Family Strengthening in the Context of COVID-19: Adapting a Community-Based Intervention from Kenya to the United States.

COVID-19 led to widespread disruption of services that promote family well-being. Families impacted most were those already experiencing disparities due to structural and systemic barriers. Existing support systems faded into the background as families became more isolated. New approaches were needed to deliver evidence-based, low-cost interventions to reach families within communities. We adapted a family strengthening intervention developed in Kenya ("Tuko Pamoja") for the United States. We tested a three-phase participatory adaptation process. In phase 1, we conducted community focus groups including 11 organizations to identify needs and a community partner. In phase 2, the academic-community partner team collaboratively adapted the intervention. We held a development workshop and trained community health workers to deliver the program using an accelerated process combining training, feedback, and iterative revisions. In phase 3, we piloted Coping Together with 18 families, collecting feedback through session-specific surveys and participant focus groups. Community focus groups confirmed that concepts from Tuko Pamoja were relevant, and adaptation resulted in a contextualized intervention-"Coping Together"-an 8-session virtual program for multiple families. As in Tuko Pamoja, communication skills are central and applied for developing family values, visions, and goals. Problem-solving and coping skills then equip families to reach goals, while positive emotion-focused activities promote openness to change. Sessions are interactive, emphasizing skills practice. Participants reported high acceptability and appropriateness, and focus groups suggested that most content was understood and applied in ways consistent with the theory of change. The accelerated reciprocal adaptation process and intervention could apply across resource-constrained settings.

Adolescent Positivity and Future Orientation, Parental Psychological Control, and Young Adult Internalising Behaviours during COVID-19 in Nine Countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many young adults' lives educationally, economically, and personally. This study investigated associations between COVID-19-related disruption and perception of increases in internalising symptoms among young adults and whether these associations were moderated by earlier measures of adolescent positivity and future orientation and parental psychological control. Participants included 1329 adolescents at Time 1, and 810 of those participants as young adults (M age = 20, 50.4% female) at Time 2 from 9 countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States). Drawing from a larger longitudinal study of adolescent risk taking and young adult competence, this study controlled for earlier levels of internalising symptoms during adolescence in examining these associations. Higher levels of adolescent positivity and future orientation as well as parent psychological control during late adolescence helped protect young adults from sharper perceived increases in anxiety and depression during the first nine months of widespread pandemic lockdowns in all nine countries. Findings are discussed in terms of how families in the 21st century can foster greater resilience during and after adolescence when faced with community-wide stressors, and the results provide new information about how psychological control may play a protective role during times of significant community-wide threats to personal health and welfare.

Challenges and Recommendations to Recruiting Women Who Do Not Adhere to Follow-Up Gynecological Care.

PURPOSE: Non-adherence to recommended follow-up visits after an abnormal cytological finding is associated with poorer outcomes and higher health care costs. The purpose of this paper is to describe the challenges when examining reasons for non-adherence to cervical cancer screening follow-up and to discuss the recommendations to overcome those challenges. METHODS: We conducted a telephone survey with two subgroups of women: 1) those which adhered to recommended follow-up care after an abnormal Pap test, and 2) those which did not adhere. RESULTS: The follow-up accrual among non-adherent women lagged behind that of adherers. We were able to contact and conduct a survey with 51% of the adherers and 26% of the non-adherers. The challenges in studying non-adherent women were related to several distinct factors: 1) the definition of non-adherence, 2) the availability of alternate contact information, 3) the amount and type of financial incentives, and 4) the availability of staffing. We describe strategies employed to increase the accrual of non-adherent women. DISCUSSION: This paper describes four recommendations that may play a role in understanding and reducing non-adherence to follow-up gynecological care.

Climate change, species distribution models, and physiological performance metrics: predicting when biogeographic models are likely to fail.

Modeling the biogeographic consequences of climate change requires confidence in model predictions under novel conditions. However, models often fail when extended to new locales, and such instances have been used as evidence of a change in physiological tolerance, that is, a fundamental niche shift. We explore an alternative explanation and propose a method for predicting the likelihood of failure based on physiological performance curves and environmental variance in the original and new environments. We define the transient event margin (TEM) as the gap between energetic performance failure, defined as CTmax, and the upper lethal limit, defined as LTmax. If TEM is large relative to environmental fluctuations, models will likely fail in new locales. If TEM is small relative to environmental fluctuations, models are likely to be robust for new locales, even when mechanism is unknown. Using temperature, we predict when biogeographic models are likely to fail and illustrate this with a case study. We suggest that failure is predictable from an understanding of how climate drives nonlethal physiological responses, but for many species such data have not been collected. Successful biogeographic forecasting thus depends on understanding when the mechanisms limiting distribution of a species will differ among geographic regions, or at different times, resulting in realized niche shifts. TEM allows prediction of the likelihood of such model failure.

Poised to prosper? A cross-system comparison of climate change effects on native and non-native species performance.

Climate change and biological invasions are primary threats to global biodiversity that may interact in the future. To date, the hypothesis that climate change will favour non-native species has been examined exclusively through local comparisons of single or few species. Here, we take a meta-analytical approach to broadly evaluate whether non-native species are poised to respond more positively than native species to future climatic conditions. We compiled a database of studies in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems that reported performance measures of non-native (157 species) and co-occurring native species (204 species) under different temperature, CO(2) and precipitation conditions. Our analyses revealed that in terrestrial (primarily plant) systems, native and non-native species responded similarly to environmental changes. By contrast, in aquatic (primarily animal) systems, increases in temperature and CO(2) largely inhibited native species. There was a general trend towards stronger responses among non-native species, including enhanced positive responses to more favourable conditions and stronger negative responses to less favourable conditions. As climate change proceeds, aquatic systems may be particularly vulnerable to invasion. Across systems, there could be a higher risk of invasion at sites becoming more climatically hospitable, whereas sites shifting towards harsher conditions may become more resistant to invasions.

Linking thermal tolerances and biogeography: Mytilus edulis (L.) at its southern limit on the east coast of the United States.

Temperature is a major factor contributing to the latitudinal distribution of species. In the Northern Hemisphere, a species is likely to be living very close to its upper thermal tolerance limits at the southern limit of its biogeographic range. With global warming, this southern limit is expected to shift poleward. Moreover, intertidal ecosystems are expected to be especially strongly affected, mostly due to their large daily and seasonal variations in temperature and exposure. Hence, these are model systems in which to conduct experiments examining the ecological effects of climate change. In this study we determined the upper lethal thermal limits, for both air and water, of the blue mussel Mytilus edulis via laboratory experiments. Tolerances vary seasonally, with a difference between media of 0.7 degrees C in June and 4.8 degrees C in November, as well as a decrease with multiple exposures. Measured lethal limits were then compared to field measurements of environmental temperature and concurrent measurements of mortality rates. Field results indicate that mortality in the intertidal occurs at rates expected from laboratory responses to elevated temperature. Hindcasts, retrospective analyses of historical data, indicate that high rates of mortality have shifted 51 and 42 days earlier in Beaufort, North Carolina, and Oregon Inlet, North Carolina, respectively, between 1956 and 2007. The combined data suggest that the historical southern limit of M. edulis near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, is indeed the result of intolerance to high temperature, and that this range edge is shifting poleward in a manner indicative of global warming.