Evaluation of a Quality Improvement Resource for Public Health Practitioners.

Objectives: Quality improvement is a critical mechanism to manage public health agency performance and to strengthen accountability for public funds. The objective of this study was to evaluate a relatively new quality improvement resource, the Public Health Quality Improvement Exchange (PHQIX), a free online communication platform dedicated to making public health quality improvement information accessible to practitioners.

Methods: We conducted an internet-based survey of registered PHQIX users (n = 536 respondents) in 2013 and key informant interviews with PHQIX frequent users (n = 21) in 2014, in the United States.

On the varieties of empathic experience: tactility, mental opacity, and pain in Yap.

This article argues that empathy should be considered a multimodal process that not only involves perception, intellection, affect, and imagination but also the bodily and sensory aspects of lived experience. The problem of empathy in anthropological, philosophical, and therapeutic contexts is discussed and a phenomenological approach to empathic experience is advanced. An outline of local orientations to empathy on the island of Yap is provided.

Closing the gap in children's quality measures: a collaborative model.

The need for measures of the quality of healthcare provided to children and adolescents is well documented. However, children have been underrepresented in national healthcare quality measurement and reporting efforts. The Pediatric Data Quality Systems (Pedi-QS) Collaborative is addressing this gap.

From pain to virtue: dysphoric sensations and moral sensibilities in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia.

This article contributes to the development of a medical anthropology of sensation through providing a thick ethnographic description of pain's significance in the context of a particular community's - Yap (Federated States of Micronesia) - understandings of subjectivity, social action, and morality. After first proposing an attentional-synthetic model of the patterning of sensory experience, the article goes on to describe in some detail the linguistic, moral, and cultural frameworks that serve as the semiotic, existential, and practical resources providing the background against which individual sufferers tend to interpret their dysphoric sensory experiences. Central to the article is an exploration of a local illness category maath'keenil' that is implicated in two, at times competing, models of ethical subjectivity.

Bruner's Search for Meaning: A Conversation between Psychology and Anthropology.

We introduce a special issue of Ethos devoted to the work of Jerome Bruner and his careerlong attempts to seek innovative ways to foster a dialogue between psychology and anthropology. The articles in this special issue situate Bruner's meaning-centered approach to psychology and his groundbreaking work on narrative in the broader context of the developmental trajectory of both of fields of inquiry. Bruner's work has been enormously influential in the subfields of cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, especially because of his important contributions to our understanding of the intimate relationship between culture and mind.