Journal of Prevention & Intervention in the Community最新文献

Children in the U.S. face a continuing mental health crisis that demands a public health framework. Sustainable innovations that keep pace with dynamic community settings require community-academic partnerships. Out-of-school time (OST) is a natural setting for mental health promotion as OST program goals align with social-emotional skills common in evidence-based programs. This manuscript describes an iterative process to refine Leaders@Play (L@P), an OST model for youth promoting mental health and co-facilitated by park and university staff promoting mental health, by University of Illinois Chicago researchers and Chicago Park District staff and administrators. We describe two phases: (a) Refinement: adapting content and format from the original L@P, and developing a training system; (b) Open Trial: exploring feasibility of the refined curriculum and impact on youth social skills and behavior. Results revealed high feasibility and potential support for program impact on youth mental health among high-risk youth. Implications for workforce development and program refinement are discussed.

Youth-serving providers (YSP) and community members (CM) working with trauma-exposed youth often face challenges implementing evidence-based, trauma-informed practices. Understanding the mechanisms that promote best practice uptake and addressing barriers to implementation readiness is critical. Guided by the Socioecological Model (SEM) and implementation science frameworks, this study examined pathways from training participant roles to the use of five best practices for community violence prevention via community violence exposure (CVE) and organizational practices (OP). A parallel multiple mediation model using maximum likelihood estimation with bootstrapping was conducted on 1,295 participants (67.6% female; mean age = 37.1 years, SD = 11.8) across roles (community members, mental health clinicians [clinician], child-focused professionals [CFP], and justice professionals [JP]). Key findings revealed: (a) training participant roles were distinctively associated with use of best practices; (b) roles predicted differences in CVE and OP, with CVE positively associated with all practices; (c) both CVE and OP significantly mediated these relationships; (d) CVE consistently mediated the link between roles and all practices, while OP had mixed effects, reducing practice use for clinicians but enhancing it for CFP and JP. This study uniquely identifies pre-training best practices already in use, emphasizing the importance of addressing CVE and OP to enhance training outcomes. By demonstrating that pre-training differences vary by role, CVE, and OP, this study underscores the need for contextually tailored training and capacity-building efforts. Implications for training and study limitations are discussed.

Latino/as in the US face disadvantages related to the social-ecological environment in which they live, contributing to poor physical and mental health outcomes. Despite these challenges, Latino/as demonstrate protective factors that may buffer the effects of a high stress burden and lead to more positive health outcomes. Resilience measurements can often lack cultural specificity, a critical component to understanding social mechanisms that may contribute to health in this population. This study aims to assess the psychometric properties of the Inventario de Resiliencia (IRES), a Spanish-language resilience instrument developed in Mexico. The study utilized data from a community-based-participatory research study in the border town of South Yuma, Arizona (N = 282). Resilience was measured at time points over one year, alongside assessments of self-rated health, social connectedness, psychological distress, and perceived ecological stress. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed at each time point to confirm the latent structure of resilience. To assess whether participants responded similarly to the IRES over time, a confirmatory factor analytic model was used to test for the invariance of factor covariance, mean, and residual variance structures across the time points. Cronbach's Alpha, Pearson product-moment and Kendall's Tau correlations were used to assess construct validity, and reliability. Findings demonstrated that IRES has excellent internal consistency, the structure of the original scale fit well with the data, and the IRES exhibited strong invariance across time. Test-retest reliability and construct validity were established by convergent and discriminant validity. This study establishes and supports the use of the IRES as a reliable and valid tool for measuring resilience in U.S. Latino/a populations. These findings underscore the importance of culturally tailored instruments in research and suggest that a more nuanced understanding of resilience can be leveraged to inform interventions and policies aimed at reducing health disparities in minority populations.

Medical respite is a form of residential convalescent care providing aftercare services to individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness and housing instability. Little research examines how residential convalescent care affects people following acute-care hospitalization. This study of an urban medical respite program used qualitative interviews with ten respite facility clients as its primary source of data. Additional descriptive information was obtained through a quantitative examination of client data (N = 103). Findings suggest that before hospitalization, patients utilizing respite care originate in unstable, tumultuous, and often violently dangerous environments. From clients' perspectives, it is therefore critically important that the studied aftercare program provides a predictably safe recuperative setting. Findings are discussed in terms of ontological security: By reducing homelessness and housing instability-related ontological insecurity-anxiety and feelings of ill-being caused by a lack of environmental constancy, privacy, and safety-both physical and mental health can improve.

