Scholars and practitioners frequently make recommendations to develop family planning interventions that are "multilevel." Such interventions take explicit account of the role of environments by incorporating multilevel or social-ecological frameworks into their design and implementation. However, research on how interventions have translated these concepts into practice in the field of family ...

Gender differences in lifestyle-related mortality and morbidity suggest a need to investigate gender-specificity of health behaviour change process and factors influencing it. We tested whether changes in self-efficacy beliefs and planning, as well as the level of social support predict change in exercise. Finnish men and women, aged 50-65 years, at an increased risk for type 2 diabetes were re...

Out-of-wedlock pregnancy among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa is a major concern, because of its association with health, social, psychological, economic and demographic factors. This article describes the development of the Teenage Mothers Project, a community-based intervention to improve psychological and social well-being of unmarried teenage mothers in rural Uganda. We used Intervention...

MENTAL HEALTH PLANNING FOR SOCIAL ACTION. By George S. Stevenson. New York, The Blakiston Division, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1956. 358 pp. $6.50. Few, if any, have done as much to advance the cause of mental health as the author of this book for which so many have waited with keen anticipation. Dr. Stevenson, with rare insight and judgment, has presented the challenge that "there is more...

ECONOMIC and social development policies both aim at improving the welfare of the population, though they often appear to compete with rather than complement each other. This is especially true for emerging nations, whose limited resources impose a degree of austerity upon the satisfaction of the collective economic demands of their citizens. In such circumstances, social security provisions ma...

An idea that seems to be gaining considerable ground is that modeling the interactions of a multi-agent system cannot be related exclusively to the actual agent and its communication capabilities, but must involve the use of concepts found in organizational engineering as well. It is possible to establish different types of agent organizations according to the type of communication, the coordin...

Robots operating in the presence of humans should adapt their plans and behavior accordingly. The recent area of humanaware planning (HAP) addresses this problem. In this paper, we propose a method for extending HAP to so-called Socially Aware planning. We build on known principles for human context recognition, extending them to support different social situations. In this new paradigm, we are...

Voluntary use of family planning is instrumental to the health and social well-being of women, families and communities.Although contraceptive use in Sub-Saharan Africa is increasing, unmet need for family planning remains high. Even within countries that have achieved increases in contraceptive prevalence, use remains low among some population subgroups. Contraceptive prevalence is generally l...

Background Urban renewal has become an important issue in Hong Kong, which is experiencing considerable population growth pressures and urban decay in various districts. Ho et al. [1] noted that urban renewal often creates not only environmental problems such as demolition waste, but also social problems such as destruction of existing social networks and the fabric of long-established communit...

The author addresses himself to "all who work and plan for Cental health". He has been outstandingly successful in covering this wide field, both from the angles of mental defect and illness and also, very comprehensively, from that of prevention and the build-lr*g up of positive mental health. Readers in this country will be struck by the paucity of services for the mentally deficient and by t...