Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Assessment Of Current Resources To Help Adolescents Quit Vaping, Karen Del'olio, Nanette Vitali, Lori Pbert

Community Engagement and Research Symposia

Background: E-cigarette use, more commonly known as vaping to our youth, has been a growing epidemic with adolescents in the United States. The recent advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General emphasizes that we must act now to protect the health of our nation’s youth from a lifetime of nicotine addiction. According to a recent 2018 Center for Disease Control MMWR article , more than 3 million high school students (grades 9 – 12) and 570,000 middle school students (grades 6 – 8) in the United States are currently vaping; defined as ≥ 1 e-cigarette in the past 30 days. Researchers from ...

Building Sustainability In Times Of Uncertainty, Matthew Sadof

Community Engagement and Research Symposia

Obama era grants were filled with the hopes of developing and implementing measures to improve healthcare delivery. Springfield Pediatrician Matt Sadof will present his experience as one of the Principal Investigators for the Massachusetts Alliance for Coordinated Care, a care coordination for children with medical complexity and social fragility funded by Center for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation at two urban centers in Massachusetts Baystate Children’s Hospital and Boston University Medical Center. As a consultative program it supported improved communication between primary care providers and specialists at two geographic locations across the state. Relying on an ambulatory ICU (complex care ...

Communities For Healthy Living: A Holistic Approach To Engaging Head Start Families To Improve Health Outcomes, Alyssa Aftosmes-Tobio, Kindra Lansburg

Community Engagement and Research Symposia

The Communities for Healthy Living (CHL) project is a five year, pragmatic intervention trial to reduce and prevent childhood obesity among low-income preschoolers in the Greater Boston area. This workshop will demonstrate the successes and challenges of engaging parents as participants and leaders of a participatory intervention to prevent childhood obesity. Key lessons learned; give insight on how staff and parents were engaged from the outset; and what this type of program can offer diverse groups of parents.

With a particular focus on the participatory nature of our work, we will describe the stages of our trial and discuss the ...

Engaging African Immigrants In Addressing Hiv Disparities Within The Population, Lorraine Anyango, Mbita Mbao, Dara Oloyede

Community Engagement and Research Symposia

The Tulumbe! Partnership was created with funds from the Pipeline to Proposal (P2P) awards established by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). The P2P awards were designed to develop partnerships; promote patient engagement; and build patient-led research proposals. Tulumbe! has spent the last two years working to engage the African immigrant community in addressing issues related to HIV, specifically focusing on identifying research topics and questions 3 that are important to community members. There are currently 10 core members representing health providers, African immigrants living with HIV, advocates, researchers and community leaders.

Tulumbe! has utilized various approaches to engage African ...

Speaker Biographies: 2019 Community Engagement And Research Symposium, Community Engagement And Research Symposium

Community Engagement and Research Symposia

Biographies of all the speakers at the 8th annual Community Engagement and Research Symposium, held Friday, March 22, 2019 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA.

Keynote And Breakout Session Descriptions: 2019 Community Engagement And Research Symposium, Community Engagement And Research Symposium

Community Engagement and Research Symposia

Descriptions of Keynote and Breakout Sessions for the 8th annual Community Engagement and Research Symposium, held Friday, March 22, 2019, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA.

Poster Session: 2019 Community Engagement And Research Symposium, Community Engagement And Research Symposium

Community Engagement and Research Symposia

Abstracts of posters presented at the 8th annual Community Engagement and Research Symposium, held Friday, March 22, 2019, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA.

Some presenters have made the full text of their posters available; these posters can be viewed in the symposium's Poster Archive.

Agenda: 2019 Community Engagement And Research Symposium, Community Engagement And Research Symposium

Community Engagement and Research Symposia

Agenda for the 8th annual Community Engagement and Research Symposium, held Friday, March 22, 2019 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA.

Impact Of Reddit Discussions On Use Or Abandonment Of Wearables, Radhika Garg, Jenna Kim

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Discussion platform, Reddit, is the third most visited website in the US. People can post their questions on this platform to get varying opinions from fellow users, which in turn might also influence their behavior and choices. Wearables are becoming widely adopted, yet challenges persist in their effective long term use because of technical and device related, or personal issues. Therefore, by employing sentiment analysis, this paper aims to analyze how decisions of use or abandonment of wearables are influenced by discussions on Reddit. The results are based on the analysis of 6680 posts and their associated 50,867 comments ...

The Fertility Problem Inventory And Infertility-Related Stress: A Case Study, Staci L. Born, Jennifer J. Preston

Staci Born

More than seven million people of childbearing age in the United States experience infertility. Oftentimes, for women, the experience of infertility is stressful. The Fertility Problem Inventory (FPI) has been used to quantitatively measure women’s experience of infertility-related stress. However, the construct of infertility-related stress is poorly described in existing literature. The purpose of this case study was to understand how women experience the FPI as a measure of infertility-related stress. To address this issue, women who were undergoing infertility treatment completed the FPI and participated in unstructured interviews. Archival documents were also retrieved to corroborate findings and satisfy ...

A Multicase Study Exploring Women’S Narratives Of Infertility: Implications For Counselors, Staci L. Born, Christin L. Carotta, Kristine Ramsay-Seaner

Staci Born

Infertility affects 6.7 million women in the United States (Chandra, Copen, & Stephen, 2013). Women’s experiences with infertility are not only influenced by biological health factors, but also by social, cultural, and personal variables. Given the prevalence and complexity of infertility, additional research is needed to further examine the nuances of women’s experiences. The purpose of this multicase study, as informed by four individual cases, was to explore how women construct their infertility narratives. Review of reflective journals found five common elements: (1) Emotional Rollercoaster, (2) Mind-Body (Dis)Connection, (3) Secret Identity, (4) Supportive vs. Constrained Communication Patterns ...

