The Importance of Social Cues for Discretionary Health Services Utilization: The Case of Infertility

Infertility is a discretionary health condition; although it carries with it important life course implications, treatment is rarely necessary for health reasons. Sociological theories of medical help‐seeking emphasize demographic factors, perceived need, and enabling conditions in health services utilization, but we find that social cues are also strongly associated with health services utilization for infertility. Adjusted for conventional predictors of medical help‐seeking, several social cue indicators have significant associations with utilization, including having friends and family with children, perceiving infertility stigma, and having a partner and/or family member who encourages treatment. Perceived need accounts for the largest portion of the variation in utilization. Enabling conditions explain less of the variance than social cues. Social cues should be especially important for discretionary health services utilization. Studies of service utilization for discretionary health conditions should explicitly incorporate a range of measures of social cues into their models.     

Panic and the Breakdown of Social Order: Popular Myth,Social Theory,Empirical Evidence

Abstract

The academic public that I encounter at my lectures always show surprise when I speak intimately and deeply about the classroom. That public seemed particularly surprised when I said that I was working on a collection of essays about teaching. This surprise is a sad reminder of the way teaching is seen as a duller, less valuable aspect of the academic professions. This perspective on teaching is a common one.     

A cohort analysis of employment status and homicide victimization in the United States

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the study was to examine the impact of employment status on homicide victimization among cohort members. Data were derived from the US National Longitudinal Mortality Study. Cox proportional hazards regression models were fitted to the data. Analysis showed that employment status was significantly associated with homicide. The unemployed were over 50% more likely to become homicide victims than the employed. Persons not in the labor force were 1.3 times more likely to be victimized than employed cohort members. Results also showed that race was significantly associated with homicide. Non-Hispanic Blacks were over 4.5 times as likely to die as whites. Hispanics were nearly 1.9 times as likely to be victims as Non-Hispanic whites. When the sample was stratified by race/ethnicity, unemployment was highly significant for both non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic African American men. Employment status is a significant risk factor for homicide victimization.     

Books and publications received

Efforts to control rampant population growth in sub-Saharan Africa have been stymied by confusion between the potential causes and consequences of high fertility in the region. A controversy has surfaced over the causal direction of the fundamental relationship between human fertility and size of landholdings. Members of one school of thought claim that farm couples modify their fertility behaviour according to the amount of land they own or operate. Yet others argue that the size of landholdings varies as a function of family size (an indicator of the availability of family labour). In the present study we use a two-stage least-squares regression on data from a 1988 survey of 747 farm households in Rwanda to disaggregate and compare the strengths of these two possible paths of influence. The results show that landholdings exert a positive influence on human reproduction, but not the reverse. Moreover, this influence is slightly stronger for couples who own all the land they operated, probably because they have larger incomes from equity in the land. The size of the farm is unrelated to the size of the family's potential farm labour force (measured as the number of household members aged 15–65) or to the husband's total desired number of children. These findings suggest that farm size boosts the number of living children not by creating a demand for more children but by increasing the supply of children through higher natural fertility and child survival.     

Health conditions in rural and urban areas of developing countries

The poor quality and meagre supply of data prohibit conclusions as to the relationship of health status to rural-urban residence in underdeveloped countries. Demographic indicators of health, specifically infant mortality and average life expectancy, do not seem to vary systematically according to rural-urban residence in the less developed countries ofAsia, Africa and Latin America. Further differences between rural and urban areas in availability of health services and facilities do not always conform with apparent differences between the areas in health status. However, nutritional standards, housing conditions, and sanitation, water supply and other pertinent environmental circumstances account to some extent for differences observed in health status between rural and urban inhabitants of these countries.     

