Publications by authors named "Irene Yen"

Objective: We sought to examine the experiences of community partners in a community-academic partnership to promote COVID-19 testing in two majority Latino communities.

Methods: We conducted semistructured, in-depth interviews in English and Spanish with community-based organization leaders and community health workers/promotoras (n = 10) from June to July 2021. Interviews focused on identifying partner roles in planning and testing implementation and evaluating communication among partners.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Research highlights the importance of social networks in helping individuals cope with illness, moving beyond the traditional view of strong and weak ties to explore more complex connections like compartmental and elastic ties.
  • This study uses a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative social network analysis and qualitative interviews, to investigate "nameless ties"—supportive relationships that don't fit conventional labels or categories.
  • The authors advocate for these mixed methods to better identify and understand marginalized individuals' support systems, particularly those facing chronic disability, poverty, and housing insecurity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Pesticide exposure via take-home pathways is a major health concern among farmers. However, little is known about the effects of pesticide take-home pathways on small-scale Hmong farmers in the Central Valley. This study explored factors that contribute to pesticide exposure via the take-home pathway among small-scale Hmong farmers in the Central Valley.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The study objective was to investigate the effects of childhood residential mobility on older adult physical and mental health. In REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) Study, we used linear regression models to investigate if number of moves during childhood predicted mental and physical health (SF-12 MCS, PCS), adjusting for demographic covariates, childhood socioeconomic status (SES), childhood social support, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). We investigated interaction by age, race, childhood SES, and ACEs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To evaluate implementation of a community-engaged approach to scale up COVID-19 mass testing in low-income, majority-Latino communities.

Methods: In January 2021, we formed a community-academic "Latino COVID-19 Collaborative" with residents, leaders, and community-based organizations (CBOs) from majority-Latinx, low-income communities in three California counties (Marin/Merced/San Francisco). The collaborative met monthly to discuss barriers/facilitators for COVID-19 testing, and plan mass testing events informed by San Francisco's Unidos en Salud "test and respond" model, offering community-based COVID-19 testing and post-test support in two US-census tracts: Canal (Marin) and Planada (Merced).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Low-income U.S. adults experiencing food insecurity have a disproportionately high prevalence of cigarette smoking, and quantitative studies suggest that food insecurity is a barrier to quitting.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Housing is a key social determinant of health and health care utilization. Although stigmatized due to poor quality, public housing may provide stability and affordability needed for individuals to engage in health care utilization behaviors. For low-income women of reproductive age (15-44 y), this has implications for long-term reproductive health trajectories.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Health care systems in the United States are experimenting with a form of surveillance and intervention known as "hot spotting," which targets high-cost patients-the so-called "super-utilizers" of emergency departments-with intensive health and social services. Through a calculative deployment of resources to the costliest patients, health care hot spotting promises to simultaneously improve population health and decrease financial expenditures on health care for impoverished people. Through an ethnographic investigation of hot spotting's modes of distribution and its workings in the lives of patients and providers, we find that it targets the same individuals and neighborhoods as the police, who maintain longer-standing practices of hot spotting in zones of racialized urban poverty.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As medicine integrates social and structural determinants into health care, some health workers redefine housing as medical treatment. This article discusses how health workers in two U.S.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • This study investigates the risk factors for heat-related deaths from hyperthermia in emergency department patients from California between 2009-2012.
  • It uses a matched case-control approach, comparing patients who died from hyperthermia to live patients with similar demographics, focusing on demographic and health history factors such as alcohol use and chronic conditions.
  • The findings indicate that patients who frequently visited the ED for alcohol issues or had specific insurance types, like Medicare, are at a significantly higher risk of hyperthermia mortality, suggesting the need for targeted interventions in EDs to protect vulnerable patients from heat exposure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Higher educational attainment predicts lower hypertension. Yet, associations between nontraditional educational trajectories (eg, interrupted degree programs) and hypertension are less well understood, particularly among structurally marginalized groups who are more likely to experience these non-traditional trajectories.

