Publications by authors named "Christopher B Keys"

Organizational empowerment (OE) is a key construct in community psychology. We build on current understandings of OE by exploring history and systemic relationships as important aspects of OE. We conducted interviews with 20 school leaders from 16 schools that went through a district-wide transition of students with disabilities into general education schools and asked these leaders about their preparation and service provision during this transition.

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Empowerment is defined as a process by which marginalized groups gain mastery over issues of concern to them. One such population is racial and ethnic minority college students. These students experience academic disparities while simultaneously relying on higher education to facilitate more equitable social outcomes for themselves and ultimately to strengthen U.

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How do stakeholder power dynamics promote social inequalities and impede empowerment of students with disabilities in the individualized education program (IEP) process? This conceptual case study explores the role of critical discourse in reducing social inequality in the IEP process for students with disabilities in two special education day schools within a metropolitan school district. The lead author's observations and field notes describe three influential stakeholder tensions over an 11-month period in two schools for children with disabilities. , or the historical context of the public school system within the metropolitan district, provides the overarching temporal ecology for all examples of stakeholder tensions.

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This qualitative study describes how immigrant survivors of torture in the United States built relationships among each other to form a psychological sense of community. Eight men and seven women from 11 different countries were recruited through a torture treatment center and a survivor-led advocacy and support coalition. This qualitative study explored how participants described their experiences of community life.

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Successful community partnerships for youth are based on the premise that reciprocity exists between all parties, but to what extent is equal power actually present? The current investigation examines the benefits and contributions associated with partnerships from community partners' perspectives. Respondents from 15 different Connect to Protect® coalitions initiated by the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions were interviewed at the onset of their partnerships. Community partners asserted that their contributions to partnerships are more varied than researchers', yet they perceived that researchers acquire more kinds of benefits.

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Collaborative teaching is a widely used method of including and supporting students with disabilities to provide all students equal access to education. Yet, there is a dearth of research on its implementation and outcomes, and the few existing studies are limited to academic and testing outcomes. This study assesses the degree to which schools are implementing co-teaching practices and the relation between co-teaching and student psychosocial outcomes using a mixed method design.

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The inclusion of students with disabilities is a process that requires collaboration among multiple individuals, with teachers, aides, parents, students, and school systems playing important roles in resolving student problems. In the current study, we examined data from 75 teachers concerning 126 students about problems that students with disabilities had following a transition from a school primarily serving students with disabilities to more inclusive schools. Reported problems were reviewed and five major themes emerged: academic, behavioral, mobility/accessibility, social, and transportation issues.

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This qualitative study explored parent perspectives of the transportation difficulties students with disabilities experienced getting to and around school. Participants were parents of predominantly African American and Latino/a high school youth with disabilities from low income neighborhoods. Content analysis of 14 meetings with 5 to 12 parents sponsored by the school district revealed five primary themes concerning transportation: the role of aides, exclusion from school programming, scheduling problems, equipment problems, and physical safety issues.

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This study explored the extent to which transportation difficulties were associated with social, psychological, and academic experiences of urban, at-risk students who recently experienced a school transition. Participants included 165 predominantly African American and Latino/a high school youth with and without disabilities, a critical population for community psychology to address given their likelihood of multiple marginalizations. Results suggested transportation problems within school predicted more school stressors and aggressive behavior.

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For students with disabilities, the process of school inclusion often begins with a move from segregated settings into general education classrooms. School transitions can be stressful as students adjust to a new environment. This study examines the adjustment of 133 students with and without disabilities who moved from a school that served primarily students with disabilities into 23 public schools in a large urban school district in the Midwest.

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School experiences can have positive effects on student academic achievement, yet less is known about intermediary processes that contribute to these positive effects. We examined pathways between school experiences and academic achievement among 117 low-income urban students of color, many with disabilities, who transitioned to other schools following a school closure. Using structural equation modeling, we tested two ecological models that examined the relationships among self-reported school experiences, school support, academic self-efficacy, and school-reported academic achievement.

