Journal of Prevention & Intervention in the Community最新文献

How do mental health practitioners and educators support child migrants, child immigrants, child refugees, and their families? This article examines the scope of current interventions for these populations. A meta-analysis of interventions used in schools over the last two decades is discussed to provide an overview of the current evidence base in this area worldwide. Recommendations are made to facilitate the application of these interventions to support child-migrants, child-immigrants, and child-refugees in the schools, and their families.

Work is a multidimensional construct that plays a crucial role in people's lives, assuring their psychological well-being, social connections, and self-determination. "Decent" work is conceptualized as a satisfactory job in conditions of equity, security, and respect for human rights. The paper reports the results of a study on the perception of the future and decent work in young immigrants, at risk of undertaking undignified and unsatisfactory jobs. The data were collected through a semi-structured interview, aimed at exploring the representations of decent work and hope. Data analysis was conducted through both qualitative and quantitative methods. The results of the study are discussed with reference to career counseling promoting decent work for immigrant people, activating the motivation to plan the future, including hope.

Objectives: Instagram is a popular social media site used by high numbers of young people. This study was designed to investigate COVID-19 content on Instagram during the month following official pandemic status from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Methods: A total of 200 posts were collected and analyzed over a four-week period between mid-February and mid-March 2020.

Results: The vast majority of posts did not address recommended prevention measures. Further, only approximately one-third of the posts referenced a reputable source. Finally, the nature of posts changed over time was impacted by type of poster and reflected a tone of anxiety.

Conclusions: The findings underscore the urgent need for public health officials to be aware of and address social media content on novel health threats. Furthermore, it is imperative that communicating risk on social media, such as Instagram be geared to young people. Failure to do so may hinder prevention, mitigation, and suppression strategies.

Background: Due to close proximity in dormitories, classes, and social activities, college students have been identified as a vulnerable population throughout the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.

Objectives: This study tested properties of a new COVID-19 Inventory (C-19-I). It was expected that the measure would show acceptable validity and reliability, females would report greater COVID-19 anxiety than males, and the addition of gender would improve a regression model of COVID-19 anxiety.

Method: Participants were 201 college undergraduates who completed multiple self-report measures and two snack selection tasks.

Results: The C-19-I showed a multifactor solution and acceptable psychometric properties. Females scored higher than males and were more likely than males to select a healthy snack after responding to questions about illness and contamination.

Conclusions: This study validates a new measure of COVID-19 anxiety and contributes to a deeper understanding of how college adults respond to pandemic illness.

This article introduces a themed issue focused on COVID-19 as it relates to community health. In the context of attempting to curb transmission, a great deal of focus has been placed on community mitigation efforts. These efforts have presented a variety of challenges. This themed issue aims to give an overview of two important aspects of community mitigation, namely, issues relating to COVID-19 related messaging and reactions of different communities to the COVID-19 pandemic. The manuscripts in this issue demonstrate a range of methodology and offer insight into areas of COVID-19 research that can inform community health. They also cover an extensive range of topics and contribute to the literature in terms of informing efforts related to constructing effective messaging and identifying areas of need. Both of these focal points have implications for prevention and intervention.

The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) measures general life stress and the Impact of Events Scale (IES) measures retrospective stress from a specific event; both have been validated across various audiences and settings. However, neither measure stress during an evolving public health crisis. The aim was to refine the PSS to measure stress during an event (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic) and examine its psychometric properties within a 4-year Hispanic-Serving Institution in the Bronx, NY. Three items from the IES were added to and one PSS item was removed from the PSS-10, creating a new PSS-12. Cronbach's α for the scale was 0.902 for faculty and 0.903 for students, indicating high internal consistency. Factor analyses also supported calculation of two subtotals similarly across groups. The PSS-12 is a valid instrument to measure perceived stress during a public health crisis, particularly among populations that already experience community health disparities.

Crisis communication is most effective when it takes into consideration the emotional reactions of those involved. Messages pertaining to pandemic illness such as COVID-19 should thus include the most effective types of words, given the goal of crisis management. This study investigated hypothesized word categories (e.g., reward/risk, focus on present versus past) related to superordinate categories of positive and negative emotional tone in COVID-19 fact sheets from each of the fifty states in the U.S. The relation of six word types to the superordinate categories and a health outcome variable (the rate of deaths per positive virus cases) was also tested. Results indicated that each of the six word types mapped on to either the positive or negative emotion word category. Furthermore, messages that included more reward and uncertainty words were associated with lower deaths per positive virus cases. Implications for future pandemic crisis messages are discussed.

Patients with COVID-19 may present with neurological manifestations, lack of oxygenation, or clotting disorders such as ischemic or hemorrhagic strokes. This has been observed in even young patients with mild symptoms. The aim of this study was to explore current online news coverage of acute stroke associated with COVID-19 in the four-month period from April 2020 to July 2020, a time during which the US found itself in the center of the pandemic. The relevant Google News stories were reviewed for content. The analysis indicated that 118 online news reports covered the topic to varying degrees, including data from reputable sources, references to the neurological symptoms, and to the incidence of stroke in young patients. It is important that health professionals be aware of this risk and convey to the public the possibility of stroke due to COVID-19 so as to increase the probability of early diagnosis and optimal outcomes.

The uncertain and unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic is anxiety-provoking and some people are seeking information about this anxiety online. The purpose of this study was to assess the readability levels of online articles related to anxiety and COVID-19. The first 50 English language URLs to appear in a Google search in July 2020 were assessed for readability using Readable.io. A five-measure panel consisting of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Gunning Fog Index, Coleman-Liau Index (CLI), the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) Grade Level, and Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease (FRE) was used, and grade level scores were recoded as easy, average, and difficult readability. Websites were grouped as commercial vs. noncommercial sources bases on the URL. Of the 50 articles evaluated, the majority were found to be written at a difficult (>10th grade) reading level with four of the five measures employed which is well above the 7-8th grade reading level abilities of most Americans. Given the importance of access to mental health information during the pandemic, it is crucial that the resources available to the general public are written at a reading level that is comprehensible to ensure they are understood.

Opioid related drug overdose deaths are a leading cause of death and injury in the United States. While research demonstrates that where people live has a major impact on drug use and abuse, most work looks at social dynamics at the county level or under the rubric of the urban/rural divide. Only recently, scholarship has become attuned to the post-industrialized areas located on the fringes of urban cores. Data presented in here are from field research conducted in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a small river town located east of Pittsburgh. Once a thriving industrial city, it is now deteriorated and has documented high levels of overdose experience. Preliminary results suggest that McKeesport residents, even before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), practice social and physical distancing as a way of life; data indicate how the pandemic potentially exacerbates the risk of accidental opioid overdose among a population defined by both geographic and social isolation.