Factors Associated With Substance Use Disorders Among Traumatized Homeless Youth

This study aimed to identify homeless youths’ lifestyle and trauma-related risk factors as well as protective factors associated with alcohol use disorder or no disorder and drug use disorder or no disorder. Youth receiving homeless services in Denver (n = 201), Austin (n = 200), and Los Angeles (n = 200; N = 601) completed quantitative interviews assessing demographic information, alcohol and drug use, homeless lifestyle risk factors, trauma-related risk factors, and protective factors. Findings showed differences in trauma-related risk factors between alcohol and drug use disorders, but not homeless lifestyle risks. Protective factors predicted substance use disorders beyond risk factors. Understanding trauma-related risk and protective factors associated with substance use disorders could improve interventions.     

Manager Characteristics and Employee Job Insecurity around a Merger Announcement: The Role of Status and Crossover

Most existing research theorizes individual factors as predictors of perceived job insecurity. Incorporating contextual and organizational factors at an information technology organization where a merger was announced during data collection, we draw on status expectations and crossover theories to investigate whether managers' characteristics and insecurity shape their employees' job insecurity. We find having an Asian as opposed to a White manager is associated with lower job insecurity, whereas managers' own insecurity positively predicts employees' insecurity. Also contingent on the organizational climate, managers' own tenure buffers, and managers' perceived job insecurity magnifies insecurity of employees interviewed after a merger announcement, further specifying status expectations theory by considering context.     

Risk Detection and Self‐Protection Among Homeless Youth

Utilizing qualitative interviews with a large sample of 145 homeless youth seeking services at homeless youth service agencies from across three U.S. cities (Los Angeles, Denver, and Austin), this study sought to explore youths' perspectives on ways in which they detect risk and protect themselves on the streets. Results indicated that youth use a combination of internal cues (affective responses) and external cues (reading people) to detect danger, although many times danger was described as undetectable. Certain contexts, includes those that were unfamiliar, difficult to escape, or involved drugs were described as most dangerous. In response to these dangers, youth employed self‐protection strategies such as carrying weapons, banding together with trusted others, isolating, or seeking programing to leave the streets.     

A First Look: Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Among US-Born and Foreign-Born Minnesota Residents

Population Research and Policy Review - This research brief provides one of the first examinations of the impact of COVID-19 mortality on immigrant communities in the United States. In the absence...     

The Malleability of Environmentalism

In this article, we predict and find that self-perceptions of environmentalism are changed by subtle manipulations of context and, in turn, affect environmental behavior. In Study 1, we found that people exhibit greater positive assessments of their environmental behaviors (1) in the context of denying harm to the environment than in the context of claiming to help the environment, and (2) in situations where behaviors are evaluated subjectively than in situations where behaviors are evaluated more objectively. In Study 2, we explored the relationship between self-perceptions of environmentalism and environmental behaviors. Our data suggest that environmentally friendly behaviors may be promoted by leading people to perceive themselves as good environmentalists.     

The Costs of Future Polio Risk Management Policies

Decisionmakers need information about the anticipated future costs of maintaining polio eradication as a function of the policy options under consideration. Given the large portfolio of options, we reviewed and synthesized the existing cost data relevant to current policies to provide context for future policies. We model the expected future costs of different strategies for continued vaccination, surveillance, and other costs that require significant potential resource commitments. We estimate the costs of different potential policy portfolios for low-, middle-, and high-income countries to demonstrate the variability in these costs. We estimate that a global transition from routine immunization with oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) to inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) would increase the costs of managing polio globally, although routine IPV use remains less costly than routine OPV use with supplemental immunization activities. The costs of surveillance and a stockpile, while small compared to routine vaccination costs, represent important expenditures to ensure adequate response to potential outbreaks. The uncertainty and sensitivity analyses highlight important uncertainty in the aggregated costs and demonstrates that the discount rate and uncertainty in price and administration cost of IPV drives the expected incremental cost of routine IPV vs. OPV immunization.     

Development and Consideration of Global Policies for Managing the Future Risks of Poliovirus Outbreaks: Insights and Lessons Learned Through Modeling

The success of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative promises to bring large benefits, including sustained improvements in quality of life (i.e., cases of paralytic disease and deaths avoided) and costs saved from cessation of vaccination. Obtaining and maintaining these benefits requires that policymakers manage the transition from the current massive use of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) to a world without OPV and free of the risks of potential future reintroductions of live polioviruses. This article describes the analytical journey that began in 2001 with a retrospective case study on polio risk management and led to development of dynamic integrated risk, economic, and decision analysis tools to inform global policies for managing the risks of polio. This analytical journey has provided several key insights and lessons learned that will be useful to future analysts involved in similar complex decision-making processes.