Factors Influencing Depression and Anxiety among Black Sexual Minority Men

The primary aim of this study was to examine the relationships between depression and anxiety, and ethnic and sexual identity development, and discrimination and harassment (DH) among Black sexual minority men. Additional aims were to determine whether an interaction effect existed between ethnic and sexual identity and whether coping skills level moderated these relationships. Using an observational cross-sectional design, 54 participants recruited through snowball sampling completed self-administered online surveys. Stepwise multiple regression analysis was used. Sixty-four percent of the variance in depression scores and 53% of the variance in anxiety scores were explained by DH and internalized homonegativity together. Thirty percent of the sample had scale scores indicating likelihood of depression and anxiety. Experience of DH and internalized homonegativity explained a large portion of the variability in depression and anxiety among Black sexual minority men. The study showed high prevalence of mental distress among this sample

Outreach Strategies to Recruit Low-Income African American Men to Participate in Health Promotion Programs and Research: Lessons From the Men of Color Health Awareness (MOCHA) Project

African American men continue to bear a disproportionate share of the burden of disease. Engaging these men in health research and health promotion programs—especially lower-income, African American men who are vulnerable to chronic disease conditions such as obesity and heart disease—has historically proven quite difficult for researchers and public health practitioners. The few effective outreach strategies identified in the literature to date are largely limited to recruiting through hospital clinics, churches, and barbershops. The Men of Color Health Awareness (MOCHA) project is a grassroots, community-driven initiative that has developed a number of innovative outreach strategies. After describing these strategies, we present data on the demographic and health characteristics of the population reached using these methods, which indicate that MOCHA has been highly effective in reaching this population of men

The Ethics and Practice of Digital Storytelling as a Methodology for Community-Based Participatory Research in Public Health

Moderator: Alice Fiddian-Green, PhD student, Department of Health Promotion and Practice, School of Public Health and Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Presenters and Session Titles: “An Ethics Framework for Digital Storytelling as a Multi-Purposed Public Health Method”: Aline Gubrium, PhD Applying the Ethics Framework in Two Projects: (1) Louis Graham, MPH, DrPH, and Sarah Lowe, MPW: “Stakeholder Engagement and Ethical Planning for Digital Storytelling: The MOCHA Moving Forward Project” (2) Mary Paterno, CNM, PhD: “Digital Storytelling as Health Promotion and Data: Ethical Considerations from a Peer-Mentor Based Project to Address Perinatal Substance Use Disorder in a Rural Community Session Description Public health often mislocates its lineage in the medical sciences. Being foremost about people and what happens when people live together, the field is equally rooted in the humanistic and social sciences. By providing a focus that is more open to the rich and variegated tapestry of health and wellbeing, participatory visual and digital approaches, such as digital storytelling, enhance understandings of health and well being. If carried out responsibly, digital storytelling has the potential to function both as a vehicle for community-based health promotion, and as a method for collecting culture-centered data that can assist researchers and practitioners in better serving local communities. Based on a Freirian model, which promotes active engagement as participants construct stories to promote change through a group process, the goal of our digital storytelling practice is to provide a creative forum for expressing the generative themes or collective issues of community members. Beyond being mere data points, digital stories enliven statistics, make research meaningful, and position research participants as experts in their own right by inviting them to define relevant issues, broaden the evidence base, and create an emotional product that attracts and influences policymakers and the public at large. Finally, digital stories can be re-purposed for use in health communication campaigns (on and offline) to effect broad reach. Published literature on the ethics of community-based participatory research methods grounded in personal storytelling and participatory media approaches is in short supply, as are advanced training opportunities for public health researchers interested in these approaches (Gubrium & Harper, 2013; Gubrium, Hill, and Flicker, 2014; Gubrium, Hill & Fiddian-Green, 2016). Based on their previous research and practice experiences with digital storytelling, Gubrium and colleagues (2014) discuss the “situated practice of ethics” for participatory visual and digital methods in public health research and practice. Specifically, they write about six common challenges faced by researchers, advocates, and health promotion practitioners alike: the fuzzy boundaries that arise when negotiating between research, advocacy/action, and health promotion practice when using these methods; tensions related to recruitment of participants and consent to participate; the complex considerations specific to the release of the digital materials produced in workshops; power issues as they relate to the shaping of both stories and digital media content; the potential for reproducing harm in visual/digital representation; and the promise of confidentiality/anonymity to research participants. The proposed breakout session will provide a brief overview of the digital storytelling process (including discussion of recruitment, informed consent and release of materials, standard activities in the digital storytelling process, follow-up semi-structured interviews with participants, pre/post measures used to evaluate the impact of the process on participants, data analysis, and strategic communications based on produced digital stories). The session will enable participants to understand the myriad ethical issues that can present when carrying out community-based participatory research that employs digital storytelling as a methodology. By the end of the session, participants will be able to demonstrate critically enhanced awareness of ethical issues surrounding participatory visual and digital methodologies and identify effective ways to address these issues

