Behavioral Health Research - Science topic

In response to the call for a research agenda to eliminate youth mental health disparities, this paper presents a purposive review of five areas of promise and concern for the amelioration of disparities in school settings: (1) mental health stigma, (2) behavioral health screening and referral disparities, (3) behavioral health treatment and outcom...

Objective Little research has examined rates or correlates of adherence to Open Science practices such as data sharing. We investigated how often researchers share data for inclusion in a meta-analysis and their reasons for not sharing data, and tested factors that could be associated with data sharing. Methods We requested data for 189 studies (1...

Latino sexual minority men (Latino/x or Hispanic gay, bisexual, or men who have sex with men; LSMM) are less likely to use behavioral health treatment than non-Latino white adults. However, there are no measures that evaluate barriers or facilitators to behavioral health treatment for LSMM. The purpose of this study was to (1) evaluate the factor s...

Behavioral health research improves practice application and validates evidence-based care, however, there are inherent challenges in translating controlled study protocols into direct service delivery. While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have long been held as the standard for evaluation of the safety, efficacy, and tolerability of new or em...

Internet-based studies are widely used in social and behavioral health research, yet bots and fraud from “survey farming” bring significant threats to data integrity. For research centering marginalized communities, data integrity is an ethical imperative, as fraudulent data at a minimum poses a threat to scientific integrity, and worse could even...

Purpose of Review The purpose of the current review was to summarize and synthesize recent literature on alcohol use in the U.S. Deaf community, and to subsequently provide recommendations for important next steps in the field of Deaf behavioral health research. We included peer-reviewed journal articles with original data published during or after...

Objective Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with chronic medical conditions often face significant challenges while transitioning from pediatric to adult healthcare (healthcare transition, HCT). Although some guidelines exist on how to facilitate this process, the specific role of psychologists in promoting successful HCT is not clearly defined....

Farmer suicide and stress are increasingly the focus of behavioral health research; however, much less has been written on stressors of women married to male farmers. Using role stress theory, we sought to understand the roles, stresses experienced, and coping strategies of women who are married to men who farm. Six focus groups were held with wome...

Secondary analysis of digital psychological data (DPD) is an increasingly popular method for behavioral health research. Under current practices, secondary research does not require human subjects research review so long as data are de-identified. We argue that this standard approach to the ethics of secondary research (i.e., de-identification) doe...

Background Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is used to capture daily lived experiences, states, and environments. Although EMA is commonly used in behavioral health research, there remains a dearth of literature on how researchers account for design considerations of EMA techniques when designing studies. The goal of this formative mixed metho...

Background In 2020 COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States. Increases in suicides, overdoses, and alcohol related deaths were seen—which make up deaths of despair. How deaths of despair compare to COVID-19 across racial, ethnic, and gender subpopulations is relatively unknown. Preliminary studies showed inequalities in CO...

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: This study evaluates the impact of an updated and expanded training for social and behavioral health researchers. Participants’ experience with training modules focused on community engagement is a focus of this evaluation as is the application of this training by participants in teams. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The Social and Beh...

Digital Therapeutics (DTx) are increasingly seen as a promising way to provide safe, effective, accessible, sustainable, scalable, and equitable approaches to advance individual and population health. Developing DTx is inherently complex in that DTx may include multiple interacting components, such as tools to support activities like medication adh...

Background Academic institutions building capacity for implementation scholarship are also well positioned to build capacity in real world health and human service settings. How practitioners and policy makers are included and trained in implementation capacity-building initiatives, and their impact on building implementation practice capacity is u...

Latino sexual minority men (LSMM) experience sexual and behavioral health disparities. Yet, LSMM are underrepresented in sexual and behavioral health research, creating scientific inequity. There is, therefore, a need to identify the barriers and facilitators to LSMM’s participation in sexual and behavioral health research, which is the gap that th...

Active engagement of community stakeholders is increasingly encouraged in behavioral health research, often described as a co-production approach. Community stakeholders (e.g., patients, providers, policy makers, advocates) play a leading role together with research investigators in conducting the various phases of research, including conceptualiza...

