The effects of pedestrian gestures on driver yielding at crosswalks: A systematic replication.

Applied research on decreasing pedestrian injuries often focuses on how to increase driver yielding behavior but rarely studies what pedestrians can do to increase their safety. There is a lack of empirical research focusing on how pedestrians can effectively signal their need to cross the street when there is no traffic light directing the pedestrian and oncoming traffic. As a replication and extension of Crowley-Koch et al.

Applying Community-Based Participatory Approaches to Addressing Health Disparities and Promoting Health Equity.

This special issue highlights work that contributes to our understanding of health disparities and community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches to promoting health equity across diverse populations and issues that matter to communities. We take on a global perspective, and thus, various efforts across international contexts are illustrated. Articles elucidate a variety of CBPR approaches designed to empower and build capacity among individuals and communities in order to seek changes at the level of community practices, programs, and systems.

Learning From Coalitions' Efforts to Promote Equity and Justice.

Coalitions and collaboratives are working to address many of the most pressing contemporary health and social issues. The articles in this special issue provide numerous insights into these complex collaborative processes across different contexts and focal issues. All emphasize and scrutinize the strategies that groups are using in their work.

Strengthening Our Collaborative Approaches for Advancing Equity and Justice.

The Principles for Collaborating for Equity and Justice are explicit about addressing social and economic injustice, structural racism, and community organizing to facilitate resident power and ownership. They also focus on structural change, an acknowledgment of complexity, and the need to thoughtfully build on decades of practice and scholarship on collaborating for community change. This special theme issue of includes 10 articles that highlight these principles and provide insight into the complexities, challenges, and rewards of collaborating in ways that are intentional about advancing health equity through inclusive processes and shared goals to address social determinants of health.

Examining implementation and effects of a comprehensive community intervention addressing type 2 diabetes among high-risk minority patients in Durham County, NC.

Type-2 diabetes affects millions of people. Racial minorities are at higher risk for developing diabetes and suffering complications. Duke University and its partners built a team to improve population-level health outcomes and reduce health disparities in Durham County, NC.

Muslims and mental health concerns: A social ecological model perspective.

Muslims in the United States experience many psychosocial issues and underutilize mental health services. This study sought to systematically identify the common issues and strengths of the Muslims affiliated with a college in the Southeast region of the United States and address them accordingly. A survey comprising 33 items and 2 open-ended questions regarding common issues and strengths was constructed.

Disposal of prescription drugs by parents of middle and high school students.

To determine how parents dispose of unused prescription medications and correlates of disposal, we recruited 3,043 parents of adolescents to complete a survey. Multivariate and multinomial logistic regression was conducted to examine correlates of disposal of prescription medication. Only 17.

Diffusion of medication drop-boxes in North Carolina from 2007 to 2016.

Introduction: A permanent drug donation box ("drop-box") is one strategy implemented in communities across the United States to reduce the availability of excess controlled medications, including prescription opioids, for diversion. The objective of this study was to examine correlates of the diffusion and implementation of drop-boxes in North Carolina.

Methods: We assessed the number and location of drop-boxes implemented in North Carolina.

The influence of community context on how coalitions achieve HIV-preventive structural change.

Community coalition action theory (CCAT) depicts the processes and factors that affect coalition formation, maintenance, institutionalization, actions, and outcomes. CCAT proposes that community context affects coalitions at every phase of development and operation. We analyzed data from 12 Connect to Protect coalitions using inductive content analysis to examine how contextual factors (e.

Disseminating online tools for building capacity among community practitioners.

To prepare the workforce for building healthier communities, we need to assure capabilities of a diverse and geographically distributed community of practitioners. Although the Internet is used extensively to disseminate practice information, less is known about the relative impact of various strategies for promoting its use. This empirical case study examines implementation of dissemination strategies and their association with increased user sessions in the online Community Tool Box (CTB), a widely used resource for community building.

Participatory research and capacity building for community health and development. Introduction.

It is my pleasure to introduce this themed issue on "Participatory Research and Capacity Building for Community Health and Development." While most of the literature is still dominated by targeted interventions, run by researchers, that have a limited reach (usually affecting change among much less than 100 persons), these community interventions affect the broader social ecology. Even further, there is a growing literature on community-engaged scholarship that calls for this kind of active partnership but often falls far short of its goals (Calleson, Jordan, & Seifer, 2005 ).

Social host policies and underage drinking parties.

Social host policies focused on underage drinking parties are implemented to reduce social availability of alcohol and high-risk drinking by adolescents in private locations. We examined the policies' relationship with drinking location, peer-group drinking size, heavy episodic drinking, and nonviolent consequences. Cross-sectional data from 11,205, 14-20-year olds, were analyzed using multilevel modeling.

Accomplishing structural change: identifying intermediate indicators of success.

