Promoting healthy parenting practices across cultural groups: a CDC research brief

Promoting Healthy Parenting Practices Across Cultural Groups: A CDC Research Brief summarizes findings from a CDC study on cultural values and parenting and child rearing. The study focused on five cultural groups--African-Americans, American Indians, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and non-Hispanic Whites. It examined the ways that parents respond to children's behavior and their views of desirable or undesirable parenting practices. Uncovering the differences and commonalities in values, normative practices, and child-rearing goals across cultural groups is an important step in developing culturally-competent and effective programs and support for parents of all cultural backgrounds.authors, Keri M. Lubell, Teresa Lofton, Helen Harber Singer.A publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Adolescent Goals TeamAlso available via the World Wide Web.Includes bibliographical references (p. 17-18)Lubell KM, Lofton T, Singer HH. Promoting Healthy Parenting Practices Across Cultural Groups: A CDC Research Brief. Atlanta (GA): Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control; 2008

How did Ebola information spread on twitter : broadcasting or viral spreading?

BACKGROUND: Information and emotions towards public health issues could spread widely through online social networks. Although aggregate metrics on the volume of information diffusion are available, we know little about how information spreads on online social networks. Health information could be transmitted from one to many (i.e. broadcasting) or from a chain of individual to individual (i.e. viral spreading). The aim of this study is to examine the spreading pattern of Ebola information on Twitter and identify influential users regarding Ebola messages. METHODS: Our data was purchased from GNIP. We obtained all Ebola-related tweets posted globally from March 23, 2014 to May 31, 2015. We reconstructed Ebola-related retweeting paths based on Twitter content and the follower-followee relationships. Social network analysis was performed to investigate retweeting patterns. In addition to describing the diffusion structures, we classify users in the network into four categories (i.e., influential user, hidden influential user, disseminator, common user) based on following and retweeting patterns. RESULTS: On average, 91% of the retweets were directly retweeted from the initial message. Moreover, 47.5% of the retweeting paths of the original tweets had a depth of 1 (i.e., from the seed user to its immediate followers). These observations suggested that the broadcasting was more pervasive than viral spreading. We found that influential users and hidden influential users triggered more retweets than disseminators and common users. Disseminators and common users relied more on the viral model for spreading information beyond their immediate followers via influential and hidden influential users. CONCLUSIONS: Broadcasting was the dominant mechanism of information diffusion of a major health event on Twitter. It suggests that public health communicators can work beneficially with influential and hidden influential users to get the message across, because influential and hidden influential users can reach more people that are not following the public health Twitter accounts. Although both influential users and hidden influential users can trigger many retweets, recognizing and using the hidden influential users as the source of information could potentially be a cost-effective communication strategy for public health promotion. However, challenges remain due to uncertain credibility of these hidden influential users

Adoption of preventive behaviors in response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic: a multiethnic perspective

Background: As public health leaders prepare for possible future influenza pandemics, the rapid spread of 2009 H1N1 influenza highlights the need to focus on measures the public can adopt to help slow disease transmission. Such measures may relate to hygiene (e.g., hand washing), social distancing (e.g., avoiding places where many people gather), and pharmaceutical interventions (e.g., vaccination). Given the disproportionate impact of public health emergencies on minority communities in the United States, it is important to understand whether there are differences in acceptance across racial/ethnic groups that could lead to targeted and more effective policies and communications. Objectives: This study explores racial/ethnic differences in the adoption of preventive behaviors during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. Patients/Methods Data are from a national telephone poll conducted March 17 to April 11, 2010, among a representative sample of 1123 white, 330 African American, 317 Hispanic, 268 Asian, and 262 American Indian/Alaska Native adults in the USA. Results: People in at least one racial/ethnic minority group were more likely than whites to adopt several behaviors related to hygiene, social distancing, and healthcare access, including increased hand washing and talking with a healthcare provider (P-values <0·05). Exceptions included avoiding others with influenza-like illnesses and receiving 2009 H1N1 and seasonal influenza vaccinations. After we controlled the data for socioeconomic status, demographic factors, healthcare access, and illness- and vaccine-related attitudes, nearly all racial/ethnic differences in behaviors persisted. Conclusions: Minority groups appear to be receptive to several preventive behaviors, but barriers to vaccination are more pervasive

How people get into mental health services: Stories of choice, coercion and "muddling through" from "first-timers"

Previous work examining how individuals enter mental health treatment comes either from the health services utilization tradition, which implicitly assumes that clients make decisions to seek care, or from the socio-legal perspective, which examines how clients are forced into care. This paper draws from the Network-Episode Model to systematically consider the different social processes through which people come to enter psychiatric treatment by exploring the "stories" told by individuals making their first major contact with the mental health system. We combine the use of qualitative and quantitative methods to examine data from the Indianapolis Network Mental Health Study, a longitudinal study of individuals in treatment at the largest public and voluntary facilities in the city. We analyze detailed self-reports of how they came to use mental health services, classifying these stories as "choice," "coercion," or "muddling through." Using multinomial logit analyses, we examine how factors such as gender, race and diagnosis shape the types of stories that individuals tell. The preliminary results indicate that fewer than half of the stories (45.9%) match the notion of choice underlying the dominant utilization theories. Almost a quarter of respondents (22.9%) report coercion and nearly one-third (31.2%) tell stories that lack a clear agent. Diagnosis and social networks tap differences in how individuals experience entry into care. Individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder or who have larger, closer social networks are more likely to tell stories of coercion. We discuss the theoretical, methodological, and clinical implications of findings drawn from this examination of clients' storiesmental health utilization coercion