Although researchers and commentators have cited a variety of benefits for open science practices such as dataset sharing, a number of barriers may impact the feasibility of some open science practices in pediatric medical and mental health systems. This article addresses potential barriers and solutions to concerns about open science practices in...

Background: Health disparities disproportionally affect Black and Hispanic older US adults. Health research is needed to understand and eliminate these disparities; however, older adults, and particularly Black and Hispanic/Latino older adults are underrepresented in health research. Adult children have influenced health behavior and health outcome...

Sequential Multiple-Assignment Randomized Trials (SMARTs) play an increasingly important role in psychological and behavioral health research. This experimental approach enables researchers to answer scientific questions about how best to sequence and match interventions to the unique and changing needs of individuals. A variety of sample size calc...

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is an approach commonly used to recruit nonprobability samples of rare and hard-to-find populations. The purpose of this study was to explore the utility of phone- and web-based RDS methodology to sample sexual minority women (SMW) for participation in a telephone survey. Key features included (i) utilizing a nation...

Background Identification of psychometrically strong implementation measures could (1) advance researchers’ understanding of how individual characteristics impact implementation processes and outcomes, and (2) promote the success of real-world implementation efforts. The current study advances the work that our team published in 2015 by providing a...

Background The youth criminal-legal system is under heavy political scrutiny with multiple calls for significant transformation. Leaders within the system are faced with rethinking traditional models and are likely to benefit from behavioral health research evidence as they redesign systems. Little is known about how juvenile court systems access a...

Older African Americans’ (AA) participation in health-related research is severely limited; they are not involved in sufficient numbers and for sufficient duration to ensure the applicability of advancements in medical and behavioral health. This research participation gap exacerbates older AAs vulnerability to poor health outcomes and disparities....

Peer-facilitated services in behavioral health care remain underutilized within criminal justice-involved community organizations, and there is little guidance for how to best involve peer workers in behavioral health-focused research activities. This paper described lessons learned regarding implementation of peer recovery coaches (PRCs) as part o...

Older African Americans’ participation in health-related research is severely limited; they are not involved in sufficient numbers to ensure the applicability of advance­ments in medical and behavioral health. This research participation gap exacerbates older African Americans’ vulnerability to poor health outcomes and disparities. The Michigan Cen...

Engaging in positive healthy lifestyle behaviors continues to be a public health challenge, requiring innovative solutions. As the market for voice assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri) grows and people increasingly use them to assist their daily tasks, there is a pressing need to explore how voice assistant (VA) technology ma...

Publishing physical activity data can facilitate reproducible health-care research in several areas such as population health management, behavioral health research, and management of chronic health problems. However, publishing such data also brings high privacy risks related to re-identification which makes anonymization necessary. One of the cha...

This article proposes a framework for managing the behavioral health impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic. This framework aligns and should be integrated with an existing public health pandemic intervals model. It includes six phases of a behavioral health pandemic response strategy: preplanning, response readiness, response mobilization, interv...

Published manuscript- Translational Behavioral Medicine journal. DOI: 10.1093/tbm/ibz141. Background: Engaging in positive healthy lifestyle behaviors continues to be a public health challenge, requiring innovative solutions. As the market for voice assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri) grows and people increasingly use them to a...

Background Behavioral health researchers are increasingly recognizing the potential of mobile phone apps to deliver empirically supported treatments. However, current options for developing apps typically require large amounts of expertise or money. Objective This paper aims to describe a pragmatic do-it-yourself approach for researchers to create...

To address critical health equity issues facing racially and ethnically diverse populations, it is essential to have researchers from similarly diverse backgrounds. Such researchers provide different perspectives that may lead to distinct research questions, novel interpretation of findings, and innovative recommendations for health promotion pract...

