Barriers and Facilitators to Quality Healthcare for African Americans with Incarceration Histories.

Background: Prior research has shown that African American men and women are more likely to receive lower quality healthcare compared to their white counterparts, which is exacerbated in jail and prison healthcare systems.

Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore barriers and facilitators to quality healthcare among African American men and women released from Illinois State Prisons or Cook County Jail by examining their opinions and experiences with overall healthcare and cancer screening during and after incarceration.

Design: Four focus groups (n = 25 "co-researchers") were conducted to understand how formerly incarcerated African American men and women perceive and describe their experience of accessing, understanding, and utilizing healthcare during and after incarceration.

Toward a conceptual model linking community violence exposure to HIV-related risk behaviors among adolescents: directions for research.

Purpose: To present a conceptual framework which accounts for the relationship between community violence exposures (CVEs) and youth HIV risk behaviors.

Methods: This article provides an overview of existing research on the links between CVE and HIV risk for youth and offers a conceptual framework for clarifying how CVE might contribute to HIV sexual risk behaviors.

Results: Increasing empirical findings substantiate that the links between CVE and HIV risk behaviors among youth are mediated by psychological problem behaviors, low school success rates, and negative peer influences.

Traumatic events involving friends and family members in a sample of African American early adolescents.

The current study examines violent and nonviolent traumatic events involving friends and family members as predictors of PTSD, depression, internalizing, and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 403 African American early adolescents from chronically violent environments. Although there are many studies of urban children's exposure to community violence, few address the unique contribution of events involving significant others, and almost no research addresses African American youths' exposure to traumatic events other than violence. This study found that violent and nonviolent traumatic events were pervasive in the lives of these urban youth, and that they were as likely to report loss and injury of a close other through an accident as an act of violence.