What Price History: Politics, Commercialism, And Urban Preservation, Theodore J. Karamanski

Theodore J. Karamanski

Historic preservation is the child of the city. In North America, the United States Conference of Mayors served as midwife to the birth of the modern historic preservation movement, when in January 1966, it issued the report With a Heritage So Rich. The report’s authors argued that in losing historic buildings and districts to urban renewal America was severing a vital link to the past. “Connections between successive generations of Americans—concretely linking their ways of life—are broken by demolition. Sources of memory cease to exist.” Part coffee-table book and part policy proposal, the volume laid the foundation ...

Extramarital Sex: Good For The Goose? Good For The Gander?, Christina J. Taylor

Christina J. Taylor

Two experiments were carried out to elucidate beliefs about marital fidelity and extramarital sex by examining how the social evaluation of extramarital relationships is affected by three situational factors -- sex of the extramarital actor, the actor's physical attractiveness, and the frequency of the actor's involvement in extramarital affairs (i.e., extramarital experience). Overall, there has been little research on this subject in social psychology, and what findings do exist (Hartnett, Mahoney, & Bernstein, 1977; Vallacher, 1982) have limited general-izability because of the youth of the subjects, contrary definitions of extramarital relationships, and contradictory evidence regarding the double standard.

Burns, Senge, And The Study Of Leadership, W. Michael Reid, Claudia J. Dold

Claudia J. Dold

James MacGregor Burns and Peter Senge have been two of the most influential writers on leadership over the past 40 years. This paper is based, in part, on a survey of articles published in four leading leadership Journals (Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, Journal of Leadership Studies, Leadership, and Open Journal of Leadership) to determine how the concepts of Burns and Senge were used in the articles. Each journal was searched from its first issue through January 1, 2018 for references to Burns and Senge. The authors found frequent references to each of them, but no systematic, adequate summary ...

Cooperative Conservation To Enhance Human–Wildlife Interactions, Terry A. Messmer

Terry A. Messmer

This is the editors commentary

Outcomes Of The Boss Classroom Management Program Among Adults With Intellectual Disabilities, Mick Needham, Peter Ross, Karen Slonski, Steven Wells, Andrew W. Wood

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

There is a current and growing need for evidence-based practices aimed at improving the social skills of adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). Despite an abundance of research on strategies to improve the social skills of young children with ID, there is limited research on interventions aimed at improving prosocial behaviors of adults with ID. A behavioral skills training approach was used to teach frontline, direct support professionals (DSPs) to implement a classroom management strategy called the Behavioral Opportunities for Social Skills (BOSS) program with adults with ID who lived in the community. The results showed that DSPs’ delivery of behavior-specific ...

Helping Experimental Psychology Affect Legal Policy, Gary L. Wells

Gary L. Wells

Any scientific psychologist who has interacted extensively with police, lawyers, or trial judges has learned that scientific psychology and the legal system are very different beasts. The differences run much deeper than mere language and instead represent different types of thinking-a clash of cultures. This clash is particularly apparent when psychologists attempt to use research findings to affect legal policies and practices. In order for scientific psychologists to work effectively in applying psychological science to the legal system, they will need to develop a better understanding of the concept of policy and the contingencies that exist for policymakers.

Transition Towns And The Transition Model: An Investigation Into The Movement's Use Of Strategic Planning, Richard Burbridge

Capstone Collection

The Transition Movement has spread around the globe in less than a decade, reaching 32 countries and 421 communities, with hundreds of projects, and harnessing the collective genius of tens of thousands of people. Despite the spread of the movement, no in-depth research of multiple initiatives within the movement has been done prior to this study. The main question investigated by this research is what tools and processes are Initiatives in New England using for SP and visioning, and how does this relate to their ability to transfer leadership and grow?

Effects Of A Repeated Writing Intervention On Writing Fluency And Writing Quality, Katherine L. Moore

LSU Master's Theses

Writing is a fundamental skill that is essential for students’ academic success. In fact, students with writing difficulties are shown to have lower academic achievement and reduced likelihood of college acceptance (Graham & Perin, 2007). Writing fluency is a crucial component in the development of writing abilities, as it allows for the development of higher-order writing skills (Bloom, 1986, Binder, Haughton & Bateman, 2002). Limited research exists of interventions targeted specially for writing fluency; however, performance feedback procedures have been shown as effective (Hier & Eckert, 2016). Literature suggests the skills of reading and writing share similar processes of learning (Nueman & Dickinson, 2001). The current study examines the impact of a writing intervention structured after the repeated reading intervention, incorporating a modeling component, on the writing fluency of elementary school students.

Delays In Antiretroviral Therapy Initiation Among Hiv-Positive Individuals: Results Of The Positive Living With Hiv Study, Krishna C. Poudel, David R. Buchanan, Kalpana Poudel-Tandukar

Krishna C. Poudel

Background: Lack of early initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) remains a major health concern due to increased risk of premature mortality and further HIV transmission. This study explored CD4+ cell count monitoring in relation to delays in ART initiation among HIV-positive individuals in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, where ART coverage was only 23.7% in 2011.

Design: We recruited a total of 87 ART-naïve, HIV-positive individuals aged 18 to 60 years through the networks of five non-government organizations working with HIV-positive individuals. We collected data on the history of ART initiation, CD4+ cell count monitoring, socio-demographic variables, perceived family support ...