Phenomenology of the General NMSSM with Gauge Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking

We investigate various classes of Gauge Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking models and show that the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model can solve the mu-problem in a phenomenologically acceptable way. These models include scenarios with singlet tadpole terms, which are phenomenologically viable, e.g., in the presence of a small Yukawa coupling <~ 10^{-5}. Scenarios with suppressed trilinear A-terms at the messenger scale lead naturally to light CP-odd scalars, which play the r\^ole of pseudo R-axions. A wide range of parameters of such models satisfies LEP constraints, with CP-even Higgs scalars below 114 GeV decaying dominantly into a pair of CP-odd scalars.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, typos corrected, reference adde

Jedi public health: Co-creating an identity-safe culture to promote health equity

© 2016 The Authors. The extent to which socially-assigned and culturally mediated social identity affects health depends on contingencies of social identity that vary across and within populations in day-to-day life. These contingencies are structurally rooted and health damaging inasmuch as they activate physiological stress responses. They also have adverse effects on cognition and emotion, undermining self-confidence and diminishing academic performance. This impact reduces opportunities for social mobility, while ensuring those who "beat the odds" pay a physical price for their positive efforts. Recent applications of social identity theory toward closing racial, ethnic, and gender academic achievement gaps through changing features of educational settings, rather than individual students, have proved fruitful. We sought to integrate this evidence with growing social epidemiological evidence that structurally-rooted biopsychosocial processes have population health effects. We explicate an emergent framework, Jedi Public Health (JPH). JPH focuses on changing features of settings in everyday life, rather than individuals, to promote population health equity, a high priority, yet, elusive national public health objective. We call for an expansion and, in some ways, a re-orienting of efforts to eliminate population health inequity. Policies and interventions to remove and replace discrediting cues in everyday settings hold promise for disrupting the repeated physiological stress process activation that fuels population health inequities with potentially wide application.National Institute on Aging (Grant # R01 AG032632)National Institute on Aging (Grant # T32 AG00221

The critical factors in producing high quality and policy-relevant research: insights from international behavioural science units

Background: There has been a rapid increase in the number of, and demand for, organisations offering behavioural science advice to government over the last ten years. Yet we know little of the state of science and the experiences of these evidence providers. / Aims and objectives: To identify current practice in this emerging field and the factors that impact on the production of high-quality and policy-relevant research. / Methods: A qualitative study using one-to-one interviews with representatives from a purposeful sample of 15 units in the vanguard of international behavioural science research in policy. The data were analysed thematically. / Findings: Relationships with policymakers were important in the inception of units, research conduct, implementation and dissemination of findings. Knowledge exchange facilitated a shared understanding of policy issues/context, and of behavioural science. Sufficient funding was crucial to maintain critical capacity in the units’ workforces, build a research portfolio beneficial to policymakers and the units, and to ensure full and transparent dissemination. / Discussion and conclusion: Findings highlight the positive impact of strong evidence-provider/user relationships and the importance of governments’ commitment to co-produced research programmes to address policy problems and transparency in the dissemination of methods and findings. From the findings we have created a framework, ‘STEPS’ (Sharing, Transparency, Engagement, Partnership, Strong relationships), of five recommendations for units working with policymakers. These findings will be of value to all researchers conducting research on behalf of government

