How Do You Build a "Culture of Health"? A Critical Analysis of Challenges and Opportunities from Medical Anthropology.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health Action Framework aims to "make health a shared value" and improve population health equity through widespread culture change. The authors draw upon their expertise as anthropologists to identify 3 challenges that they believe must be addressed in order to effectively achieve the health equity and population health improvement goals of the Culture of Health initiative: clarifying and demystifying the concept of "culture," contextualizing "community" within networks of power and inequality, and confronting the crises of trust and solidarity in the contemporary United States. The authors suggest that those who seek to build a "Culture of Health" refine their understanding of how "culture" is experienced, advocate for policies and practices that break down unhealthy consolidations of power, and innovate solutions to building consensus in a divided nation

Determining Evidence Based Properties of M.O.P. Civic Education School Discipline Program

School discipline helps establish a safe and supportive environment for student learning and development. There are however factors that can undermine the creation of such an environment. These factors include the conduct of students as well as that of school staff. The Me Others Property Civic Education School Discipline Program has been implemented for the last 20 years in several local schools in Indiana. However its evidence based properties have yet to be evaluated. This study examined such properties via the literature on evidence based practices for school discipline. The APA Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) suggests that the use of EBP in schools can help boost students’ psychological wellbeing, and also create the grounds for productive learning outcomes (Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology, 2006). There is increasing appeal for interventions developed on the basis data-informed practices (Kelly et al., 2010). Specifically the study continues to assess the data from a survey administered in two local schools (70 elementary students) and 45 high school-age students who completed a pre-post-test in Belize. The MOP program espouse to help students learn how to respect themselves, others, and property and make right choices. Preliminary findings are presented and discussed

Teaching Respect: Effectiveness of the 'Me Others Property (M.O.P.) Civic Education Program'

Many factors often undermine the creation of safe and supportive environments for learning, academic, and social development in schools in general. These factors may include the conduct of students as well as that of school staff. The Me Others Property (M.O.P.) civic education program has been implemented for 25 years in local Indiana schools. However, its effectiveness to teach respect has not been evaluated. The program was designed to increase three outcomes, participants’ respect for themselves, others, and property. With the main goal of assessing effectiveness of the program properties, we evaluated the three outcomes and assessed differences according to age, gender, and ethnicity. This study highlights the role civic education programs may play in schools in general. It suggests that through these programs students, regardless of their age, gender, and ethnicity, learn values about helping self, others, and property to aid their country. More evaluation of the evidence based properties of civic education programs is necessary

Adolescents' views of food and eating: Identifying barriers to healthy eating

This is a postprint version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - © 2006 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents Published by Elsevier Ltd.Contemporary Western society has encouraged an obesogenic culture of eating amongst youth. Multiple factors may influence an adolescent's susceptibility to this eating culture, and thus act as a barrier to healthy eating. Given the increasing prevalence of obesity amongst adolescents, the need to reduce these barriers has become a necessity. Twelve focus group discussions of single-sex groups of boys or girls ranging from early to-mid adolescence (N = 73) were employed to identify key perceptions of, and influences upon, healthy eating behaviour. Thematic analysis identified four key factors as barriers to healthy eating. These factors were: physical and psychological reinforcement of eating behaviour; perceptions of food and eating behaviour; perceptions of contradictory food-related social pressures; Q perceptions of the concept of healthy eating itself. Overall, healthy eating as a goal in its own right is notably absent from the data and would appear to be elided by competing pressures to eat unhealthily and to lose weight. This insight should inform the development of future food-related communications to adolescents. (c) 2006 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents.Funding from Safefood: the food safety promotion board is acknowledged

“Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers and Civil Rights Unionism in the Mid-1950s

Emmett Till’s mangled face is seared into our collective memory, a tragic epitome of the brutal violence that upheld white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. But Till\u27s murder was more than just a tragedy: it also inspired an outpouring of determined protest, in which labor unions played a prominent role. The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) campaigned energetically on behalf of Emmett Till, from the stockyards of Chicago to the sugar refineries of Louisiana. Packinghouse workers petitioned, marched, and rallied to demand justice; the UPWA organized the first mass meeting addressed by Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley; and an interracial group of union activists traveled to Mississippi to observe the trial of Till’s killers, flouting segregation inside and outside the courtroom. In addition to revising our image of a signal event in African-American history, this article contributes to wider scholarly debates over the relationship between organized labor and the black freedom struggle. The growing “whiteness” literature has documented European-American workers’ assimilation of racist ideology and the complicity of labor unions in the subordination of African-Americans. But whiteness scholarship has done little to illuminate the contexts and strategies that have fostered durable interracial working-class solidarity. Analysis of antiracist unions like the UPWA can help address this lacuna. A second body of scholarship, more attuned to the diversity of racial practices within the labor movement, has highlighted the destructive impact of anti-Communism on unions with impressive records of challenging white supremacy. The UPWA, which managed to survive the red scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s relatively unscathed, represents an important link between the “civil rights unionism” of the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s

