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In this paper, we examined the extent to which one's own religiosity, as well as that of her or his peers, has on alcohol and substance use among undergraduate students at a medium-sized public university in the southeastern United States. Findings indicate that though peer religiosity significantly affects substance use, one's own religiosity is not a significant predictor of substance use. Discussion of results, limitations of the study, and directions for future research are also discussed., In the United States, drinking and illicit substance use among college students is quite prevalent on college campuses (Giordano, Prosek, Daly, Holm, Ramsey, Abernathy, & Sender, 2013; Johnston, O'Malley, Bachman, [...]

This article addresses the general ethical issues of accessing online personal data for research purposes. The authors discuss the practical aspects of online research with a specific case study that illustrates the ethical challenges encountered when accessing data from Kooth, an online youth web-counselling service. This paper firstly highlights the relevance of a process-based approach to ethics (Markham and Buchanan 2012 (See CR46)) when accessing highly sensitive data and then discusses the ethical considerations and potential challenges regarding the accessing of public data from Digital Mental Health (DMH) services. It presents solutions that aim to protect young DMH service users as well as the DMH providers and researchers mining such data. Special consideration is given to service users' expectations of what their data might be used for, as well as their perceptions of whether the data they post is public, private or open. We provide recommendations for planning and designing online research that includes vulnerable young people as research participants in an ethical manner. We emphasise the distinction between public, private and open data, which is crucial to comprehend the ethical challenges in accessing DMH data. Among our key recommendations, we foreground the need to consider a collaborative approach with the DMH providers while respecting service users' control over personal data, and we propose the implementation of digital solutions embedded within the platform for explicit opt-out/opt-in recruitment strategies and 'read more' options (Bergin and Harding 2016 (See CR9))., Author(s): Elvira Perez Vallejos [sup.1] , Ansgar Koene [sup.2] , Christopher James Carter [sup.3] , Daniel Hunt [sup.4] , Christopher Woodard [sup.5] , Lachlan Urquhart [sup.6] , Aislinn Bergin [sup.7] [...]

It's not enough to be busy. The question is: what are we busy about?' --Henry David Thoreau Twenty years ago, I (Jodi Polaha) had a freshly minted PhD in Child [...]

In recent years, the number of new asylum applications in Germany has risen with a peak in 2015. Many refugees arrive with high levels of prior education and corresponding educational aspirations. Hence, German universities and preparatory colleges (so-called 'Studienkollegs') have created additional preparatory courses and supporting services for refugees. Heretofore, little is known about the specific challenges for prospective refugee students seeking access to higher education in the German context. We focus on key individual, social, and institutional conditions for integrating refugees into the German higher education system. How do prospective refugee students value higher education? What are the key challenges and supporting factors on their way to higher education in Germany? Our analysis is based on 17 exploratory interviews with prospective refugee students, staff of higher education institutions and counselling services. We combine educational sociology and refugee studies and rely on the capability approach and its close relation to the conception of agency to theorize our empirical findings. Reconstructing the challenges and coping strategies along with the key concepts of the capability approach reveals the different strategies of prospective refugee students to achieve their aspirations as well as the frustrating institutional limits of agency. Finally, we will discuss implications for higher education policy in Germany.KeywordsAccess to Higher Education, Agency, Capabilities, Engagements, Prospective Refugee Students, IntroductionFrom 2014 to 2016, significantly more asylum seekers arrived in Germany than in previous years and therefore, many higher education institutions (HEI) had to cope with a growing number of [...]

In general, readers of Families, Systems, and Health (FSH) practice in high income countries and in settings that have adequate resources. Providers can usually count on being able to offer [...]

Background One in 5 women experience mental illness in pregnancy or post partum. Universal preventive interventions have not lowered the incidence of perinatal mental illness, perhaps because those at highest risk were not targeted. Outside of pregnancy, chronic physical conditions are known to confer increased risk for mental illness. Our objective was to examine the association between chronic physical conditions and risk of perinatal mental illness. Methods and findings We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study using linked health administrative data sets in Ontario, Canada, in 2005 to 2015. We compared 77,385 women with chronic physical conditions to 780,619 women without such conditions, all of whom had a singleton live birth. Excluded were women with a mental illness diagnosis within 2 years before pregnancy. Chronic physical conditions were captured using the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Chronic Condition Indicator, applied to acute healthcare encounters in the 2 years before pregnancy. The outcome was perinatal mental illness, defined by a mental illness or addiction diagnosis arising between conception and 365 days post partum. The outcome was further defined by timing (prenatal or post partum) and specific diagnosis (psychotic disorder, mood or anxiety disorder, substance use disorder, self-harm, or other). Modified Poisson regression generated relative risks and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), adjusted for age, parity, rural residence, income quintile, and remote history of mental health care. Women in the cohort had an average age of 29.6 years (standard deviation 5.4), 44.2% were primiparous, 11.0% lived in a rural area, 40.1% were in the lowest 2 income quintiles, and 47.9% had a remote history of mental health care. More women with (20.4%) than without (15.6%) a chronic physical condition experienced perinatal mental illness-an adjusted relative risk (aRR) of 1.20 (95% CI 1.18-1.22, p < 0.0001). The aRRs were statistically significant for mental illness in pregnancy (1.12, 95% CI 1.10-1.15, p < 0.0001) and post partum (1.25, 95% CI 1.23-1.28, p < 0.0001). Psychotic disorders (aRR 1.50, 95% CI 1.36-1.65, p < 0.0001), mood or anxiety disorders (aRR 1.19, 95% CI 1.17-1.21, p < 0.0001), substance use disorders (aRR 1.47, 95% CI 1.34-1.62, p < 0.0001), and other mental illness (aRR 1.68, 95% CI 1.50-1.87, p < 0.0001) were more likely in women with than without chronic physical conditions, but not self-harm (aRR 1.14, 95% CI 0.87-1.48, p = 0.34). The study was limited by reliance on acute health care encounters to measure chronic physical conditions and the inability to capture undiagnosed mental health problems. Conclusions Findings from this study suggest that women with a chronic physical condition predating pregnancy may be at heightened risk of developing mental illness in the perinatal period. These women may require targeted efforts to lower the severity of their condition and improve their coping strategies and supports in pregnancy and thereafter., Author(s): Hilary K. Brown 1,2,3,4,5,*, Andrew S. Wilton 4, Joel G. Ray 2,4,6, Cindy-Lee Dennis 3,6,7, Astrid Guttmann 2,4,8,9, Simone N. Vigod 2,3,4,5 Introduction One in 5 women suffer from [...]