Browsing by Subject "Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Genes, Race, and Causation: US Public Perspectives About Racial Difference
    (Race and Social Problems, 2018-06-01) Outram, Simon; Graves, Joseph L; Powell, Jill; Wolpert, Chantelle; Haynie, Kerry L; Foster, Morris W; Blanchard, Jessica W; Hoffmeyer, Anna; Agans, Robert P; Royal, Charmaine Dm
    © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Concerns have been raised that the increase in popular interest in genetics may herald a new era within which racial inequities are seen as “natural” or immutable. In the following study, we provide data from a nationally representative survey on how the US population perceives general ability, athleticism, and intellect being determined by race and/or genetics and whether they believe racial health inequities to be primarily the product of genetic or social factors. We find that self-described race is of primary importance in attributing general ability to race, increasing age is a significant factor in attributing athleticism and intellect to genes and race, and education is a significant factor in decreasing such racially and genetically deterministic views. Beliefs about the meaning of race are statistically significantly associated with respect to the perception of athletic abilities and marginally associated with the perception of racial health inequalities being either socially or genetically derived. Race, education, socioeconomic status, and concepts of race were frequently found to be multiplicative in their statistical effects. The persistent acceptance of a genetically and racially deterministic view of athleticism among the White and older population group is discussed with respect to its social impact, as is the high level of agreement that general abilities are determined by race among non-White respondents and those of lower socioeconomic status. We argue that these findings highlight that both biological and non-biological forms of understanding race continue to play a role into the politics of race and social difference within contemporary US society.
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    Mapping the Dynamic Complexity of Chronic Disease Care in Singapore: Using Group Model Building in Knowledge Elicitation
    (Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2018-11-01) Ansah, JP; Matchar, DB; Koh, V; Schoenenberger, L
    This study describes a group model building exercise that aims to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamic complexity of chronic disease care delivery within a primary care setting in Singapore, leveraging on the insights of stakeholders with personal and institutional knowledge of the health care system. A group model building exercise, which included 50 stakeholders, was used to develop the qualitative model. The qualitative model helped to bring a feedback perspective to understanding the dynamic complexity of chronic disease care delivery. The feedback perspective helped in identifying the systemic issues within chronic disease care delivery, which has the potential to inform system-wide interventions and policies to improve health. Enhancing chronic care in Singapore will require an enhancement of both the capacity and capability of the primary care sector. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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    RECONSTRUCTING RACISM: TRANSFORMING RACIAL HIERARCHY FROM “NECESSARY EVIL” INTO “POSITIVE GOOD”
    (Social Philosophy and Policy, 2017) Grynaviski, JD; Munger, MC
    Copyright © 2017 Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation. Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously (though perhaps not intentionally) devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites, preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human (and therefore requiring care, as a positive duty of the slave owner, as a man cares for his children, who cannot care for themselves), or else as being other than human (and therefore being spiritually no different from cattle or horses, and therefore requiring only the same considerations for maintenance and husbandry). The interest of the historical narrative presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior ideologies can prove extremely persistent.
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    Universal Reach at Birth: Family Connects
    (The Future of Children, 2019) Dodge, KA; Goodman, WB
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    Using Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Mixed Methods Research: An Evaluation of an Integrated Care Program for Frequently Hospitalized Older Adults in Singapore
    (Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 2020-04-01) Penkunas, MJ; Matchar, DB; Wong, CH; Liu, C; Chan, AWM
    Traditional evaluation techniques are often not suitable for studying health interventions operating in real-world settings, particularly when interventions operate through complex causal pathways. We describe a mixed methods design for evaluating an integrated home care and social support service targeting mature and older adults (55+ years) in Singapore. Here, nurses and community health workers visit patients’ homes to address health and social needs while facilitating linkages to community-based services and providing caregiver support. Our mixed methods evaluation plan is composed of three components: quantitative comparison of hospital-based service utilization, cost-effectiveness analysis, and qualitative investigation into the experiences of patients, caregivers, and individuals who declined services. This article contributes a description of how cost-effectiveness analysis adds value when incorporated into mixed methods studies.