Does Anywhere + Anytime = Success? Mobile Learning, Engagement, and Student Success in Higher Education

This study aims to understand the possible impact of mobile learning on engagement and student success in the online environment. The research questions ask what impacts mobile learning has on student engagement, measured with Self-Regulated Learning (SRL); what impact mobile learning has on the SRL constructs of environment structuring, task management, and time management; and what associations mobile learning might have with student success and persistence. One hundred sixty-two undergraduate online students participated in the study through the survey instrument, utilizing the Online Self-Regulated Learning Questionnaire (OSLQ). ANOVA results showed that lower levels of mobile learning use engaged in SRL less when compared to the highest level of mobile learning use (HSD = -4.581, p = .001, d =.719). The lowest level of mobile learning used the SRL construct of task management less than the highest level (HSD = -2.624, p=.000, d =.796), as did the moderate level of mobile use (HSD = -1.681, p = .040, d =.494). Additionally, the lowest level of mobile learning used the SRL time management construct less than the highest group of mobile learning use (HSD = -1.293, p = .026, d =.505). Crosstabs analysis indicated no association between levels of mobile learning and measures of student success. These findings have implications for the development of online pedagogy, mobile learning theory, online course design, and student support initiatives

The principles and application of qualitative research

The present paper provides an overview of the methodological principles that underpin qualitative research and how these principles differ from those of quantitative research. It is intended to set the scene for the following papers that outline two specific approaches to the analysis of qualitative data. Within the tradition of qualitative research there are many different theoretical perspectives, of which these approaches are only two examples, but they need to be set within this broader tradition in order to highlight their specific features. Qualitative and quantitative research differ from each other in far more than their methods and data. They are each based on very different premises about both the nature of the world and the nature of our knowledge of it and how this information is generated. These approaches have implications for all aspects of research strategy, including the assessment of the quality of research findings and their wider utility or application. In relation to the latter, lack of detail in the reporting of qualitative research and small sample sizes has tended to create the impression that the findings of qualitative research have little application outside the particular research setting. While there is need for more rigor in reporting, it needs to be recognized that qualitative research can offer insights and understandings with wider relevance, although these outcomes are of a different type from those provided by quantitative research

Vaccine innovation, translational research and the management of knowledge accumulation

What does it take to translate research into socially beneficial technologies like vaccines? Current policy that focuses on expanding research or strengthening incentives overlooks how the supply and demand of innovation is mediated by problem-solving processes that generate knowledge which is often fragmented and only locally valid. This paper details some of the conditions that allow fragmented, local knowledge to accumulate through a series of structured steps from the artificial simplicity of the laboratory to the complexity of real world application. Poliomyelitis is used as an illustrative case to highlight the importance of experimental animal models and the extent of co-ordination that can be required if they are missing. Implications for the governance and management of current attempts to produce vaccines for HIV, TB and Malaria are discussed. Article Outlin

The Social and Political Dimensions of the Ebola Response: Global Inequality, Climate Change, and Infectious Disease

The 2014 Ebola crisis has highlighted public-health vulnerabilities in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea – countries ravaged by extreme poverty, deforestation and mining-related disruption of livelihoods and ecosystems, and bloody civil wars in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Ebola’s emergence and impact are grounded in the legacy of colonialism and its creation of enduring inequalities within African nations and globally, via neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. Recent experiences with new and emerging diseases such as SARS and various strains of HN influenzas have demonstrated the effectiveness of a coordinated local and global public health and education-oriented response to contain epidemics. To what extent is international assistance to fight Ebola strengthening local public health and medical capacity in a sustainable way, so that other emerging disease threats, which are accelerating with climate change, may be met successfully? This chapter considers the wide-ranging socio-political, medical, legal and environmental factors that have contributed to the rapid spread of Ebola, with particular emphasis on the politics of the global and public health response and the role of gender, social inequality, colonialism and racism as they relate to the mobilization and establishment of the public health infrastructure required to combat Ebola and other emerging diseases in times of climate change

John W. Dean III and the Watergate Cover-up, Revisited

At the heart of the latest installment of a decade-old debate is the work most often cited on the Watergate portion of the Nixon tapes, Kutler\u27s Abuse of Power. Working in the pre-digital era with difficult analog cassette audiotapes, Kutler set the standard for Nixon tape transcription. His permanent loss of hearing is the price he paid so that generations could leam from his groundbreaking work. Numerous critics have raised objections - not all of them legitimate - to Abuse of Power and to Kutler\u27s earlier book TheWars of Watergate, bu Klingman\u27s article, which was submitted for publication to the American Historical Review, is the most pointed and the most prominent of these critiques.