A focus on the use of shared language to enhance congruence in interventionist-client dialogue is missing from traditional research on evidence-based practices and rural behavioral health. This study incorporates qualitative interactional sociolinguistics, which includes discourse analysis (typically written or audio recordings of face-to-face enco...

Publishing physical activity data can facilitate reproducible health-care research in several areas such as population health management, behavioral health research, and management of chronic health problems. However, publishing such data also brings high privacy risks related to re-identification which makes anonymization necessary. One of the cha...

Many important exposure–response relationships, such as diet and weight, can be influenced by intermediates, such as the gut microbiome. Understanding the role of these intermediates, the mediators, is important in refining cause–effect theories and discovering additional medical interventions (e.g., probiotics, prebiotics). Mediation analysis has...

State mental health agencies (SMHAs) are integral to public behavioral health service systems. As such, senior-level officials within SMHAs are important targets for advocacy and dissemination of behavioral health research findings. Evidence-informed decision making in SMHAs can potentially be enhanced by developing summaries of behavioral health r...

Purpose of Review Prior research and assessment of aggression in schizophrenia and other psychotic conditions has focused on one or two levels of measurement (third-party observation and self-report) identified by the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), while frequently neglecting a third (laboratory behavioral paradigms). We review aggression in...

Practice-based research is an important means of bridging the gap between the science and practice of psychotherapy. Unfortunately, numerous barriers exist for clinicians who want to conduct research in practice settings. One specific barrier that has received minimal attention in the literature—lack of access to institutional review board (IRB) ov...

Suicide is the 10th highest cause of death in the US. Despite the prevalence, little is known about the experiences of people before, during, and after suicidal ideation. A new research tool, the electronic health record, presents an opportunity for behavioral health researchers to obtain objective data across time. The purpose of this study was to...

The World Health Organization has identified four behavioral health priorities as risk factors for noncommunicable diseases in maternal populations: tobacco use, harmful alcohol use, poor nutrition, and lack of physical activity. These risk factors also significantly affect pregnant and immediately postpartum mothers, doubling the health risk and e...

These past few years have been difficult for our nation, as well for many of our patients and for those of us who treat, conduct research with, and teach about health issues affecting racial/ethnic minority populations. The national racial climate has channeled directly into our professional work, and indeed into many of our lives. To many, the lis...

Background: Within the field of behavioral health research, one of the most understudied populations is the U.S. Deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) population - a diverse group of individuals with hearing loss that have varied language and communication preferences, community affiliations, and sociocultural norms. Recent research identified concernin...

Wearable and portable digital devices can support self-monitoring for patients with chronic medical conditions, individuals seeking to reduce stress, and people seeking to modify health-related behaviors such as substance use or overeating. The resulting data may be used directly by a consumer, or shared with a clinician for treatment, a caregiver...

Background Studies from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) indicate that the use of audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) is associated with more accurate reporting of sensitive behaviors (e.g. substance use and sexual risk behaviors) compared with interviewer-administered questionnaires. There is a lack of published information on...

Deaf individuals experience significant obstacles to participating in behavioral health research when careful consideration is not given to accessibility in the design of study methodology. To inform such considerations, we conducted a secondary analysis of a mixed-methods study that explored 16 Deaf trauma survivors’ help-seeking experiences. Our...

The careful application of theory often is used in the behavioral health field to enhance our understanding of how the world currently works. But theory also can help us visualize what the world can become, particularly through its potential impacts on population-wide health. Applying a multi-level ecological perspective can help in expanding the f...

Gaining greater understanding about the various psychosocial, socio-cultural, and environmental factors that may influence experiences of depression among African American women (AAW) helps elucidate how this mental illness impacts the lives of this population. Sixty-three adult AAW comprised the study’s convenience sample. Specifically, focus grou...

Advances in technology and the associated cultural norms, especially the advent of the smartphone, offer an unprecedented opportunity to collect data on relevant health behaviors and experiences unobtrusively at a greater frequency and in greater volumes than ever before. This special issue will acquaint the readership of Nicotine and Tobacco Resea...