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As it has become clear that most individuals exposed to trauma do not develop PTSD, it has become increasingly important to examine pretrauma risk factors. However, PTSD research has overwhelmingly relied on retrospective accounts of trauma, which is beleaguered by problems of recall bias. To further our understanding of PTSD's etiology, a systematic review of 54 prospective, longitudinal studies of PTSD published between 1991 and 2013 were examined.

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The acceptance and inclusion of persons with intellectual disability can vary across cultures, and understanding attitudes can provide insight into such variation. To our knowledge, no previous study has explored attitudes toward people with intellectual disability among Pakistani community members and disability service providers. We administered the Community Living Attitudes Scale (Henry et al.

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Empowerment is an interdisciplinary construct heavily grounded in the theories of community psychology. Although empowerment has a strong theoretical foundation, few context-specific quantitative measures have been designed to evaluate empowerment for specific populations. The present study explored the factor structure of a modified empowerment scale with a cross-sectional sample of 296 women in recovery from substance use who lived in recovery homes located throughout the United States.

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Latino immigrant families with children with disabilities experience multiple sources of oppression during their settlement process in the United States. Unfair social structures and dominant cultural values and norms and the way they influence the immigrants' personal life stories generate a cycle of oppression very difficult to break. This paper presents a case study of how a group of Latino parents carried out a process of liberation fueled by the generation of empowering community narratives (critical awareness leading to transformative action) that resulted from a community-university partnership.

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Purpose: Project Shake-It-Up provided a health promotion and capacity building program for individuals with spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, and related neurological impairments. Major research aims were to evaluate changes in participants' self-efficacy, ability to set/achieve goals, and perceived independent-living status.

Methods: Participants completed self-efficacy measures at baseline, program completion, 6- and 12-month follow-up, and set health and/or independent living goals.

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Researchers and Institutional Review Board (IRB) members' attitudes influence scientific knowledge about individuals with intellectual disability. We recruited 260 intellectual disability researchers and IRB members to develop a measure of attitudes toward the research participation of adults with intellectual disability, the Participation in Research Attitude Scale. Findings suggest three conceptual domains: Opportunity and Choice, Help in Decision Making, and Beneficence.

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How do those in power decide to include and exclude those at the margins from community life? We used simulated review of research vignettes to examine how researchers and members of Institutional Review Boards make decisions concerning the research participation of adults with and without intellectual disabilities. Results indicate that decision-makers are influenced by the disability status of the sample, characteristics of the research in which they are engaged, and their attitudes toward the research participation of adults with intellectual disabilities as well as their own relationship to the research process. For example, decision-makers may create situations that limit the self-determination of adults with intellectual disabilities and adults without disabilities within the research context, particularly when the research poses some risk of harm to participants.

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Community psychologists have called for research on human diversity and interactions between individuals and society with a focus on oppression. This study examines learning disabilities as they co-occur with other sociopolitical minority statuses. We examined dominant cultural narratives of and individual responses to learning disability, race/ethnicity and gender identified by low-income men and women of color with learning disabilities.

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Purpose: This is a description of a model demonstration project called Project Shake-It-Up. This project promotes the health and empowerment of people with spinal cord injuries and related neurological disabilities. It also builds the capacity of community organizations that provide services to this population.

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In choosing to implement empowering interventions with marginalized populations, community psychologists often have to merge research and action. We present three case stories that exemplify empowerment efforts in the context of a multi-year school intervention designed to develop the advocacy skills of ethnic minority students' with disabilities and promote attainment of transition-related goals. In the process of implementing the intervention, our research team had to instigate change, advocate, and/or mediate in multiple conflictual interactions between the various stakeholders in the schools.

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We compared the inclusion-related attitudes of community agency staff in the United States and Israel. Samples of 147 (United States) and 74 (Israel) staff members were assessed with the Community Living Attitudes Scale (CLAS). Results showed that higher educational levels, regardless of nation, were associated with higher Empowerment scores, lower Exclusion scores, lower Sheltering scores, and higher Similarity scores.

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