Recruitment and retention of homeless individuals with mental illness in a housing first intervention study.

Background: Homeless individuals with mental illness are challenging to recruit and retain in longitudinal research studies. The present study uses information from the Vancouver site of a Canadian multi-city longitudinal randomized controlled trial on housing first interventions for homeless individuals. We were able to recruit 500 participants and retain large number of homeless individuals with mental illness; 92% of the participants completed the 6-month follow up interview, 84% the 24-month follow up, while 80% completed all follow-up visits of the study.

Low-Income Mothers' Descriptions of Children's Injury-Related Events: A Discourse Analysis.

The purpose of this study was to examine how mothers with young children who were living in low-income households used discursive strategies to explain their children's injury and near-miss events. In-person interviews were conducted with 17 mothers and a discourse analytic approach was used to analyze the data. Mothers used a variety of discursive strategies to explain injury events including minimizing the nature of events and expressing tensions between responsibility and resistance.

Meanings of well-being from the perspectives of youth recently diagnosed with psychosis.

Background: The phenomenon of well-being has attracted a surge of attention in mental health policy, clinical practice and research internationally. Yet, the definitions of well-being remain elusive, and there is limited understanding on its meanings from the perspectives of youth mental health service users.

Objective: This study explored the meanings of well-being from the perspectives of youth mental health service users diagnosed with psychosis in the past 3 years.

Out of our inner city backyards: re-scaling urban environmental health inequity assessment.

In this paper, we report the results of a three-year research project (2008-2011) that aimed to identify urban environmental health inequities using a photography-mediated qualitative approach adapted for comparative neighbourhood-level assessment. The project took place in Vancouver, Toronto, and Winnipeg, Canada and involved a total of 49 inner city community researchers who compared environmental health conditions in numerous neighbourhoods across each city. Using the social determinants of health as a guiding framework, community researchers observed a wide range of differences in health-influencing private and public spaces, including sanitation services, housing, parks and gardens, art displays, and community services.

Developing and evaluating a relevant and feasible instrument for measuring health literacy of Canadian high school students.

Health literacy has come to play a critical role in health education and promotion, yet it is poorly understood in adolescents and few measurement tools exist. Standardized instruments to measure health literacy in adults assume it to be a derivative of general literacy. This paper reports on the development and the early-stage validation of a health literacy tool for high school students that measured skills to understand and evaluate health information.

Key considerations for logic model development in research partnerships: a Canadian case study.

Community-academic partnership research is a fairly new genre of community-based participatory research. It has arisen in part, from recognition of the potential role of alliances in the development and translation of applied knowledge and the elimination of health disparities. This paper reports on the learning process of academic and community members who worked together in developing a logic model for a research program focusing on partnerships with vulnerable populations.