Methods: In National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort data (N = 6 317), we used sequence and cluster analyses to identify groups of similar educational sequences-characterized by timing and type of terminal credential-that participants followed from age 14-48 years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: Individuals increasingly experience delays or interruptions in schooling; we evaluate the association between these non-traditional education trajectories and mental health.

Methods: Using year-by-year education data for 7,501 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 participants, ages 14-48 (262,535 person-years of education data), we applied sequence analysis and a clustering algorithm to identify educational trajectory groups, incorporating both type and timing to credential. Linear regression models, adjusted for early-life confounders, evaluated relationships between educational trajectories and mental health component scores (MCS) from the 12-item short form instrument at age 50.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Using an adaption of the Photovoice method, this study explored how food insecurity affected parents' ability to provide food for their family, their strategies for managing household food insecurity and the impact of food insecurity on their well-being.

Design: Parents submitted photos around their families' experiences with food insecurity. Afterwards, they completed in-depth, semi-structured interviews about their photos.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is critical to alleviating food insecurity, but low diet quality among program participants is a concern. Nutrition-related interventions have focused on SNAP-authorized food retailers, but the perspectives of small food store owners and managers have not been represented in national policy discussions. This study aimed to explore the opinions of store owners/managers of SNAP-authorized small food stores about their overall perceptions of the program and the stricter stocking standards previously proposed in 2016.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We share findings from a larger ethnographic study of two urban complex care management programs in the Western United States. The data presented stem from in-depth interviews conducted with 17 complex care management RNs and participant observations of home visits. We advance the concept of social literacy as a nursing attribute that comprises an RN's recognition and responses to the varied types of hinderances to self-management with which patients must contend in their lived environment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In the United States, in the wake of health care reform, health care systems have been subject to intensifying demands to increase , a term that refers broadly to participation in care. We draw from ethnographic research in urban health care safety-net settings in California to examine efforts to increase patient engagement among chronically ill, marginalized patients who have long been disconnected from outpatient care. We suggest that the work of engagement in this context involved getting people to accept the norms of biomedicine while also reworking these norms to account for the complex circumstances of their lives.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Housing status affects drug using behaviors, but less is known about the relationship between housing patterns and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. HCV-negative young people who inject drugs (PWID) were enrolled into a prospective cohort (2003-2019) with quarterly study visits. We used Cox regression to estimate the independent association of recent housing status (housed vs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Social factors across one's lifespan may contribute to the relationship between low educational attainment and depression, but this relationship has been understudied. Previous studies assessing the association between educational attainment and depression did not fully account for prior common determinants across the life course and possible interactions by sex or race/ethnicity. It is also unclear whether the link between educational attainment and depression is independent of the role of aspired educational attainment or expected educational attainment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Nontraditional education trajectories are common, but their influence on physical health is understudied. We constructed year-by-year education trajectories for 7,501 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 participants aged 14 to 48 years (262,535 person-years of education data from 1979 to 2014). We characterized trajectory similarity using sequence analysis and used hierarchical clustering to group similar educational trajectories.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over 2.5 million people experience homelessness yearly in the United States. Black persons are overrepresented by three-fold among those experiencing homelessness but little research has examined the relationship between race and homelessness.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This Letter to the Editor raises questions regarding a recently published article, "Food insecurity transitions and smoking behavior among older adults who smoke."

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The contribution of medical mistrust to healthcare utilization delays has gained increased public health attention. However, few studies examine these associations among African-American men, who delay preventive healthcare more often and report higher levels of medical mistrust than non-Hispanic White men. Additionally, studies rarely account for other factors reportedly working in tandem with medical mistrust to increase African-American men's preventive health screening delays (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - Gentrification impacts health outcomes, but there’s little research on its effects due to differing ways of measuring it.
  • - This study compared three gentrification methodologies in the San Francisco Bay Area, finding significant differences in classification; most characterized areas as stable except for the Urban Displacement Project which identified nearly half as gentrifying or at risk.
  • - The findings suggest that health studies related to gentrification should use multiple measurement methods to ensure more reliable results, given the inconsistencies in characterizing gentrifying neighborhoods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: To examine whether food insecurity longitudinally affects smoking status.

Design: Population-based prospective study.

Setting: Data from the 2003 and 2015 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF