Claire Clark

Partner Incarceration and African-American Women’s Sexual Relationships and Risk: A Longitudinal Qualitative Study

Racialized mass incarceration is associated with racial/ethnic disparities in HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the US. The purpose of this longitudinal qualitative study was to learn about the processes through which partner incarceration affects African-American women’s sexual risk. Four waves of in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted in 2010–2011 with 30 women in Atlanta, Georgia (US) who had recently incarcerated partners. Approximately half the sample misused substances at baseline. Transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory. For over half the sample (N = 19), partner incarceration resulted in destitution, and half of this group (N = 9) developed new partnerships to secure shelter or food; most misused substances. Other women (N = 9) initiated casual relationships to meet emotional or sexual needs. When considered with past research, these findings suggest that reducing incarceration rates among African-American men may reduce HIV/STIs among African-American women, particularly among substance-misusing women, as might rapidly linking women with recently incarcerated partners to housing and economic support and drug treatment.

“He Was the Story of My Drug Use Life”: A Longitudinal Qualitative Study of the Impact of Partner Incarceration on Substance Misuse Patterns Among African American Women

This NIH-funded longitudinal qualitative study explored pathways through which partner incarceration affected substance misuse among African American women. Four waves of semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 substance-misusing African American women whose partners had recently been incarcerated. Data were collected in Atlanta, Georgia, during 2010–2011. Transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory methods. Analyses suggest that partner incarceration initially precipitated multiple crises in womens lives (e.g., homelessness); over time, and with formal and informal support, women got their lives “back on track.” Substance misuse declined over time, though spiked for some women during the crisis period. We discuss implications for research and interventions.

Tough love: A brief cultural history of the addiction intervention.

Popular media depictions of intervention and associated confrontational therapies often implicitly reference-and sometimes explicitly present-dated and discredited therapeutic practices. Furthermore, rather than reenacting these practices, contemporary televised interventions revive them. Drawing on a range of literature in family history, psychology, and media studies that covers the course of the last 3 decades, this paper argues that competing discourses about the nuclear family enabled this revival. Historians such as Stephanie Coontz, Elaine Tyler May, and Natasha Zaretsky have demonstrated that the ideal nuclear family in the post-WWII United States was defined by strictly gendered roles for parents and appropriate levels of parental engagement with children. These qualities were supposedly strongly associated with middle-class decorum and material comfort. By the 1970s, this familial ideal was subjected to a variety of criticisms, most notably from mental health practitioners who studied-or attempted to remedy-the problematic family dynamics that arose from, for example, anxious mothers or absent fathers. After psychological professionals began to question the logic of treating maladjusted individuals for the sake of preserving the nuclear family, a therapeutic process for doing exactly that was popularized: the addiction intervention. The delayed prevalence of therapeutic interventions arises from a tension between the psychological establishment that increasingly viewed the nuclear family as the primary site and source of social and psychological ills, and the producers of popular media, who relied on the redemptive myth of the nuclear family as a source of drama. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Providers' Perspectives on Program Collaboration and Service Integration for Persons Who Use Drugs.

The structure and process of health care financing, delivery, and organization result in challenges for providers seeking to offer comprehensive and integrated care for persons who use drugs. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is increasing coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatment as part of the Essential Health Benefits for Medicaid expansion and many private health plans. Community groups and scholars predict that increasing access to care under the ACA will likely require program collaboration among providers and integration of services in community health

Bill W. Goes to Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of Recovering Addiction Experts

Although historians of addiction have long debated whether an oral culture of “sharing” or “Big Book”-based reading practices are foundational to 12-step recovery culture, the role other types of media have played in the development of contemporary recovery discourse has remained largely unexplored. This essay compares the production, reception and formal elements of the films The Lost Weekend and Smash Up in relation to the popularization of the disease concept of alcoholism. Through an analysis of archival sources, addiction narratives, and nascent alcoholism research, this paper argues that, by emphasizing the importance of popular representations of alcoholics above scientific inquiry, early recovering “experts” successfully promulgated the disease concept of alcoholism, but the testimonials of later recovering alcoholics became relegated to the sphere of popular culture.

Book Review: Alexandra Rutherford, Beyond the Box: B. F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950—1970s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 210 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8020-9774-3 (hardback),

Rutherford’s readers are likely to recognize two central figures in her book’s title: B. F. Skinner, the controversial propagator of behaviorism, and his ‘boxes’, the containers in which operant conditioning experiments with pigeons and rats would yield animal models for human behavior and motivation. But the star of this book is not Skinner, his experiments, or even behaviorism proper – at least as it has been traditionally defined in relation to John Watson’s human experiments – but the concept of a ‘technology of behavior’. This technology sought to use operant conditioning to ‘engineer’ human choices and interactions for the betterment of society. It is this technology, rather than Skinner himself, that drives the narrative of Rutherford’s argument by ‘dismantling’ the lab-based box through its increasingly widespread application. Without turning B. F. Skinner into a behaviorist Dr Frankenstein, Beyond the Box allows his technology to move farther away from Skinner’s own ideas, experiments and biography – and affirms his proper historical place as its father. The first chapter, which appeared in an earlier form in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, discusses B. F. Skinner’s career as a public intellectual. The chapter’s premise is that Skinner’s work and public presence were significantly intertwined with mid-century American society and culture. Having established this, Rutherford explicates Skinner’s considerable impact on both. Unlike other public psychologists (such as ‘Freud, Rogers, Maslow, or Dr. Phil’) Skinner ‘embodied the psychologist as bench scientist’; his revolutionary version of ‘psychology without the psyche’ proved polarizing among professional psychologists and their ‘publics’ (21). His most profound influence was the application of his ideas through what Rutherford calls a ‘technology of behavior’ and the creation of the field of ‘applied behavior analysis’ (21). The chapter