Lori L Jervis

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of Oklahoma

Prior research identifies trust as critical to increase vaccine acceptance and uptake. However, few intervention studies have sought to develop or test strategies for bolstering vaccine-related trust. To address this gap, this exploratory study identifies features of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy interventions that can promote or undermine trust acros...

American Indian and Alaska Natives serve in the military at one of the highest rates of all racial and ethnic groups. For Veterans, the already significant healthcare disparities Natives experience are aggravated by barriers to accessing care, care navigation, and coordination of health care within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) between t...

American Indian and Alaska Native (Native) Veterans enrolled in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits program are far less likely to access health care compared to other racial/ethnic groups, in part driven by challenges posed by often distant, complex, and culturally unresponsive health care that does not easily interface with the...

Background: American Indians experience disproportionally high rates of diet-related metabolic disorders. Suboptimal retail food environments make obtaining healthy food difficult, particularly for rural American Indians, and contribute to ill health. Objective: This project examined food availability in food stores within a tribal community. Desig...

This chapter provides an overview of American Indian (AI) prevalence and risk factors for dementia, cultural views of dementia, cultural validity of dementia assessment specific to AI populations, and culturally relevant assessment practices. It concludes with a description of several key areas in need of further research attention.

Free-roaming dogs are a common phenomenon on many American Indian reservations as well as globally. Lack of canine restriction may be pathologized by outsiders, assumed to be a “problem” that reflects underlying individual or community dysfunction. Seldom investigated are the cultural logics underlying the lack of restriction, and the positive role...

This book chapter that reviews the history, findings, and cross-cultural challenges of research on elder mistreatment (including physical, psychological, sexual, and financial abuse) within American Indian communities in the US; it reviews what is known about prevalence and consequences of elder abuse in Indian Country and also makes policy and fut...

Background Taeniasis and cysticercosis are two diseases caused by Taenia solium, a parasite transmitted between humans and pigs, leading to considerable economic loss and disabilities. Transmission of the parasite is linked to environmental and behavioural factors such as inadequate sanitation and hygiene, poor pig management, and consumption of in...

The problem of how to conceptualize elder mistreatment goes back several decades, and is especially important for ethnic minority populations, who may have perspectives that differ from the dominant society. This Community Based Participatory Research study, which examined perceptions of mistreatment by family among 100 urban and rural older Americ...

This article provides an overview of the status of research on elder mistreatment among underserved populations in the United States, including gaps in our current knowledge base, scientific and structural barriers to growing research on the exploitation, neglect, and abuse of older people from diverse and disadvantaged ethnic/racial, geographic, s...

Dementia is an issue of increasing importance in indigenous populations in the United States. We begin by discussing what is known about dementia prevalence and elder family caregiving in American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian populations. We briefly highlight examples of culture-based programming developed to address a number of chron...

Existing studies characterizing gut microbiome variation in the United States suffer from population ascertainment biases, with individuals of American Indian ancestry being among the most underrepresented. Here, we describe the first gut microbiome diversity study of an American Indian community. We partnered with the Cheyenne and Arapaho (C&A), f...

Whereas recent reports from national studies have presented extremely high rates for many personality disorders in American Indian communities, persistent concerns about the meaning of these symptoms have left many troubled by these reports. American Indians as a group are known to suffer disproportionately from a number of violent experiences, but...

Although elder mistreatment among ethnic minorities is increasingly gaining attention, our empirical knowledge of this phenomenon among American Indians remains quite limited, especially with respect to measurement. The Shielding American Indian Elders (SAIE) Project used a collaborative approach to explore culturally informed measurement of elder...

Purpose: To determine conditional risk of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in two culturally distinct American Indian reservation communities. Method: Data derived from the American Indian Service Utilization, Psychiatric Epidemiology, Risk and Protective Factors Project, a cross-sectional population-based survey that was completed between 1...

This chapter presents information on mental health issues among older American Indian and Alaska Native adults, focusing on sociohistorical factors, environmental factors, and barriers to help-seeking as major challenges to the maintenance of mental health in this group. We also describe several strengths that contribute to resilience among Native...

Although the articles for this special issue on Native North American elders cover a diversearray of topics, approaches, and geographical areas, this issue was motivated by a singledesire: to gather together in one venue a collection of varied disciplinary approaches tocontemporary social and cultural research with older American Indian, Alaska Nat...

In recent years, a vast literature has accumulated on the negative effects on family caregivers of providing care to elders, while relatively little research has explored caregiving as a positive experience. Only a handful of studies have examined any aspect of informal caregiving among American Indians. This mixed methods study explores the negati...

Little is known about factors that predict older American Indians' performance on cognitive tests. This study examined 137 American Indian elders' performance on the MMSE and the Dementia Rating Scale-Second Edition (DRS-2). Multivariate regression identified younger age, more education, not receiving Supplemental Security Income, and frequent rece...

In their recent article, N. Spillane and G. Smith suggested that reservation-dwelling American Indians have higher rates of problem drinking than do either non-American Indians or those American Indians living in nonreservation settings. These authors further argued that problematic alcohol use patterns in reservation communities are due to the lac...

Many American Indian people experience traumatization related to their postcolonial status that extends beyond the individual. This article explores experiences of cultural traumatization among 44 Northern Plains American Indians who were part of a population-based psychiatric epidemiological study. Of special interest were the ways in which cultur...

