Unveiling their worlds: the use of dialogue as a health-promotion tool for HIV/AIDS education in a poor community in Kenya

Three decades since the onset of HIV/AIDS, 33.2 million people worldwide are infected and prevalence in Kenya is on the rise. This paper contributes to discussions about HIV/AIDS education and draws on the health promotion approach and the emancipatory theory of Paulo Freire. Freire argued that through dialogue people unveil their world. The researchers used the method of dialogue to facilitate parents' and teachers' reflections on sexuality education for the children. The dialogues seemed to facilitate some reflection and showed the attitudes of the community to matters that impact on sexuality education (e.g. gender and sexuality). This paper illustrates how dialogic processes can be useful to the process of constructing realistic and contextually relevant HIV/AIDS education. The challenges for the researcher as an outsider are also discussed.     

Merck's One Less Campaign: Using Risk Message Frames to Promote the Use of Gardasil® in HPV Prevention

In 2006, Merck introduced Gardasil® through its One Less campaign, highlighting how the vaccine protects against the transmission of human papillomavirus (HPV) and, potentially, cervical cancer. The purpose of this study was to determine how young women learned about Gardasil and if the One Less campaign influenced the patient's decision to receive/decline the vaccines. Participants primarily learned about Gardasil from television advertising, and felt the campaign addressed the psychometric paradigm hazard factors of control and dread associated with HPV. However, participants reported that physicians/physician's assistants and mothers remained the primary sources of influence when choosing to receive/decline the vaccine series.     

Student perceptions of satisfaction and anxiety in an online doctoral program

Eighty-four students in an online health education doctoral program taking the first course in the program over one year (four quarters) were surveyed in regards to their computer, Internet, and online course anxiety, and overall course satisfaction. An 18-item anxiety tool with domains in computer, Internet, and online learning was administered in the first and last weeks of an educational research course to assess for changes in student anxiety. A 24-item satisfaction tool with domains regarding the instructor, technology, setup, interaction, outcomes, and overall satisfaction was administered at the end of the course. Results show a significant negative correlation between anxiety and student satisfaction. Student anxiety levels were in the relatively moderate range; changes in anxiety levels over time were not significant. Participants who felt anxious when using computers or the Internet, or when taking online courses experienced anxiety with other domains.     

Maintaining Open Adoption Relationships: Practitioner Insights on Adoptive Parents’ Regulation of Adoption Kinship Networks

The present study explores practitioner perceptions of and observations about the adoptive parent, birth parent, and adoptee interactions that regulate open adoption relationships. Grounded in family systems theory, practitioner interviews (N = 19) were analyzed to understand the degree to which open adoption shapes the family system as well as the opportunities, challenges, and considerations experienced by individuals in open adoption. Findings reveal that open adoption relationships consist of numerous complex relationships. This complexity generates significant opportunities for connection. At the same time, the complexity of the system generates challenges. Social networking provides costs and rewards that require consideration on an individual basis. Findings offer implications for the utility of family systems theory in illuminating diverse family construction as well as open adoption communication research.     

The Communication Privacy Management of Adopted Individuals in Their Social Networks: Disclosure Decisions in Light of the Discourse of Biological Normativity

Although adoptees are often stigmatized for their nonnormative identity, adopted individuals must communicate with nonfamily members to integrate their adoptive identity into their definition of self. In the current study, adult adoptees (n = 25) were interviewed about their processes for disclosing their adoptive status in their social networks. Drawing upon communication privacy management (CPM) theory, inductive analyses demonstrated that adoptees created motivational and contextual criteria to enact privacy rules surrounding adoption. Adoptees maintained privacy to avoid messages of “difference,” insensitive comments, imperviousness, and negative opinions about adoption. Adoptees disclosed about their adoption to build relational closeness and to educate/advocate for adoption. These privacy decisions were undergirded by the societal assumption that families are biologically linked or the discourse of biological normativity (Suter et al., 2014).     

Student Views of Computer-Based Mathematics in the Middle Years: Does Gender Make a Difference?

How the use of computers in mathematics classrooms was viewed by students in two middle years mathematics classrooms was the focus of the research described in this paper. The primary data sources consisted of questionnaires, classroom observations supported by videotaping of mathematics lessons, and interviews with two girls and two boys from each class. Thus both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Girls viewed the computer-based lessons less favourably than did boys. In general, the boys were likely to believe that computers contributed to their experiencing pleasure in these lessons, and to making mathematics more relevant to them. Girls were typically more concerned about whether computers facilitated learning and enabled success in mathematics. The attitudes of students to computer-based mathematics were related to their views of computers.