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Compared to drug-abusing women with fewer than five risks, women with five or more risks found parenting more stressful and indicated greater inclination towards abusive and neglectful behavior, placing their infants at increased risk for poor parenting, abuse and neglect. Early home-based intervention in high-risk families may be beneficial to infant development.

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Objective To determine whether living in a food swamp (≥4 corner stores within 0·40 km (0·25 miles) of home) or a food desert (generally, no supermarket or access to healthy foods) is associated with consumption of snacks/desserts or fruits/vegetables, and if neighbourhood-level socio-economic status (SES) confounds relationships. Design Cross-sectional. Assessments included diet (Youth/Adolescent FFQ, skewed dietary variables normalized) and measured height/weight (BMI-for-age percentiles/Z-scores calculated). A geographic information system geocoded home addresses and mapped food deserts/food swamps. Associations examined using multiple linear regression (MLR) models adjusting for age and BMI-for-age Z-score. Setting Baltimore City, MD, USA. Subjects Early adolescent girls (6th/7th grade, n 634; mean age 12·1 years; 90·7 % African American; 52·4 % overweight/obese), recruited from twenty-two urban, low-income schools. Results Girls’ consumption of fruit, vegetables and snacks/desserts: 1·2, 1·7 and 3·4 servings/d, respectively. Girls’ food environment: 10·4 % food desert only, 19·1 % food swamp only, 16·1 % both food desert/swamp and 54·4 % neither food desert/swamp. Average median neighbourhood-level household income: $US 35 298. In MLR models, girls living in both food deserts/swamps consumed additional servings of snacks/desserts v. girls living in neither (β = 0·13, P = 0·029; 3·8 v. 3·2 servings/d). Specifically, girls living in food swamps consumed more snacks/desserts than girls who did not (β = 0·16, P = 0·003; 3·7 v. 3·1 servings/d), with no confounding effect of neighbourhood-level SES. No associations were identified with food deserts or consumption of fruits/vegetables. Conclusions Early adolescent girls living in food swamps consumed more snacks/desserts than girls not living in food swamps. Dietary interventions should consider the built environment/food access when addressing adolescent dietary behaviours.

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Prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) are associated with reductions in opioid use, measured by volume, among disabled and older adult Medicare beneficiaries in the United States compared with states that do not have PDMPs. PDMP impact on daily doses and daily prescriptions varied by reason for eligibility and plan type. These findings cannot be generalized beyond the 10 US states studied.

Objectives: The Migratory Grief and Loss Questionnaire (MGLQ) was designed to measure the grief experience associated with immigration. This article reports the development and psychometric properties of a Chinese-version of MGLQ. Methods: An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using maximum likelihood extraction with varimax rotation was conducted to identify the factor structure of the MGLQ. Results: A two-factor solution was identified with Factor 1 representing ‘‘Attachment to Homeland’’ and Factor 2 representing ‘‘Identify Discontinuity.’’ Both factors had excellent internal consistency reliability and concurrent validity as demonstrated by predicted relationships with depression scores. Conclusions: This study supported the validity and the reliability of the MGLQ, demonstrating its utility in assessing the migratory grief experience among immigrants.

This article reports on a study of convergent and discriminant validity of the Traumatic Stress Institute Belief Scale (TSI)–Revision L (Traumatic Stress Institute, 1994) as a measure of vicarious trauma in a random sample of master's level clinical social workers. Forty-nine items from six subscales of the TSI were used. The scale purports to measure disturbed beliefs that may be caused by direct traumatic experience or repeated exposure to details of clients' traumatic stories. Results of correlational analyses of the TSI score with study variables and exploratory multiple regression analysis on the TSI score indicate its association with younger age, more reported somatic symptoms, lower annual salaries, lower scores on the Perceived Social Support (PSS)–Friends subscale (Procidano & Heller, 1983) and greater burnout as measured by the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Jackson, 1986). TSI scores were not associated with social workers' personal trauma history, their reported weekly amount of face-to-face client contact, or a self-report of the level of intrusiveness of client material into the social workers' lives. TSI scores appear to be measuring perceptions about self and work that, like burnout, may relate to social workers' general outlook, not necessarily to the effects of traumatic stress, vicarious or otherwise. Significant overlap of the TSI with burnout scores in this social work sample suggests a lack of clear distinction between burnout and vicarious trauma.