The structural and environmental factors literature offers important insights and reveals a number of productive intervention strategies that might be explored in both resource-rich and -poor settings. However, new methodologies are required to document and evaluate the effects of the structural interventions, which by their very nature involve large-scale elements that cannot be easily controlled by experimental or quasi-experimental research designs. Innovative, interdisciplinary approaches are needed that can move beyond the limited successes of traditional behavioral interventions and explicitly attempt to achieve broader social and structural change.
The Brazilian National AIDS Program is widely recognized as the leading example of an integrated HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment program in a developing country. We critically analyze the Brazilian experience, distinguishing those elements that are unique to Brazil from the programmatic and policy decisions that can aid the development of similar programs in other low-and middleincome and developing countries.Among the critical issues that are discussed are human rights and solidarity, the interface of politics and public health, sexuality and culture, the integration of prevention and treatment, the transition from an epidemic rooted among men who have sex with men to one that increasingly affects women, and special prevention and treatment programs for injection drug users. (Am J Public Health.
In recent years, the menstrual hygiene management challenges facing schoolgirls in low-income-country contexts have gained global attention. We applied Gusfield's sociological analysis of the culture of public problems to better understand how this relatively newly recognized public health challenge rose to the level of global public health awareness and action. We similarly applied the conceptualization by Dorfman et al. of the role of public health messaging in changing corporate practice to explore the conceptual frames and the news frames that are being used to shape the perceptions of menstrual hygiene management as an issue of social justice within the context of public health. Important lessons were revealed for getting other public health problems onto the global-, national-, and local-level agendas.
In this study, the authors examined the extent to which maternal and paternal parenting styles, cognitions, and behaviors were associated with young girls' and boys' more compassionate (prototypically feminine) and more agentic (prototypically masculine) prosocial behaviors with peers. Parents of 133 preschool-aged children reported on their authoritative parenting style, attributions for children's prosocial behavior, and responses to children's prosocial behavior. Approximately 6 months later, children's more feminine and more masculine prosocial behaviors were observed during interactions with unfamiliar peers and reported on by their preschool teachers. Boys and girls did not differ in the observed and teacher-reported measures of prosocial behavior. Compared to other parents, fathers of boys were less likely to express affection or respond directly to children's prosocial behavior. Mothers' authoritative style, internal attributions for prosocial behavior, and positive responses to prosocial behavior predicted girls' displays of more feminine prosocial actions and boys' displays of more masculine prosocial actions toward peers. Relations were similar but weaker for fathers' parenting, and after accounting for mother' scores, fathers' scores accounted for unique variance in only one analysis: Teachers reported more masculine prosocial behavior in boys of fathers who discussed prosocial behavior. Overall, the results support a model of parental socialization of sex-typed prosocial behavior and indicate that mothers contribute more strongly than do fathers to both daughters' and sons' prosocial development.
▪ Abstract This article examines the development of anthropological research in response to AIDS. During the first decade of the epidemic, most social science research focused on the behavioral correlates of HIV infection among individuals and failed to examine broader social and cultural factors. By the late 1980s, however, pioneering work by anthropologists began to raise the importance of cultural systems in shaping sexual practices relevant to HIV transmission and prevention. Since the start of the 1990s, this emphasis on cultural analysis has taken shape alongside a growing anthropological research focus on structural factors shaping vulnerability to HIV infection. Work on social inequality and the political economy of HIV and AIDS has been especially important. Much current research seeks to integrate both cultural and structural concerns in providing an alternative to more individualistic behavioral research paradigms.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.