Social science & medicine
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Social science & medicine · Feb 2005
Exploring the association of John Henry active coping and education on smoking behavior and nicotine dependence among Blacks in the USA.
Although smoking is used as a coping tool in response to stress and Blacks have been found to report smoking more in response to stress than Whites, little research exists that has examined ethno-culturally specific constructs of stress and coping as they relate to smoking behavior and nicotine dependence among Blacks in the USA. This study explored the association between the ethno-culturally interactively defined construct of John Henryism, as well as the individual contributions of John Henry active coping and education on smoking behavior and nicotine dependence in a relatively urban-Midwestern Black population. ⋯ Furthermore, low levels of John Henry active coping were associated with the use of menthol cigarettes and lower-educational level was associated with smoking greater than 20 cigarettes per day. Further community-based studies examining this construct among Black smokers in various socio-cultural contexts are needed to clarify the association between John Henry active coping and socioeconomic status on smoking behavior and nicotine dependence among Blacks.
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Social science & medicine · Jan 2005
Shifts in global immunisation goals (1984-2004): unfinished agendas and mixed results.
The turn of the millennium has been marked by a large-scale mobilisation of resources for immunisation programmes in developing countries. The resources have been generated by public and private sector parties collaborating in the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). GAVI was formed in response to deteriorating immunisation coverage rates occurring in the late 1990s. ⋯ The study argues that shifts in global immunisation goals lead to fragmentation in the implementation of vaccine programmes at the local level in developing countries. It also suggests that global actors involved in the formulation of these initiatives appear to miss opportunities to build on past experiences and fail to learn from previous mistakes. This raises questions about the initiatives' sustainability and relevance to the overall objective of preventing vaccine-preventable deaths.
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2004
Preferences in end-of-life care of older persons: after-death interviews with proxy respondents.
This population-based study employing after-death interviews with proxies describes older persons' preferences regarding medical care at the end of life. Interviews were held with 270 proxy respondents of 342 deceased persons (age range 59-91) in the Netherlands, The deceased were respondents to the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. The prevalence of advance directives (ADs), preferences for medical decisions at the end of life (i.e. withholding treatment, physician-assisted suicide euthanasia) and preferences about the focus of treatment in the last week of life (i.e. comfort care versus extending life) were examined. ⋯ The knowledge of the proxy regarding the older person's preference for the focus of treatment was dependent on the patient's symptom burden as perceived by the proxy. The majority of older persons had died without either an AD, or having expressed preferences for end-of-life care. Stimulating the formulation of ADs may help professionals who work with older people to understand these preferences better, especially in the case of non-cancer patients and those with low PSE.
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2004
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialShort-term effects of moving from public housing in poor to middle-class neighborhoods on low-income, minority adults' outcomes.
This study reports results from a quasi-experimental residential mobility study in Yonkers, NY, in which low-income minority families residing in public and private housing in high-poverty neighborhoods were randomly assigned via lottery to relocate to publicly funded attached rowhouses in seven middle-class neighborhoods. One hundred seventy-three Black and Latino families who moved and 142 demographically similar families who remained in the original high-poverty neighborhoods were interviewed approximately 2 years after movers relocated; no baseline data were available. ⋯ No program effects were found on adults' symptoms of depression and anxiety. These early program effects inform housing policy initiatives for low-income families.
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2004
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialDrug name confusion: evaluating the effectiveness of capital ("Tall Man") letters using eye movement data.
Medication errors commonly involve confusion between drug names that look or sound alike. One possible method of reducing these errors is to print sections of the names in "Tall Man" (capital) letters, in order to emphasise differences between similar products. This paper reports an eye-tracking experiment that evaluates this strategy. ⋯ The target pack was replaced by a similar distractor in the array. Participants made fewer errors when the appearance of the names had been altered, that is, they were less likely to incorrectly identify a distractor as the target drug. This result was reflected in the eye movement data.