CSDE Affiliate Susan M. Graham (Medicine and Global Health) and co-authors recently published the pilot results of the Shauriana Intervention for young Kenyan gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) in AIDS Behavior. In close collaboration with GBMSM community leaders, Graham and coauthors developed a theory-based, culturally-tailored HIV prevention intervention that integrates sexual health and mental health support. The research team conducted a randomized trial comparing the pilot intervention to standard care. At six months, acceptability was high, and most participants rated its value and relevance highly. Attendance was excellent, with all 29 intervention participants completing all five sessions. Exploratory analyses suggest improved knowledge of PrEP, healthy relationships, and communication, as well as higher condom use at last sex. Future work is warranted to evaluate this intervention in a larger trial.
With support from the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) and funding from NICHD, CSDE has launched a six month program to forge and strengthen partnerships between public-serving organizations in Washington and UW researchers. The initiative begins with a call for applications from public-serving organizations in Washington due February 20. Please visit our landing page to learn more. If you are a UW researcher who has connections to public-serving organizations, please let us know by filling out this form.
CSDE Affiliate Julianne Meisner (Global Health & Epidemiology) has been appointed to the Directorship of the University of Washington Center for One Health Research (COHR). The COHR is an Organizational Research Unit (ORU) that sits between the Departments of Environmental & Occupational Sciences and DGH. Meisner previously served as the Center’s Deputy Director and is recognized internationally as a leader in the One Health field. Her innovative research portfolio—including critical field studies in the Middle East and Mongolia—sits at the cutting edge of human, animal, and environmental health. Congratulations, Dr. Meisner!
CSDE Trainee Will von Geldern (Public Policy) published an opinion piece in the Seattle Times that draws on findings from his dissertation research and work with CSDE Affiliates Rachel Fyall (Public Policy) and Karin Martin (Public Policy). The op-ed addresses the “right to counsel” law in Washington, which was intended to ensure legal representation for tenants who receive public assistance or who have very low incomes. Five years after the bill’s passing, however, less than half of tenants receive legal assistance during the eviction process. In the article, von Geldern argues that the decision to create the right-to-counsel program without fixing the underlying eviction process has contributed to a persistent gap in tenants’ access to justice.
The NIH will be accepting applications under the new multi-component award structure. Please see PA 26-002 “NIH Collaborative International Research Project (Parent PF5 Clinical Trial Optional)” for more details.
Please join us for our next speaker in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences Seminar Series. Wednesday February 18th at 12:30pm, Debrielle Jacques, Assistant Professor, Psychology, UW will give a seminar titled: Making All the Pieces Matter: Bridging Theory, Methodology, and Analyses to Uncover Nuance in Parenting and Child Development Research.
This seminar will be offered as a hybrid session. Below please find the abstract and information about joining in-person or on Zoom.
Parents with addiction and mental health challenges (also known as psychopathology) can struggle to consistently and responsively meet their children’s needs. This can increase children’s risk for future mental health problems and adverse developmental outcomes. Sometimes the effects of parent addiction and psychopathology are subtle, less “visible”, and unfold in diverse, complicated processes that are difficult for researchers to capture or explain. Consequently, this requires scholars to adopt more sophisticated or creative empirical approaches to enrich our understanding of associations between addiction, psychopathology, parenting, and child development. However, few studies explicitly, intentionally, or strategically combine theories (which help explain complex phenomena) with diverse methods or advanced analytical approaches to explore the nuance, novelty, and complexity of these associations. This talk demonstrates the utility of integrated and intentional theory-methods-analysis approaches via multiple studies that merge developmental theories, diverse methods, and advanced analyses (e.g., longitudinal, structural equation (SEM), and person-centered analyses). Studies 1 and 2 combine affective developmental theories with longitudinal SEM to examine how and why parental substance use and psychopathology uniquely predict infant emotional development and trajectories of anxiety and depression across early childhood. Study 3 combines social-affective-cognitive developmental theories with mixture modeling to examine heterogeneous associations between maternal alcohol dependence, psychopathology, and parental scaffolding and parent-child problem-solving behaviors.