Background and purpose: The need for continuous measures of preventive behaviors, health researchers is highlighted. Means of achieving that goal requires the use of adequate reliability and validity in the scientific literature. Material and methods: This cross-sectional study was done in 2013 on a two-stage random sampling method, 135 persons wer...

Background: Children are a common target group in behavioral health research. Yet their recruitment into community setting studies poses challenges to researchers and little guidance exists on recruitment and retention methods. Purpose This study aims to present successful strategies for the recruitment and retention of children into behavioral hea...

Social and behavioral research in public health is often intimately tied to profound, but frequently neglected, biological influences from underlying genetic, environmental, and epigenetic events. The dynamic interplay between the life, social, and behavioral sciences often remains underappreciated and underutilized in addressing complex diseases a...

Integrated primary care research in the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) presents unique challenges not found in other behavioral health or medical care settings. The PCMH service delivery principles and supporting systems are designed to maximize quality and outcomes of care while controlling health care costs. Conducting ethical research in t...

While there is strong evidence in support of geriatric depression treatments, much less is available with regard to older U.S. racial and ethnic minorities. The objectives of this review are to identify and appraise depression treatment studies tested with samples of U.S. racial and ethnic minority older adults. We include an appraisal of sociocult...

Ubiquitous computing has shown promise in applications for health care in the home. In this paper, we focus on a study of how a particular ubicomp capability, selective archiving, can be used to support behavioral health research and practice. Selective archiving technology, which allows the capture of a window of data prior to and after an event,...

Reviews the film, Dialogues in behavioral health research ethics: A DVD series to facilitate ethical action with James M. DuBois and Jean Campbell (2007) and the book, Ethics in mental health research: Principles, guidance, and cases by James M. DuBois (see record 2007-02501-000). In a thoughtful and methodical way, DuBois lays a foundation for...

This study provides information about the extent of comorbidity between medical and behavioral problems among adolescents in mental health services, describes the clinical and sociodemographic characteristics of adolescents with both problems, and discusses the consequences or comorbidity for service delivery. Nationally representative mental healt...

BACKGROUND Digital interventions for mental health are pivotal for addressing barriers such as stigma, cost, and accessibility, particularly for underserved populations. While the effectiveness of digital interventions has been established, poor adherence and lack of engagement remain critical factors that undermine efficacy. Millions of individual...

This chapter presses for expanding conservative Christian perspectives on mental illness merely as an issue of moral or mental weakness, to a stronger biopsychosocial-spiritual perspective. Common beliefs specific to the Seventh-day Adventist history around mental illness, use of medications, and other influences on mental wellbeing, are reframed a...

Background Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. Prior research suggests that 10% of people who died by suicide received some form of emergency department (ED) treatment in the 2 months preceding death. The risk of attempted suicide is high during transition back to the community after discharge from the ED, so this is a...

Background Current research on digital applications to support the mental health and well-being of foster youth is limited to theoretical applications for transition-aged foster youth and support platforms developed without intentional input from foster youth themselves. Centering the lived expertise of foster youth in digital solutions is crucial...

Latinx youth face increased risk for behavioral health concerns and experience obstacles accessing behavioral health services yet remain underrepresented in behavioral health research. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a shift toward virtual research methods, but little is known about how virtual methods may affect research participation...

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) are highly prevalent and burdensome. To increase mental health screening rates, the digital health research community has been exploring the ability to augment self reporting instruments with digital logs. Crowdsourced workers are being increasingly recruited for behavioral heal...

Objective: Sexual minority disparities in behavioral health (e.g., mental health and substance use) are well-established. However, sexual identity is dynamic, and changes are common across the life course (e.g., identifying with a monosexual [lesbian or gay] label and later with a plurisexual [queer, pansexual, etc.] label). This study assessed wh...

Objective: Thus far, behavioral health research in the United States has not explored the prevalence or correlates of sober curiosity (SC; exploratory or experimental abstinence or moderation) or temporary alcohol abstinence challenges (TAACs; e.g., "Dry January"), despite significant attention in media and popular discourse. We explored these act...

