"If They Give Their Mind to HIV, They Don't Last as Long": An Explanatory Model of HIV Infection in a Limited-Resource Setting Informs Person-Centered Care.

Explanatory models describe individuals' perceptions of their illness experiences, which can guide culturally relevant care. We constructed an explanatory model of the experience of living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the Dominican Republic. Following qualitative descriptive methodology, we conducted interviews in Spanish using a semi-structured interview guide developed using Kleinman's explanatory model framework.

Clinician Use of HIV-Related Infographics During Clinic Visits in the Dominican Republic is Associated with Lower Viral Load and Other Improvements in Health Outcomes.

We designed an infographic intervention to help clinicians provide health information to persons living with HIV. In this study, we assessed the extent to which our intervention may improve objectively and subjectively measured health outcomes (CD4 count, viral load, and engagement with clinician among others) when integrated into routine visits in the Dominican Republic. In this pretest-posttest study, we followed participants for 9 months at 3-month intervals.

Utilization of substance use treatment among criminal justice-involved individuals in the United States.

Over six million individuals are involved with the criminal justice system in the United States, of which a large proportion report extensive substance use. We examined the extent to which criminal justice-involvement affects substance use treatment utilization among participants from one of the largest annual surveys on substance use in the U.S.

Reducing poverty among children: Evidence from state policy simulations.

State approaches to reducing child poverty vary considerably. We exploit this state-level variation to estimate what could be achieved in terms of child poverty if all states adopted the most generous or inclusive states' policies. Specifically, we simulate the child poverty reductions that would occur if every state were as generous or inclusive as the most generous or inclusive state in four key policies: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and state Child Tax Credits (CTC).

Your baby is so happy, active, uncooperative: How prenatal care providers contribute to parents' mental representations of the baby.

Background: Parents' prenatal mental representations (i.e., thoughts and expectations) of their future child and relationship to that child have been associated with parenting and parent-child relationships after birth.

Income and Child Maltreatment in Unmarried Families: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit.

This study estimates the associations of income with both (self-reported) child protective services (CPS) involvement and parenting behaviors that proxy for child abuse and neglect risk among unmarried families. Our primary strategy follows the instrumental variables (IV) approach employed by Dahl and Lochner (2012), which leverages variation between states and over time in the generosity of the total state and federal Earned Income Tax Credit for which a family is eligible to identify exogenous variation in family income. As a robustness check, we also estimate standard OLS regressions (linear probability models), reduced form OLS regressions, and OLS regressions with the inclusion of a control function (each with and without family-specific fixed effects).

Parental Debt and Children's Socioemotional Well-being.

Objectives: We estimated associations between total amount of parental debt and of home mortgage, student loan, automobile, and unsecured debt with children's socioemotional well-being.

Methods: We used population-based longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 Cohort and Children of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 Cohort. Our analytic sample consisted of 29 318 child-year observations of 9011 children and their mothers observed annually or biennially from 1986 to 2008.

Adolescents' perspectives about brief psychiatric hospitalization: what is helpful and what is not?

Significant numbers of adolescents receive inpatient psychiatric services, yet we know little about their experiences: what about hospitalization is perceived as helpful and what is counter-productive or even harmful? In this study, eighty adolescents hospitalized for the first time in a psychiatric program were interviewed within a week of discharge (using a semi-structured interview format), and asked to describe what did and did not help them. Multiple themes emerged relating to helpful experiences and these were grouped in three categories: interpersonal support, therapy and psycho-education, and environment; Unhelpful/harmful experiences were classified in four categories: rigidity and confinement, lack of treatment responsiveness, frightening/anxiety-provoking experiences, and other. Participants provided rich feedback that both reinforces existing practices and offers ways for programs to change practices to better meet adolescents' developmental needs.

A community-specific approach to cancer research in Indian country.

Background: Health care leaders in a small, rural, American Indian community and university partners used the community-based participatory research (CBPR) method to survey cancer survivors.

Objectives: We sought to provide support for the use of CBPR to generate ideas for how to improve the detection and treatment of cancer in American Indian communities.

Methods: Partners worked together to develop a mail-out survey and send it to the Indian health clinic's patients who had cancer in the past 5 years.

Social relationships and their role in the consideration to hasten death.

Purpose: This study explored the quality and functioning of terminally ill elders' social relationships and their impact on elders' consideration to hasten death.

Design And Methods: In-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 96 terminally ill elders. Logistic regression was used to determine whether aspects of social relationships significantly predicted the consideration to hasten death.

Challenges to providing end-of-life care to low-income elders with advanced chronic disease: lessons learned from a model program.

Purpose: This study explored the challenges in providing end-of-life care to low-income elders with multiple comorbid chronic conditions in a fully "integrated" managed care program, and it highlighted essential recommendations.

Design And Methods: A case-study design was used that involved an extensive analysis of qualitative data from five focus groups with interdisciplinary team members, two in-depth interviews with administrators, and open-ended survey responses from social workers detailing death experiences of 120 elders.

Results: Seven major themes characterized primary end-of-life care challenges: (a) the nature of advanced chronic disease; (b) the incapacity of support systems; (c) barriers to honoring care preferences; (d) challenges with characteristics and needs of participants; (e) needs of complex family systems; (f) barriers with transitions; and (g) barriers with culture and language.

Health insurance and child support.

This DataWatch examines the extent of the child support system's increasing efforts to require nonresident parents to provide health insurance for their children. More than half of children who have public insurance only and more than one-fourth of uninsured children live in families that could be affected by the child support system. Nonresident fathers now provide insurance to only 15 percent of children living with their mother.