Faculty Bibliography

Background/UNASSIGNED:Health providers' perceived sense of knowledge, competency, and self-efficacy to support the needs of their patients contributes to optimal patient health outcomes. With regards to mental health service delivery in Kenya, this area needs further exploration. Guided by the e-health technology acceptance mode, the needs and preferences of health care providers around mental health training for clinical management and their ability to intervene in peripartum adolescent mental health care are explored. We probed how well-equipped service providers are, their engagement with technology to learn and offer services. The health care provider's technology use preferences were also explored. Method/UNASSIGNED:Guided by a human-centered design-focused qualitative inquiry we interviewed 20 specialists around their needs, perspectives, and preferences for digitized mental health screening and intervention. Mean age was 44.2 years, (range of 32-58 years), 25% (5) males and 75% (15) females. After a written consenting process, the online interviews (30-45 min) were conducted in April 2021, once personal information was de-identified interviews were transcribed and coded. Thematic analysis was used and we combined rapid appraisal of Google Jamboard online storyboards to do individual human-centered design personas alongside. Results/UNASSIGNED:Our participants were well-exposed to digital technologies. Prohibitive costs of data bundles, lack of funds for consistent online engagement, high workload, and instability of access to appropriate gadgets were found to be barriers to e-health training. Emerging opportunities were well-identified adolescent mental health service and intervention needs, willingness to take online courses offered on learning platforms, and wish for these to be disseminated through diverse social media. Other recommendations were the need to have a user-friendly interface such as data-light engaging and practical materials including animations, short, group-based learning. Conclusion/UNASSIGNED:Understanding contextual factors that influence perceived usefulness and ease of use of the remote/digital components would be critical for e-training development and its uptake.

Many children in immigrant households endure unique stressors shaped by national, state, and local immigration policies and enforcement activity in the United States. Qualitative studies find that during times of heightened immigration enforcement, children as young as 3 years of age show signs of behavioral distress related to national anti-immigrant sentiment and the possibility of losing a parent. Using multiple sources of data from 168 racially and ethnically diverse families of children in pre-Kindergarten, the present study examined variability in perceived levels of immigration enforcement threat by parental immigrant status and ethnicity. This study examined associations between immigration enforcement threat and child mental health, self-regulation, and executive functioning and whether parent immigrant status or child gender moderates these associations. We found substantial variability in perceived immigration threat, with immigrant parents and Latinx parents reporting significantly greater levels of immigration threat compared to nonimmigrant parents and non-Latinx parents. Immigration enforcement threat was associated with greater child separation anxiety and overanxious behaviors, and lower self-regulation among boys and girls and among children of immigrant and U.S.-born parents. In contrast to our hypothesis, immigration enforcement threat was associated with higher self-regulation according to independent assessor ratings. Educators and healthcare providers working with young children from immigrant and Latinx households should be aware of the disproportionate stress experienced by immigrant and Latinx families due to a xenophobic sociopolitical climate marked by heightened immigration enforcement threat and racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

We present a conceptual model of the ways in which built and social environments shape the development of self-regulation in early childhood. Importantly, in centering children of color growing up in historically disinvested neighborhoods, we first describe how systemic structures of racism and social stratification have shaped neighborhood built and social environment features. We then present evidence linking these neighborhood features to children's development of self-regulation. Furthermore, we take a multilevel approach to examining three potential pathways linking neighborhood contexts to self-regulation: school environment and resources, home environment and resources, and child health behaviors. Finally, we consider how racial-ethnic-cultural strengths and multilevel interventions have the potential to buffer children's development of self-regulation in disinvested neighborhood contexts. Advancing multilevel approaches to understand the development of self-regulation among children of color living in historically disinvested neighborhoods is an important step in efforts to promote equity in health and education.

Evidence-based and culturally relevant parenting programs strengthen adults' capacity to support children's health and development. Optimizing parent participation in programs implemented at scale is a prevailing challenge. Our collaborative team of program developers, implementers, and researchers applied insights from the field of behavioral economics (BE) to support parent participation in ParentCorps-a family-centered program delivered as an enhancement to pre-kindergarten-as it scaled in a large urban school district. We designed a bundle of BE-infused parent outreach materials and successfully showed their feasibility in site-level randomized pilot implementation. The site-level study did not show a statistically significant impact on family attendance. A sub-study with a family-level randomization design showed that varying the delivery time of BE-infused digital outreach significantly increased the likelihood of families attending the parenting program. Lessons on the potential value of a BE-infused approach to support outreach and engagement in parenting programs are discussed in the context of scaling up efforts.

Children of color are more likely to have poor sleep health than White children, placing them at risk for behavioral problems in the classroom and lower academic performance. Few studies, however, have utilized standardized measures of both classroom behavior and achievement. This study examined whether children's sleep (parent and teacher report) in first grade concurrently related to independent observations of classroom behavior and longitudinally predicted achievement test scores in second grade in a sample of primarily Black (86%) children (n = 572; age = 6.8) living in historically disinvested neighborhoods. Higher teacher-reported child sleepiness was associated with lower adaptive behaviors and higher problem behaviors in the classroom, and predicted lower achievement. Parent-reported bedtime resistance and disordered breathing also predicted lower achievement.