Maternal mental health in Australia and New Zealand: A review of longitudinal studies

AimThe aim of this paper is to describe the factors that impact on the mental health of Australian and New Zealand (NZ) women in the perinatal period (pregnancy and the year following birth), and to determine the impact of perinatal mental health on women's subsequent health by summarising findings from prospective longitudinal studies conducted in Australia and NZ.MethodsA systematic search was conducted using the databases, Scopus, Medline, PsychInfo and Health Source to identify prospective longitudinal studies focused on women's social and emotional health in the perinatal period. Forty-eight papers from eight longitudinal studies were included.ResultsThe proportion of women reporting depressive symptoms in the first year after birth was between 10 and 20% and this has remained stable over 25 years. The two strongest predictors for depression and anxiety were previous history of depression and poor partner relationship. Importantly, women's mood appears to be better in the first year after birth, when compared to pregnancy and five years later. Becoming a mother at a young age is by itself not a risk factor unless coupled with social disadvantage. Women report a high number of stressors in pregnancy and following birth and the rate of intimate partner violence reported is worryingly high.ConclusionMidwives have an important role in the identification, support and referral of women experiencing mental health problems. As many women do not seek help from mental health services, the potential for a known midwife to impact on women's mental health warrants further examination.     

Health-Related Stereotype Threat Predicts Health Services Delays Among Blacks

To our knowledge, no published research has developed an individual difference measure of health-related stereotype threat (HRST). We adapted existing measures of academic stereotype threat to the health domain on a sample of black college students (N = 280). The resulting health-related stereotype threat scale-24 (HRST-24) was assessed for internal consistency, construct and incremental validity, and whether it explains variance in self-reported delays among four preventive health behaviors—blood pressure and cholesterol assays, physical exams, and routine checkups. After adjusting for several control variables, the HRST-24’s (full scale α = 0.96) perceived black health inferiority (18 items; α = 0.96) and perceived physician racial bias (6 items; α = 0.85) subscales explained unique variance in delays among two of the four behaviors including a blood cholesterol check (p < .01) and routine checkup—albeit at marginal levels (p = .063) in the case of the latter. Overall, these data provide preliminary evidence of construct and incremental validity for the HRST-24 among blacks. Recommendations for administering the scale are provided and future directions for HRST research are discussed.     

Racial contestation and the emergence of populist nationalism in the United States

Much of the discussion surrounding nationalism still revolves around the ethnic versus civic nation divide. For purposes of this paper it is more useful to view the United States from the tri-modal perspective offered by Anderson, in which the United States is a creole (or settler) nation. All of Anderson's types can be seen as variants of ethnic nationalism. Kaufmann argues that the US evolved from ethnic to civic nationalism by the 1960s. This argument overlooks the importance of phenotype-based racism in the evolution of creole, or white settler colonial nationalism. We want to argue that US nationalism evolved from ethnic, to white racial nationalism in the interwar years. Since the 1920s, the political establishment has opted for civic nationalism that is based upon ‘white assimilationism’. This civic nationalism has been challenged by multiculturalism since the 1960s. In the context of a democratic political culture, the content of American nationalism has become ‘populist’ in the sense that it has come under popular contestation from the assimilationist right and the multiculturalist left. This populist nationalism includes aspects of ethnic and civic nationalism. Racial formation theory will be used to show that national identity may remain under ‘relatively permanent political contestation’ with racial cleavage as a major fault line in that contest. The issues of immigration and the treatment of Muslims since 9/11 will be addressed in order to make the case.     

AIDS as a US National Security Threat: Media Effects and Geographical Imaginations

This paper is concerned with how Australian print news media journalists, male and female, remember, talk about, experience, acknowledge, condemn, and/or deny sexually harassing behaviour in the newsroom. A total of seventeen in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight male and nine female journalists in late 2003 and early 2004. The interviewees ranged in age from 19 to 56 and differed in levels of industry experience. The interviews were not set up to specifically discuss sexually harassing behaviour in the newsroom; however it was a theme that arose in seven of the interviews about newsroom culture, my broader PhD project. The female interviewees make clear their encounters are constant reminders of how their bodies do not “fit” and/or where and how they do fit in this occupation. This is the case, even though some women do not use the term “sexual harassment” to describe the behaviour that clearly constitutes it under Australian government legislation. The two male journalists interviewed who mentioned harassment talk about it in defence of accepted office behaviour, or in passing about procedural business policy. The use of the term “sexual harassment,” or lack of its use, also tells us about the place of feminism and/or feminist inspired government legislation in journalism's occupational culture.