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...

Background Maternal health remains a central policy concern in Vietnam. With a commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 target of maternal mortality rate (MMR) of 70/100 000 by 2015, the Ministry of Health (MoH) issued the National Plan for Safe Motherhood (NPSM) 2003-2010. In 2008, reproductive health, including safe motherhood (SM) became a national health target progra...

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...

this article seeks to identify and classify the micro factors affecting the implementation of poverty reduction policy in iran. the existence and spread of poverty in society, in spite of the existent policy programs is the sign of some weaknesses in the executive models of policy. policy making in the field of poverty reduction theoretically is classified into several categories different fact...