Acculturation theories often describe how individuals in the United States adopt and incorporate dominant cultural values, beliefs, and behaviors such as individualism and selfreliance. Theorists tend to perceive dominant cultural values as "accessible to everyone," even though some dominant cultural values, such as preserving White racial status, are reserved for White people. In this article, the authors posit that White supremacist ideology is suffused within dominant cultural values, connecting the array of cultural values into a coherent whole and bearing with it an explicit status for White people and people of color. Consequently, the authors frame acculturation as a continuing process wherein some people of color learn explicitly via racism, microaggressions, and racial trauma about their racial positionality; White racial space; and how they are supposed to accommodate White people's needs, status, and emotions. The authors suggest that acculturation may mean that the person of color learns to avoid racial discourse to minimize eliciting White fragility and distress. Moreover, acculturation allows the person of color to live in proximity to White people because the person of color has become unthreatening and racially innocuous. The authors provide recommendations for research and clinical practice focused on understanding the connections between ideology, racism, microaggressions and ways to create psychological healing.
OBJECTIVE
Head and neck cancer (HNC) patients experience debilitating side effects, including abnormally reduced salivation and difficulty swallowing. Intensive self-care protocols are prescribed to control side effects and minimize discomfort, but non-adherence rates are high. Although spouses are in a prime position to encourage adherence, studies have yet to examine how spouse social control (i.e., attempts to influence patient behavior to support adherence) affects HNC patient mood and self-efficacy for engaging in these self-care routines.
METHODS
One-hundred twenty-five HNC couples where the patient (86% male) was undergoing radiotherapy were recorded in the laboratory as they discussed a cancer-related issue that the patient identified as being a topic of concern.
RESULTS
Sixty-eight couples discussed side-effects and spouses engaged in social control in 61 of these discussions. Although oral complications and pain were frequently identified by patients as being topics of concern, dental/oral care and pain management were some of the least likely self-care behaviors to be targeted by spouses, who focused primarily on encouraging patients to maintain their weight and hydration. Although spouses engaged in an almost equal number of positive and negative control attempts, only positive control was significantly (p<.05) associated with patient positive mood and self-efficacy.
CONCLUSION
HNC couples may benefit from programs that emphasize the regular practice of self-care routines to control oral side effects, pain, and nutrition/hydration problems. Likewise, programs that encourage spouses to maximize their use of positive social control may also boost patients’ mood during treatment and empower them to engage in recommended self-care behaviors.
Patients (n = 16) and clinical staff (n = 10) participated in phase 1. Three major themes were identified: "symptom experience," "symptom management," and "technology." Through an iterative process using these results and evidence from the literature, the OASIS web application was developed. Usability testing with N = 126 stakeholders demonstrated that the web application is easy to use, contains relevant content, and has pleasing graphics. No differences were found among patients, family/friends, and staff. Both frequent and infrequent internet users positively evaluated the web application. CONCLUSIONS: Rural stakeholders report significant symptom management needs, are interested in eHealth technologies, and perceived OASIS positively. Future research is needed to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of OASIS.
Mental health professionals and administrators work to improve substance use treatment for racially and ethnically diverse populations. However, a national comparison study of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) and non-AAPIs substance use outpatient treatment completion has received little attention. The present study examined treatment completion by comparing AAPI clients to White and Latinx clients, and identified demographic and treatment-related moderating factors associated with treatment completion using discharge data from the Treatment Episode Data Sets-Discharge (TEDS-D). A retrospective analysis of AAPI treatment completion was conducted using logistic regression for the years 2006-2011 (N = 2,356,883). AAPIs were significantly more likely to complete treatment than non-AAPIs when controlling for all study variables in the multivariate model, Wald χ[1]2 = 158.60, p < .001, AOR = 1.19, 95% CI = 1.15-1.21. Additionally, we found a moderating effect (Wald χ[2]2 = 69.65, p < .001) with large effect sizes in treatment completion differences between the three comparison groups (AAPI, White, and Latinx). Results demonstrated AAPI clients are more likely to complete treatment than White and Latinx clients with small effect sizes. Additionally, being female, an adolescent, in school, living with parents or adult guardians, having more frequent substance use, and being admitted to treatment at younger age in the AAPI samples were associated with higher treatment completion percentages with clinically meaningful effect sizes. These findings may help to enhance and expand culturally competent psychological services to AAPIs at risk for substance use problems. (PsycINFO Database Record
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