Coalitions are routinely employed across the United States as a method of mobilizing communities to improve local conditions that impact on citizens' well-being. Success in achieving specific objectives for environmental or structural community change may not quickly translate into improved population outcomes in the community, posing a dilemma for coalitions that pursue changes that focus on altering community conditions. Considerable effort by communities to plan for and pursue structural change objectives, without evidence of logical and appropriate intermediate markers of success could lead to wasted effort.

A review of social host policies focused on underage drinking parties: suggestions for future research.

Underage drinking continues to be a public health concern, partially due to the ease in which adolescents obtain alcohol and consume it in private locations. States and municipalities have implemented strategies to counteract this, including adopting public policies called social host policies, despite limited evidence of effectiveness. Traditionally, these laws have held adults accountable for furnishing alcohol to underage drinkers.

Challenges and approaches to mobilizing communities for HIV prevention among young men who have sex with men of color.

Young men who have sex with men (YMSM) of color are disproportionately impacted by HIV/AIDS in the United States. More HIV prevention interventions targeting risk factors of this group are needed, particularly at the structural level. This article focuses on Connect to Protect®: Partnerships for Youth Prevention Interventions (C2P), a multisite study employing community mobilization to decrease HIV acquisition and transmission among youth.

Programmatic capacity and HIV structural change interventions: influences on coalitions' success and efficiency in accomplishing intermediate outcomes.

This article assesses how programmatic capacity affects coalitions' ability to achieve structural HIV prevention interventions. The focus of the analysis was on the structural changes developed (n = 304) at all coalitions involved in Connect to Protect® between early 2006 through the end of 2008. Data included records of coalitions' structural change objectives and the progress made toward their accomplishment.

Conflict transformation, stigma, and HIV-preventive structural change.

Over the prior decade, structural change efforts have become an important component of community-based HIV prevention initiatives. However, these efforts may not succeed when structural change initiatives encounter political resistance or invoke conflicting values, which may be likely when changes are intended to benefit a stigmatized population. The current study sought to examine the impact of target population stigma on the ability of 13 community coalitions to achieve structural change objectives.

Transdisciplinary research and evaluation for community health initiatives.

Transdisciplinary research and evaluation projects provide valuable opportunities to collaborate on interventions to improve the health and well-being of individuals and communities. Given team members' diverse backgrounds and roles or responsibilities in such projects, members' perspectives are significant in strengthening a project's infrastructure and improving its organizational functioning. This article presents an evaluation mechanism that allows team members to express the successes and challenges incurred throughout their involvement in a multisite transdisciplinary research project.

Partnership selection and formation: a case study of developing adolescent health community-researcher partnerships in fifteen U.S. communities.

Purpose: This study describes the partner selection process in 15 U.S. communities developing community-researcher partnerships for the Connect to Protect (C2P): Partnerships for Youth Prevention Interventions, an initiative of the Adolescent Trials Network for human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) Interventions.

Grassroots advocacy campaign for HIV/AIDS prevention: lessons from the field.

There are many guides written for developing strategies and tactics related to advocacy, and many pages of text are devoted to developing advocacy plans. Less well described is the context within which grassroots advocacy campaigns can be successful. This article describes a successful campaign to establish a needle-exchange program (NEP) in Guilford County, North Carolina.

Social validation of goals, procedures, and effects in public health.

By relying solely on tests of statistical significance as the measure of success for interventions in public health, and in community-based participatory research, we can miss important social dimensions of the project. These dimensions include how our interventions might affect the lives of participants (social validity) and the lives of people more broadly (clinical or public health significance). Social validation procedures were originally developed to assess the acceptability of procedures and effects of behavioral interventions among clients and consumers.

Laying the foundation for Connect to Protect: a multi-site community mobilization intervention to reduce HIV/AIDS incidence and prevalence among urban youth.

Despite the considerable resources that have been dedicated to HIV prevention interventions and services over the past decade, HIV incidence among young people in the United States remains alarmingly high. One reason is that the majority of prevention efforts continue to focus solely on modifying individual behavior, even though public health research strongly suggests that changes to a community's structural elements, such as their programs, practices, and laws or policies, may result in more effective and sustainable outcomes. Connect to Protect is a multi-city community mobilization intervention that focuses on altering or creating community structural elements in ways that will ultimately reduce youth HIV incidence and prevalence.

Evaluating community partnerships and coalitions with practitioners in mind.

Evaluation plays a key role in developing and sustaining community partnerships and coalitions. We recommend focusing on three levels of coalition evaluation that measure (a) processes that sustain and renew coalition infrastructure and function; (b) programs intended to meet target activities, or those that work directly toward the partnership's goals; and (c) changes in health status or the community. A tendency to focus on quick wins and short-term effects of programs may explain why some coalitions are not able to achieve systems and/or health outcomes change.

How do we know if we are making a difference with our program or community initiative?

In this article, the authors discuss issues related to knowing if health workers are making a difference with their community initiatives or programs being delivered in a community setting. Issues relating to the choice of evaluation questions, relevance of data sets used to answer those questions, and the rigor by which the answer can be evaluated--and the ability to generalize to other communities or populations--are explored. Finally, relevant resources to help you pursue these issues are provided.