Race and Social Problems最新文献

In the United States, hypertension is more common among individuals from racial and ethnic minority groups. Hypertension control rates are also lower for minority group members compared with White Americans. However, little research has employed well-established theoretical perspectives on health behavior, such as the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and the Model of Goal-Directed Behavior (MGB), to better understand racial differences in rates of hypertension control. The present study examines the psychological processes involved in efforts to control blood pressure, through the lens of the TPB augmented by the MGB, in hypertensive patients of three racial groups: American Indian/Alaska Native, Black/African American, and White. Participants completed measures of past efforts to control blood pressure, attitudes, norms, perceived behavioral control, intentions, and anticipated emotions. Analyses employed confirmatory factor analysis and cross-groups path analysis. Measurement of the theoretical constructs and core putative mediators of blood pressure control intentions were largely similar across racial groups. With regard to the patterns of relationships among the constructs, differences among the groups were most apparent in pathways from past efforts to both cognitive and affective theoretical antecedents of intentions. These findings contribute to the sparse literature on factors involved in racial differences in hypertension control rates and may inform future interventions aimed at increasing hypertension control behaviors. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03028597, registered 23 January 2017, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03028597; ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04414982, registered 4 June 2020 (retrospectively registered), https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04414982.

While the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of college students can vary across race and gender, few studies have explored the role of hardships and university assistance in these disparities, as well as how these disparities can manifest themselves differently across intersections of race and gender. We address this gap by using unique survey data (n = 417) from two large graduate schools of social work, public health, and social policy in the United States. Using multi-group structural equation modeling, we explore how material hardships, academic hardships, and university assistance needed mediates the relationship between race and mental health, including depression and anxiety. We also explore how gender moderates these relationships. We find that Black students are directly related to material hardships and-through these hardships-indirectly related to increased depression, indicating mediation. However, material hardships did not mediate the relationship between race and anxiety. Furthermore, while academic hardships mediated the relationships between race and depression, as well as race and anxiety, these relationships were only significant for females, indicating moderated-mediation. Moreover, although university assistance needed mediated the relationship between race and depression for females only, university assistance needed mediated the relationship between race and anxiety for both males and females. We close with implications for policy and practice.

Educational debt is an economic stressor that is harmful to mental health and disproportionately experienced by African American and Latinx youth. In this paper, we use a daily diary design to explore the link between mental health, context specific factors like "college stress" and time use, and educational debt stress, or stress incurred from thinking about educational debt and college affordability. This paper utilizes data from a sample of predominately African American and Latinx college students who provided over 1,000 unique time observations. Results show that debt-induced stress is predictive of greater self-reported hostility, guilt, sadness, fatigue, and general negative emotion. Moreover, the relationship may be partly mediated by "college stress" reflecting course loads and post-graduation job expectations. For enrolled students then, educational debt may influence mental health directly through concerns over affordability, or indirectly by shaping facets of college life. The window that our granular data provides into college experiences suggest that the consequences of student debt are manifest and immediate. Further, the documented day-to-day mental health burden for minority students may contribute to downstream processes like matriculation.