Depression and lower cognitive functioning are common conditions in older populations. While links between psychopathology and neuropsychological performance have been studied in the white majority population, little is known about such links in the American Indian population. American Indians aged 60 and older (n=140) completed structured intervie...

This paper describes how I came to know a younger, mentally ill resident during fieldwork in an urban nursing home. I describe my efforts to establish a connection with this man, revealing the manner in which the academic and personal become fused in ethnographic research. In his discourse David conveys an unsettling universe filled with extreme po...

Objective: Residents' cognitive, psychiatric, and behavioral statuses were examined as part of a larger study of care in a nursing home (NH) owned and operated by a Northern Plains American Indian tribe. Method: Reviews of 45 medical records and semistructured interviews with 36 staff were completed. Results: Creekside residents had considerable ps...

Optimal methods for assessing cognitive impairment among older American Indians have not been established. This study sought to examine the cultural relevance and performance of two common cognitive screening measures, the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Mattis Dementia Rating Scale (MDRS), in one American Indian population. One hundred fo...

Suboptimal medication use among nursing home (NH) residents is common. NH residents tend to be older, suffer from multiple conditions, and take numerous medications, increasing their risk of serious complications. This article examines pharmacotherapy in a rural, tribally owned NH. Medical records were reviewed and case studies were conducted by a...

American Indians have endured numerous significant historical events, including epidemics, warfare, genocide, relocation, and for many, confinement to reservations. These events often are thought to be the root cause of contemporary physical and mental health problems within this population. Yet despite the presumed force of history in shaping thei...

Although the continuum of familial involvement with nursing home residents includes those who are deeply engaged and those who are totally absent, little is known about how staff perceive and react to family noninvolvement. This article explores staff perspectives on and responses to family absence. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 52...

An explicit clinical significance (CS) criterion was added to many DSM-IV diagnoses in an attempt to more closely approximate the clinical diagnostic process and reduce the proportion of false positives in epidemiological studies. The American Indian Service Utilization, Psychiatric Epidemiology, Risk and Protective Factors Project (AI-SUPERPFP) of...

American Indian alcohol use has received scrutiny in recent decades,1 but data derived from samples that permit direct comparisons to other US epidemiological studies have been less commonly reported.2–4 This brief places rates of the quantity and frequency of alcohol use in 2 tribally defined reservation samples in such a comparative epidemiologic...

Perhaps because of its reputation as an inconsequential emotion, the significance of boredom in human social life has often been minimized if not ignored. Boredom has been theoretically linked to modernity, affluence, and the growing problem of filling "leisure time. "It has also been attributed to the expansion of individualism with its heightened...

Based on a nationwide survey of 108 federally recognized American Indian communities, this paper describes the perceived need for and availability of long-term care services for older Natives who live in rural areas. Sources for the provision and funding of such services are identified, as are the barriers that prevent older American Indians from r...

Working in and around the ‘chain of command’: power relations among nursing staff in an urban nursing home By most accounts, the discipline of nursing enjoys considerable hegemony in US nursing homes. Not surprisingly, the ethos of this setting is influenced, in large part, by nursing’s value system. This ethos powerfully impacts both the residents...

Despite the pervasiveness of challenging resident behaviors in U.S. nursing homes, the staff who work in these facilities typically have little training in mental health or behavior management. This article, based on ethnographic research in a U.S. nursing home that served a predominantly psychiatrically disabled clientele, explores how staff conce...

Although the Native elder population continues to expand, very little is known about how dementia of any kind affects this group. This article reviews what is and is not known about dementia among American Indians/Alaska Natives. Specifically, it examines prevalence, assessment and diagnosis, cultural understandings, family caregiving, formal servi...

Residents under age 65 comprise a small, but not insignificant, segment of the US nursing home population--a segment about which very little is known. This article explores the meaningful constitution of nursing home experience among younger, psychiatrically disabled residents of an urban nursing home. Residents' "behavior problems", the difficulti...

Residents under age 65 comprise a small, but not insignificant, segment of the US nursing home population—a segment about which very little is known. This article explores the meaningful constitution of nursing home experience among younger, psychiatrically disabled residents of an urban nursing home. Residents’ “behavior problems”, the difficultie...

The stereotype of nursing home life as a uniformly dismal experience is pervasive in American culture, but this examination of the attitudes of psychiatrically disabled residents calls this generality into question. Residents in this study exemplified a range of opinions about the nursing home — some were clearly satisfied or dissatisfied, but most...

In U.S. nursing homes, it is the job of nursing assistants to tend to residents ' basic bodily needs, including elimination and incontinence care. Given their frequent contact with pollutants, aides are very much at risk of becoming “pollutedpeople.” In this article, I investigate how nursing assistants' continual contact with contaminating substan...

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to learn how older women and their caregiving daughters managed care following the mother's hospitalization because of a chronic illness. Data were collected in semi-structured interviews with 33 mother-daughter pairs at two weeks post-discharge, and 32 pairs two months post-discharge. Content analysis...

Previous studies of family caregiving focus on the stresses and burdens associated with providing care to an elder over a long period of time, with tnstitutionalization often viewed as respite from caregiving. The purpose of this study was to identify fhe sources and nature of difficulties family caregivers experience when an elder is hospitalized...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 1998. Includes bibliographic references (leaves 415-436).