Police are often called to address concerns about people experiencing homelessness and mental health crises. These interactions often lead to arrests, which lead to fines that many are unable to pay, loss of personal belongings, and additional barriers to housing and employment. Based on concerns about the over-policing of people experiencing homelessness, communities have become increasingly interested in alternatives to police response to calls involving people experiencing mental health distress and homelessness. Portland Street Response (PSR) is one such alternative that was developed and implemented in Portland, Oregon. Although specifically focused on mental and behavioral health crises, a large portion of PSR's calls respond to individuals experiencing homelessness. For this reason, it is critical to assess unhoused community members' knowledge of PSR and their experiences with and attitudes toward the program. 719 surveys of unhoused community members and 29 follow-up qualitative interviews were conducted across four evaluation timepoints. Knowledge of PSR was low at the beginning of the program but increased significantly over the evaluation period. Unhoused community members, particularly those who were Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC), reported feeling unsafe calling 911 to request service from PSR, though their trust increased over time. While only a small percentage of unhoused community members we spoke with reported direct experience interacting with PSR, those who did expressed high levels of satisfaction, appreciating the compassionate, person-centered care they received in the community; the connection to housing, health services, and other resources; and the collaborative manner in which PSR staff engaged with them. As cities across the country implement alternative first responder programs, our findings help identify important areas to consider to ensure that unhoused community members are aware of how to access the programs, and, importantly, that they trust the programs will help them rather than harm them.

Utilizing a resiliency-informed perspective and restorative approaches, the purpose of this work is to offer counterstories of marginalized women that center their strengths as well as capacities to create and highlights the importance of embodiment and imagination in the process of re-storying. The sample size ranged from 3 to 6 incarcerated women during each session, for 10 sessions in total, at the Santa Barbara County Jail, and the inquiry explored asked "How might imagination play a role in the prison industrial complex schema abolition as a liberatory possibility?" The Realms of ACEs' Adverse Childhood Experiences model (2023) was also utilized to contextualize the women's intergenerational traumas and experiences of oppression from a familial, community, and environmental level. With the dissemination of these findings, I hope to broaden the scope for who it reaches to offer alternative methodologies that could be used in other jails, environments, or conditions of imprisonment.

While research has shown self-beliefs influence recovery from substance use disorder, beliefs about the external world may also be important when considering recovery capital, or the sum of resources an individual can draw upon to sustain their recovery. Rooted in key concepts of positive psychology and community psychology, recovery capital offers an asset-based framework for understanding recovery as a process of growth to achieve flourishing. This study investigates the role of primal world beliefs, a taxonomy of fundamental beliefs about the world, as they relate to recovery capital in individuals recovering from substance use disorder. Primal world beliefs, also originating in the positive psychological tradition, offer a way to examine how beliefs about the world shape access to recovery-supportive resources. Utilizing a sample of Oxford House, Inc. employees (Baseline n = 132), this 6-month study assessed whether Safe, Enticing, and Alive primal world beliefs influence recovery capital. The findings reveal that Safe and Enticing world beliefs are associated with higher recovery capital, with Enticing world belief showing a stronger association. Additionally, the Alive world belief was found to moderate the relationship between spirituality and recovery capital. These results suggest that primal world beliefs shape perceptions of available recovery resources, with the Enticing belief emerging as a critical factor. This study contributes to the understanding of recovery by highlighting the role of beliefs about the world in accumulating resources essential for recovery, offering potential avenues for understanding the mechanisms underlying community-based substance use disorder interventions.

Schools are a critical developmental context for adolescents that can, depending on certain characteristics, do a better or worse job at promoting student resilience and well-being. In working to meet student needs and respond to student behaviors, schools can exhibit more punitive characteristics, like exclusionary discipline practices, or more promotive characteristics, including restorative practices and marshaling of mental health resources. While punitive factors have been associated with more negative outcomes, especially for marginalized students, and promotive factors have been associated with more positive outcomes for students, these factors have rarely been considered together. We conducted an online survey of students from high schools in the Midwest. Students rated their experiences of various promotive and punitive characteristics at their schools, as well as their sense of the school climate-perceived safety, fairness, and belonging. Promotive factors uniquely and positively predicted climate outcomes, eclipsing any effect of punitive factors. Further, while main effects indicated differences across racial groups in perceptions of school climate, there were no racial group differences in the impact of promotive factors on these climate perceptions. When exploring different promotive elements, support from teachers and staff, as well as available resources and mental health resources had the largest predictive effects on climate outcomes for students. We discuss implications for how educators and policy makers can leverage such promotive characteristics to create equitable contexts for all students to flourish.

The current study explored youth participatory action research (YPAR) as a multi-level intervention to promote young adults' wellbeing within a virtual National Young Adult Wellbeing Network. The research questions were: 1) how did young adults conceptualize wellbeing?; 2) how did young adults describe the impact of YPAR on their wellbeing? Fifteen racially and economically diverse 18-23 year olds from three states participated. Phase one included creating art as data (research), critical reflection, and action planning in YPAR. Phase two involved a qualitative follow up to create a collective definition of wellbeing. Field notes, arti(facts), and post-interviews were coded and reflexive thematic analysis was used to answer the research questions. Young adults' conceptualization of wellbeing centered the impact of structural forces on individual and group functioning. YPAR facilitated the young adults' wellbeing across five domains. Combining positive psychology and community psychology in YPAR can improve individual and collective wellbeing.