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Sociology Department> Research >Health, aging, and medical sociology

Health, aging, and medical sociology

Introduction

This concentration currently encompasses issues of health and health service delivery in comparative frameworks within the Asian-Pacific basin. Research and teaching involve the study of the structure and changes in the social organization of health care professions and institutions; the interaction between professionals and their clients; the social and cultural barriers in communication and services/treatment; the adaptation to trauma, health problems, and aging; technological changes and other social arrangements and stresses in the etiology of health problems; and needs assessment and program evaluation in health interventions. Faculty are active at international, national, regional, and local/-institutional levels.

Faculty with graduate students have been engaged in work on the health needs of native Hawaiians, on research supported by the National Institute of Mental Health on "Victims of Rape, Stress, Coping, and Social Support," on research and training grants for health services in the Philippines, Micronesia, and Samoa, on gender and ethnicity in psychiatric diagnosis, on turnover of nurses and public health nurses in Hawai`i, on research on care programs for the frail elderly and family care giving for the chronically ill and the elderly, and on the impact of changes in types of health care coverage of needy populations.

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Recent Projects

The Native Hawaiian Mental Health Research and Development Project staff
The Native Hawaiian Mental Health Research and Development Project staff taken with Senator Daniel Inouye in November, 2001. (Prof. Wegner is in the center of the back row).

Eldon Wegner has served as a Faculty Mentor with the Native Hawaiian Mental Health Research and Development Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the John A. Burns School of Medicine. The project focuses primarily on investigating cultural and social risk factors among adolescents in schools having high concentrations of Native Hawaiian youth. Most recently, he has completed a study comparing youth of different ethnic backgrounds in their propensity to seek help for various personal and psychological problems. He has also served as an Investigator for the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center, supported by a five year grant from the CDC, Gregory Mark, P.I. The project is based in the Department of Psychiatry at the John A. Burns School of Medicine and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland California. The Hawaii portion of the project focuses on three communities and is collecting data from at-risk youth and their parents with Hawaiian, Samoan and Filipino ethnic backgrounds. During his 1996 sabbatical leave, he conducted research in Germany concerning the implementation of long-term care provisions to their national health care law, and has been engaged in efforts to enact a modest long-term care social insurance program in the state of Hawaii.

Bill Wood has been involved in health research in Hawaii for 20 years having served as PI for the 1991, 1998, and 2004 Alcohol and Drug Abuse Adult Household surveys of the state. In addition, he has coordinated the National Institute on Drug Abuse's Community Epidemiology Work Group (CEWG) since 1990, has served as PI for the National Institute of Justice's Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program for Hawaii, has evaluated several drug related programs in the community, and teaches the first graduate level course in Drugs and Society at the University of Hawaii. Beyond the area of Substance Abuse, Dr. Wood has been an active researcher in the area of health access and health insurance having served as consultant to the State during the creation of the State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) in the mid-1980s, served as evaluator for that program in collaboration with the Hawaii Medical Service Association and Kaiser Permanente of Portland. More recently, he assisted the Hawaii Primary Care Association in the Covering Kids project by developing and assessing the data capabilities in the state to track the number of uninsured children. In addition, he was a co-investigator on the State's Coverage for All initiative funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (with Loretta Fuddy of the Department of Health) to develop a State Plan to eliminate the number of uninsured within the state. He is also co-principal investigator of a similar program for American Samoa (with Carol Murry of SSRI)) and is a consultant to the Republic of Belau in their Incentive Grant program for Substance Abuse reduction.

John Gartrell is the Principal Investigator for an ongoing evaluation research project run through SSRI under contract to ADAD, Hawaii Dept of Health. The project evaluates three new substance prevention programs for youth offered under a SIG from CSAP: Parenting Adolescents Wisely (PAW) offered in Kalihi with SWCC as the lead organization; Positive Action offered in Waialua/Haleiwa by the YMCA (Camp Erdman) as the lead organization; and Reconnecting Youth and Smart Moves/Smart Leaders offered by the Coalition for a Drug Free Hawaii and the Ewa Beach Boys and Girls Club in Ewa Beach. It also establishing a baseline for community level change throughout Hawaii (42 public School Complex Areas) from available data (the biannual school survey of substance use as well as DOE data). Finally, it reviews the influence of the SIG grant ($8.7 million) upon the Hawaii prevention system. Gartrell is also a PI for the Maui Social Services Needs Assessment (with Judith Inazu and James Spencer through SSRI) which will conduct focus groups regarding social service needs on Maui, Molokai and Lanai. This will be followed by a general population survey early in 2004.