BACKGROUND Current research on digital applications to support the mental health and well-being of foster youth is limited to theoretical applications for transition-aged foster youth and support platforms developed without intentional input from foster youth themselves. Centering the lived expertise of foster youth in digital solutions is crucial...

Sequential Multiple-Assignment Randomized Trials (SMARTs) play an increasingly important role in psychological and behavioral health research. This experimental approach enables researchers to answer scientific questions about how to sequence and match interventions to the unique, changing needs of individuals. A variety of sample size planning res...

Objectives: Recent preclinical studies suggested potential anticancer effects of antidepressant (AD) use in multiple cancers, but the effect on lung cancer in human studies remains unclear. This meta-analysis examined the effect of AD use on lung cancer incidence and mortality. Methods: Web of Science, Medline, CINAHL, and PsycINFO databases were s...

Integrating behavioral health care into pediatric primary care (PPC) settings can increase access to behavioral health promotion services and treatment. Efficient models for integrated PPC are emerging. Recent reviews call for integrated PPC research to better identify efficient teaming and processes, particularly in areas of building integrated PP...

Background: Traditional longitudinal regression models only estimate the average impact of time-varying covariates on outcome. Such impact may be different by time. Time-varying effect model(TVEM) could explore the way associations between variables of interest change over time. It has been applied into behavioral health research and intensive long...

Given its popularity among youth ages 13–17, social media is a promising avenue for engaging and retaining historically hard-to-reach youth in longitudinal research. Social media use in longitudinal research involving youth, however, has preceded development of best practices for ethical use. This article describes the ethical challenges and consid...

Research on disaster behavioral health presents significant methodological challenges. Challenges are even more complex for research on mass violence events that involve military members, families, and communities, due to the cultural and logistical considerations of working with this population. The current article aims to inform and educate on th...

Objectives: Adolescents of color are underrepresented in behavioral health research. Study aims were to quantify the amount and types of outreach effort needed to recruit young Black adolescents with type 1 diabetes and their primary caregiver into a clinical trial evaluating a parenting intervention and to determine if degree of recruitment diffi...

This chapter discusses the different roles of advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) in research and the process of conducting health behavior research with at‐risk children and adolescents. APRNs frequently assume one or more of three primary roles in relation to research: consumers of research, contributors to ongoing research endeavors, and...

Publishing physical activity data can facilitate reproducible health-care research in several areas such as population health management, behavioral health research, and management of chronic health problems. However, publishing such data also brings high privacy risks related to re-identification which makes anonymization necessary. One of the cha...

The integration of mobile health (mHealth) devices into behavioral health research has fundamentally changed the way researchers and interventionalists are able to collect data as well as deploy and evaluate intervention strategies. In these studies, researchers often collect intensive longitudinal data (ILD) using ecological momentary assessment m...

The integration of mobile health (mHealth) devices into behavioral health research has fundamentally changed the way researchers and interventionalists are able to collect data as well as deploy and evaluate intervention strategies. In these studies, researchers often collect intensive longitudinal data (ILD) using ecological momentary assessment m...

Introduction: Imbalance in multi-factorial components of human ecology plays a role in developing post-traumatic stress disorder hampering economical productivity and normal social life. Objectives: To find out the interplay of issues that are conducive to the outcome of the disorder among hospital admitted burn patients. Materials and Methods: Thi...

Sexual minority women [SMW] are a considerable population, yet they are often overlooked in behavioral health research focused on problematic alcohol use. With a foundation in Relational-Cultural Theory, we examined the association between relationship commitment and alcohol-related consequences among SMW. Participants were recruited to take part i...

The study of social networks is central to advancing our understanding of a wide range of phenomena in human societies. Social networks co-evolve concurrently alongside the individuals within them. Selection processes cause network structure to change in response to emerging similarities/differences between individuals. At the same time, diffusion...

