average age at baseline was 13.1 years. Multilevel growth curve models for both girls and boys showed no significant interactions between neighborhood socioeconomic d...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - April 4, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Karriker-Jaffe KJ, Foshee VA, Ennett ST, Suchindran C Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

A Social Disorganization Perspective on Bullying-Related Attitudes and Behaviors: The Influence of School Context.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Social disorganization theory suggests that certain school-level indictors of disorder may be important predictors of bullying-related attitudes and behaviors. Multilevel analyses were conducted on bullying-related attitudes and experiences among 22,178 students in 95 elementary and middle schools. The intraclass correlation coefficients indicated that 0.6-2% of the variance in victimization, 5-10% of the variance in retaliatory attitudes, 5-6% of the variance in perceptions of safety, and 0.9% of the variance in perpetration of bullying was associated with the clustering of students within schools. Although the specif...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - March 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Bradshaw CP, Sawyer AL, O'Brennan LM Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Domestic Violence Survivors' Experiences with Their Informal Social Networks.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Informal social networks play a critical role in buffering the negative effects of stressful life events. For women experiencing the stress of a violent relationship, family and friends are among the first sources of support sought; however, reactions to the abuse by family and friends are not uniformly perceived as helpful by survivors. The current study takes a qualitative approach to examining the range of possible reactions survivors may encounter from their social networks regarding the abuse. Special attention is given to negative and mixed reactions, as they have previously been under-examined in the literature....
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - March 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Trotter JL, Allen NE Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Multilevel Community-Based Culturally Situated Interventions and Community Impact: An Ecological Perspective.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The purpose of this paper is to apply an ecological perspective to the conduct of multilevel community-based culturally-situated interventions. After a discussion of the emerging consensus about the value of approaching such interventions ecologically, the paper outlines a series of questions stimulated by an ecological perspective that can guide further theory development in conducting multilevel interventions. These questions all derive from the importance of assessing the local community ecology where the intervention occurs. The paper concludes with a series of topics which, taken together, provide a roadmap for fu...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - March 31, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Trickett EJ Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Summary Comments: Multi-Level Community Based Culturally Situated Interventions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this critical summary the editors summarize main themes that cut across special issue papers including challenges in introducing interventions into communities theorized as dynamic systems, strengths and problems presented by multilevel interventions in single communities, the value of community based culturally situated preventive interventions, and some solutions to evaluation of interventions in complex social settings. PMID: 19326207 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: American Journal of Community Psychology)
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - March 27, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Trickett EJ, Schensul JJ Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

Changing Drug Users' Risk Environments: Peer Health Advocates as Multi-level Community Change Agents.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Peer delivered, social oriented HIV prevention intervention designs are increasingly popular for addressing broader contexts of health risk beyond a focus on individual factors. Such interventions have the potential to affect multiple social levels of risk and change, including at the individual, network, and community levels, and reflect social ecological principles of interaction across social levels over time. The iterative and feedback dynamic generated by this multi-level effect increases the likelihood for sustained health improvement initiated by those trained to deliver the peer intervention. The Risk Avoidance...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - March 27, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Weeks MR, Convey M, Dickson-Gomez J, Li J, Radda K, Martinez M, Robles E Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals

How People Can Benefit from Mental Health Consumer-Run Organizations.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The goal of this study is to develop a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of the processes by which people can benefit from mental health consumer-run organizations (CROs). To accomplish this goal, the concept of roles is used to create a preliminary framework that draws connections between several established theoretical explanations. To ground theory development in empirical data, 194 CRO members from 20 CROs answered open-ended questions about what personal changes occurred as a result of their CRO involvement and what CRO participation experiences enabled personal change. Data analysis led to the identifi...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - March 24, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Brown LD Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: journals