INTRODUCTION Currently Australia is experiencing a rural medical workforce shortage, especially among GPs. Strategies aimed at improving this shortage have generally been directed at small and remote rural communities (RRMA 4-7); however, longstanding GP shortages also continue in large (RRMA 3) rural communities. The key to the understanding the rural workforce is the perceptions of GPs themse...

Among female adolescents, maternal deaths due to unsafe abortion and childbirth complications is a leading cause of death. Contraceptive use prevents unwanted pregnancies reduces the need for abortion. This cross-sectional study was conducted among 174 adolescent girls, ages 15 – 19yrs, in two different settings (rural urban). The knowledge adolescents on family planning, their attitude uptake ...

CONTEXT Throughout its history, the main problem for Thailand's health system in has been an inadequate number of physicians and other healthcare workers in rural areas. Due to this, for decades in Thailand, rural service has been mandatory for healthcare workers. ISSUE Thailand's mandatory health service system commenced in 1889 and has been continuous until the present (2010). Under this sy...

Research on humor in organizations has rarely considered the social context in which humor occurs. One such social setting that most of us experience on a daily basis concerns the team context. Building on recent theorizing about the humor-performance link in teams, this study seeks to increase our understanding of the function and effects of humor in team interaction settings. We examined beha...

BACKGROUND Cognitive mapping is a participatory research methodology that documents, in visual form, a construct of the local environment in which people live and work. We adapted this method to provide detailed data about study locales to inform recruitment and retention strategies for HIV prevention community based clinical trials. METHODS Four cognitive mapping studies were undertaken betw...

We investigated how positive affectivity influences people's perception of the pat terns of social relationships around them. Positive affectivity was measured as trait positive affect. The outcome variable was accuracy in the perception of informal patterns of social interaction in a group (i.e., the group's network structure). Data on the perception of the relationships of friendship and work...

The words we use matter. The concept of a social norm exists in many social and behavioral science disciplines and research traditions (1). Because the general term “social norm” is a hypernym, an explicit definition is crucial to discussions of its place and usefulness in solving complex social–environmental issues (cf. ref. 2). In their discussion of incentives, Lubchenco et al. (3) suggest t...

BACKGROUND An exclusive focus on individual or family coping strategies may be inadequate for people whose major point of concern may be collective healing on a more communal level. METHODS To our knowledge, the current study is the first to make use of ethnographic fieldwork methods to investigate this type of coping as a process in a natural setting over time. Participant observation was em...

OBJECTIVES To examine the prevalence of seizures, epilepsy and seropositivity to cysticercosis in rural villagers (cysticercosis-endemic setting), rural-to-urban migrants into a non-endemic urban shanty town and urban inhabitants of the same non-endemic shanty town. METHODS Three Peruvian populations (n = 985) originally recruited into a study about chronic diseases and migration were studied...

OBJECTIVE In-depth exploration of the perceptions, experiences and expectations of current long-term rural GPs and medical students intent on a rural career, regarding the current and future state of rural medicine. DESIGN Qualitative study using semistructured interviews. SETTING Rural and remote towns in Central and Southern Queensland and the School of Medicine, University of Queensland....