The space is designed to facilitate reflection and strategize around application of CRT/I tenants to advance anti-racist SW research and center community priorities.

Young adults define their social networks in different ways; networks are shaped by foster care experiences and current living situation

Six factors are significantly associated with mental health status after Harvey. Four predict mental health deterioration, and two predict mental health resilience.

Dissonance exists between where teens say they want to get sex education and where they get sex education.

Adolescents in Hong Kong tend to obtain sexual health knowledge from teachers and classmates. The internet and textbooks are two primary preferred autodidactic sources. There was a high motivation that these students would like to acquire sex education motivation in their school years. A youth-friendly self-assessment tool would serve as a channel to express their needs to receive formal sex education. Culturally and gender-sensitive instructions are crucial teaching tools to increase the effectiveness of sexual health education to evoke students’ learning interest and motivation to learn from formal sources. Training should include selecting topics of interest to students to foster a healthy and holistic learning environment.

Timing of implementation and open attitude to health promotion are important considerations in designing sex education programs for preteens. Since girls turn to teachers and mothers for information while boys turn to internet sources, this study supports delivering an age-appropriate sex education curriculum starting earlier than the fifth grade, probably from the first grade on a topic of gender differences as suggested by sex educators. Teachers and parents may plan sexual health content with technology-assisted teaching methods. The psychology of the targeted youth’s keen learning desire is projected through their high response rate to each survey question. The unique aspect is that the respondents did not view early timing as a fixed starting point, but rather a continuum learning journey to understand more about sexuality and sexual health. With a curriculum designed to focus on the youth’s desire to learn, primary school students would be able to gradually increase their knowledge based on their developmental needs. Hearing directly from the preteens is an important planning step toward building a user-friendly learning platform.

This study exposed large differences between sex education mores and behavior of teenagers. Before developing a comprehensive grade-by-grade sexual education programs in Hong Kong, educators must work with adolescents to hear about their source preferences: peer support, online sexual education, and age-appropriate education in schools. Given the large disparity between the role adolescents believe the family members should play in sexual education and sex education provided by family members, future research should evaluate which specific areas of family engagement would best engage adolescents in the sex education process. Future curricula can be designed with these preferences in mind. Finally, given the rise of STDs among youth, public health initiatives, including sex-appropriate education in schools, must consider the gendered preferences of the adolescents. Engaging youth in sex education planning according to their preferences can increase the participation and fulfill UNESCO’s goals in providing sexual education to world youth to increase their knowledge about sexual development and behaviors, enrich emotional content, and endorse risk reduction.

In China, fewer than 10% of individuals with mental health problems seek out professional treatment. Findings indicate that beliefs about seeking professional help for mental health are influenced by knowing someone with a mental health problem. In addition, males who were older, had a child, and were married endorsed more openness to help-seeking for mental health needs, underscoring the importance of life experience as an important variable when considering attitudes toward help-seeking. Findings support future research identifying the mechanisms by which these life experiences impact individuals’ help-seeking attitudes.

The findings suggest that all (n=32) child participants were subjected to extreme abuse by law enforcement. Findings indicate that police officers were both active and passive abusers of children. As active abusers, police intentionally harmed, abused, raped, trafficked, or tortured children under the pretext of maintaining law and order or to “clean” public places by removing children. Most egregiously, boy informants reported being kicked, jailed, slapped or beaten with batons by police. Girl informants reported being forced to have sex or to participate in transactional sexual acts, imprisoned, or expelled from public places by police. Girl respondents also said that police patronized pimps to confine them, as victims of sex trafficking, for repeated sexual abuse by police.

Participants identified four significant themes as causes of child marriage: 1) the financial burden of girls; 2) issues around girls’ safety, security, and protecting honor; 3) religious traditions; and 4) lack of awareness of consequences of child marriage. As researchers, we found that the interventions currently being used by the participant stakeholders were not aligned with many of the identified causes of child marriage. Notably, none of the research participants used or suggested using interventions that related to meaningful enforcement of current laws, religious community leaders’ control over marriages and divorce in Syrian communities, racism and discrimination against refugees, the ongoing misogynist harassment of women and girls, nor the abject poverty within the Syrian refugee community.

Identifying early warning signs of self-harm and suicide intentions is an effective way to prevent completed suicides, yet few participants explicitly acknowledged the thoughts of self-harm present in the vignette. Unexpectedly, our results did not indicate any significant differences in stigma based on the vignette subject demographics, indicating that stigma towards a person with suicidal ideation may not be affected by the gender or age of the person experiencing suicidal thoughts. Immigrant generation, however, played an important role in our respondents’ perception of individuals experiencing suicidal ideation. Consistent with prior literature, first generation immigrants reported higher levels of community-level stigma toward the vignette subject than those from subsequent generations, indicating those who are second generation immigrants and beyond may be more highly acculturated and thus may report overall lower levels of mental health stigma. This was not the case for personal-level stigma wherein second and third generation immigrants expressed less willingness to accept those experiencing suicidal ideation.

Findings demonstrate that disasters may create a window of opportunity for increased civic involvement and in some cases, can more deeply connect people with their communities. Findings also highlight challenges to civic engagement. Inadequate and confusing coordination of disaster assistance and volunteers, limited access (including language access) to reliable information, feelings of abandonment by public officials, and distrust due to inadequate and inequitable systems of recovery suggest needed policy responses to support equitable post-disaster community well-being.

Study results show the strong, positive association between TBI and psychopathy, and elucidate the need for more research, clinical practice, and policy work examining this relationship and its potential effects further. Clinical implications suggest early intervention is needed to treat the potential long-term effects of TBIs and the development of psychopathic traits.

Students reported significantly better outcomes in family, friends, school, and afterschool outcomes in fall 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. More research on how COVID-19 impacts afterschool programs is needed to determine implications for future programming.