Intervention studies conducted in caregivers often focus on improving mental health. Consequently, researchers may discover incidental findings like elevated depressive symptoms. Researchers have an ethical obligation to report incidental findings to participants, but no protocols exist for reporting behavioral health symptoms. The purpose of this...

Behavioral scientists are developing new methods and frameworks that leverage mobile health technologies to optimize individual level behavior change. Pervasive sensors and mobile apps allow researchers to passively observe human behaviors “in the wild” 24/7 which supports delivery of personalized interventions in the real-world environment. This i...

The purpose of this design and development case is to share our experiences in the transformation of a face-to-face workshop into a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for a prominent MOOC platform. The goal of the workshop and MOOC is to teach learners how to conduct appropriate power and sample size analysis for multilevel and longitudinal studies...

Authentic inclusion and engagement of behavioral health patients in their care delivery and in the process of scientific discovery are often challenged in the health care system. Consequently, there is a growing need to engage with and better serve the needs of behavioral health patients, particularly by leveraging health information technologies....

BACKGROUND Behavioral health researchers are increasingly recognizing the potential of mobile phone apps to deliver empirically supported treatments. However, current options for developing apps typically require large amounts of expertise or money. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to describe a pragmatic do-it-yourself approach for researchers to create...

The paper is currently under review. This is an author copy. -- Background: Engaging in positive healthy lifestyle behaviors continues to be a public health challenge, requiring innovative solutions. As the market for voice assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri) grows and people increasingly use them to assist their daily tasks, t...

The field of behavioral medicine continues to have a major impact on psychological science and public health. Presently, the field of behavioral medicine is undergoing rapid development and continues to evolve as a sub-discipline in allied disciplines. This Special Issue highlights emerging work that contributes to the evolution of behavioral medic...

SIGNIFICANCE: Cigarette smoking during pregnancy (SDP) provides a strong model system for investigating risk and protective factors in substance use cessation. Existing research has largely focused on the associations of individual factors with SDP. Assessing small-area geographic variation and neighborhood characteristics (e.g. socioeconomic depri...

Collaborations that integrate diverse perspectives are critical to addressing many of our complex scientific and societal problems. Yet those engaged in cross-disciplinary team science often face institutional barriers and collaborative challenges. Strategies for Team Science Success offers readers a comprehensive set of actionable strategies for r...

Behavioral health research has profound implications for the future domain of Clinical Behavioral Medicine(Wickramasekera 1988) and for clinical psychology as a profession.

Objectives: This study sought to characterize primary sources of behavioral health research and dissemination preferences of state legislators and assess differences by political party. Methods: A 2017 cross-sectional survey of state legislators (N=475) assessed where legislators seek, and the most important features of, behavioral health resear...

Introduction Growing evidence has shown that Qigong exercise improves sleep quality and alleviates depressive symptoms. However, the mechanisms underlying the effects of Qigong exercise remain unclear. Methods A randomized waitlist-controlled trial was conducted to assess efficacy of Qigong exercise and investigate relationship between pro-inflamm...

This essay is a personal story that spans a period of approximately 30 years, yet focuses on my time conducting behavioral health research during the war in Iraq. It is based on my memory and view of events that transpired before and during the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan—conflicts that I like to refer to as the Great Wars on Terror. While I h...

This volume focuses on the culture of the U.S. Army. Many of the major points also apply to other military services. The concepts are important for those who desire to understand U.S. Army culture for research - particularly those early in their careers. We hope that this book helps those interested in conducting research in the Army to better navi...

Deaf individuals experience significant obstacles to participating in behavioral health research when careful consideration is not given to accessibility during the design of study methodology. To inform such considerations, we conducted an exploratory secondary analysis of a mixed-methods study that originally explored 16 Deaf trauma survivors' he...

Advances in mobile technology and mobile applications (apps) have opened up an exciting new frontier for behavioral health researchers, with a “second generation” of apps allowing for the simultaneous collection of multiple streams of data in real time. With this comes a host of technical decisions and ethical considerations unique to this evolving...

No abstract is available for this article.