A growing literature has drawn attention to the psychosocial impact of cancer on families with young children. However, to help families develop adaptive responses to chronic illness, recent scholarship has begun to advocate a shift in orientation from a deficit to a strengths perspective. In this article, the authors examine the reorganization of family life … Read more

The transfer of responsibility for diabetes management from parent to child has been seen as a central challenge for the clinical care of adolescents with Type 1 diabetes. Research is needed to better understand how clinicians, patients, and families handle the delicate balance between parental involvement and adolescent responsibility for diabetes management. The aim of … Read more

OBJECTIVE: Most patients who misuse alcohol do not receive alcohol counseling from their providers. This study evaluated primary care patient and provider characteristics associated with receipt of alcohol-related advice and whether patients were advised to drink less or to abstain. METHOD: Outpatients from seven Veterans Affairs (VA) general medicine clinics were eligible if they screened … Read more

Building on foundational work in activity theory and cultural psychology, this article examines children’s play to discern how biomedical practices and understandings of illness are negotiated, modeled, and reproduced among children dealing with a parent’s cancer. Using discourse analytic methods, I analyze a videotaped playroom interaction involving three preschool-age girls, all of whom have a … Read more

This article presents the findings from a review of ethnographic approaches to child care research. Ethnographic research has enhanced researcher and practitioner understandings of the child care environment by providing entry into the child care center as an important site not only of development and education, but also of social reproduction and enculturation. The extant … Read more

Community engagement is an on-going, arduous, and necessary process for developing effective health promotion programs. The challenges are amplified when the particular health issue or research question is not prominent in the consciousness of the targeted community. In this paper, we explore the community-based participatory research (CBPR) model as a means to negotiate a mutual … Read more

This study explored the illness experiences of adolescents with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) using Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA). Five adolescents with IDDM were asked to videotape 8 hours of their lives over a 1-month period. At the conclusion of the study, the primary investigator interviewed each adolescent and their diabetes clinician. VIA visual illness narratives … Read more