Environmental Health Assessment by Local Environmental Justice Experts for Evidence-based Decision-making in an Agricultural Community of Northern California.

Environmental justice research driven by academics and policymakers often overlooks the valuable insights and leadership of the communities most impacted by environmental hazards. When institution-led research approaches are employed, inadequate community ownership and limited institutional accountability hinder the effectiveness of environmental public health interventions. In contrast, a community-owned and -managed approach to environmental justice research can guide community members in developing evidence-based interventions.

Community-responsive scholar-activist research: conceptualizing capacity building and sustainability in a Northern California community-university partnership.

We critically examine the ongoing development of a collaborative, responsive, activist research process between academics and farmworkers. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with community-based researchers and scholar-activists, we assess our team's understanding of community capacity building and research sustainability as the conceptual and operational definitions of these concepts lack academic consensus. The definitions we present reflect a 12-year effort to respond to community needs through interdisciplinary research, planning, and action.

Clinical one health: A novel healthcare solution for underserved communities.

Limited access to healthcare is a symptom of poverty worldwide. In Knights Landing, California, USA, an economically underserved, agricultural community, advocates recognized that integration of human and animal healthcare could provide a less intimidating gateway to services and facilitate assessments of individuals' health, not just in moments in time, but within the context of the complex interactions with other humans, animals, and their encompassing environment. Humans and animals share diseases resulting from common exposure to environmental pollutants and disease hosts and lack of adequate nutrition.

[Experiences of undocumented Mexican migrant women when accessing sexual and reproductive health services in California, USA: a case study].

This study focuses on the experience of Mexican women migrants in California, USA, with the use of formal health services for sexual and reproductive health issues. The authors used a qualitative interpretative approach with life histories, interviewing eight female users of healthcare services in California and seven key informants in Mexico and California. There were three main types of barriers to healthcare: immigration status, language, and gender.

[Mexico City's Legal Abortion Program: health workers' experiences].

Objective: Identify the perceptions and opinions of people who provide abortion services in Mexico City, three years after implementation of elective abortion legal reforms.

Methods: Nineteen in-depth interviews of health workers assigned to the legal abortion programs at a clinic and a hospital in Mexico's Federal District were carried out between February and June of 2010. Information on sociodemographic data, professional training, and experience in providing services was collected.

Development and testing of interview questions to determine last menstrual period in Mexican immigrant populations.

The last menstrual period is used to estimate gestational age. This paper examines sources of measurement error related to the recall of last menstrual period among Mexican immigrant women living in the United States. Qualitative analyses (focus groups and cognitive interviews) suggest that last menstrual period recall does not seem to be a large source of measurement error in the calculation of gestational age and the impact of this type of error on the misclassification of preterm births appears to be minimal.

The role of coding time in estimating and interpreting growth curve models.

The coding of time in growth curve models has important implications for the interpretation of the resulting model that are sometimes not transparent. The authors develop a general framework that includes predictors of growth curve components to illustrate how parameter estimates and their standard errors are exactly determined as a function of receding time in growth curve models. Linear and quadratic growth model examples are provided, and the interpretation of estimates given a particular coding of time is illustrated.