Indirect Dark Matter Detection from Dwarf Satellites: Joint Expectations from Astrophysics and Supersymmetry

We present a general methodology for determining the gamma-ray flux from annihilation of dark matter particles in Milky Way satellite galaxies, focusing on two promising satellites as examples: Segue 1 and Draco. We use the SuperBayeS code to explore the best-fitting regions of the Constrained Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (CMSSM) parameter space, and an independent MCMC analysis of the dark matter halo properties of the satellites using published radial velocities. We present a formalism for determining the boost from halo substructure in these galaxies and show that its value depends strongly on the extrapolation of the concentration-mass (c(M)) relation for CDM subhalos down to the minimum possible mass. We show that the preferred region for this minimum halo mass within the CMSSM with neutralino dark matter is ~10^-9-10^-6 solar masses. For the boost model where the observed power-law c(M) relation is extrapolated down to the minimum halo mass we find average boosts of about 20, while the Bullock et al (2001) c(M) model results in boosts of order unity. We estimate that for the power-law c(M) boost model and photon energies greater than a GeV, the Fermi space-telescope has about 20% chance of detecting a dark matter annihilation signal from Draco with signal-to-noise greater than 3 after about 5 years of observation

Public understanding of COVID-19 antibody testing and test results: A qualitative study conducted in the U.K. early in the pandemic.

BACKGROUND: During the COVID-19 pandemic, antibody testing was proposed by several countries as a surveillance tool to monitor the spread of the virus and potentially to ease restrictions. In the UK, antibody testing originally formed the third pillar of the UK Government's COVID-19 testing programme and was thought to offer hope that those with a positive antibody test result could return to normal life. However, at that time scientists and the public had little understanding of the longevity of COVID-19 antibodies, and whether they provided immunity to reinfection or transmission of the virus. OBJECTIVE: This paper explores the UK public's understanding of COVID-19 testing, perceived test accuracy, the meaning of a positive test result, willingness to adhere to restrictive measures in response to an antibody test result and how they expect other people to respond. METHODS: On-line synchronous focus groups were conducted in April/May 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic and the most stringent period of the COVID-19 restrictive measures. Data were analysed thematically. RESULTS: There was confusion in responses as to whether those with a positive or negative test should return to work and which restrictive measures would apply to them or their household members. Participants raised concerns about the wider public response to positive antibody test results and the adverse behavioural effects. There were worries that antibody tests could create a divided society particularly if those with a positive test result were given greater freedoms or chose to disregard the restrictive measures. CONCLUSION: Should these tests be offered more widely, information should be developed in consultation with the public to ensure clarity and address uncertainty about test results and subsequent behaviours

A comparison of seasonal influenza and novel Covid-19 vaccine intentions : a cross-sectional survey of vaccine hesitant adults in England during the 2020 pandemic

We compared intention to receive the seasonal influenza vaccine with a prospective coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine among undecided or COVID-19 vaccine hesitant individuals to better understand the underlying differences and similarities in factors associated with vaccine intention. We delivered a cross-sectional online survey in October–November 2020. We included psychological constructs and sociodemographic variables informed by theory. We conducted pairwise comparisons and multiple linear regression models to explore associations between vaccine intention and psychological constructs. We recruited 1,660 participants, where 47.6% responded that they would likely receive the influenza vaccine, 31.0% that they would probably not accept the vaccination and 21.4% were unsure. In relation to the prospective COVID-19 vaccine, 39.0% responded that they would likely receive the vaccination, 23.7% that they would probably not accept the vaccination and 37.3% were unsure. Unique factors positively associated with COVID-19 vaccine intention were: perceived knowledge sufficiency about vaccine safety, beliefs about vaccine safety, and living in an area of low deprivation. The only unique factor positively associated with influenza intention was past influenza behavior. The strongest common predictors positively associated with intention were: favorable vaccine attitudes, the anticipated regret they may feel following infection if they were not to receive a vaccine, and the expectation from family or friends to accept the vaccine. Despite overall similarities in those factors associated with vaccination intention, we identified unique influences on intention. This additional insight will help support the planning and tailoring of future immunizations programmes for the respective viruses