Kyle A. McGregor

Willingness to disclose sexually transmitted infection status to sex partners among college-aged men in the United States

Disclosure of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) to sexual partners is critical to the prevention, treatment, and control of STIs. We examine personal intra and interpersonal influences on willingness to disclose STI status among college-aged men. Participants (n = 1064) were aged 17 to 24 years and recruited from a variety of university and community venues. Using independent-samples t test, Pearson χ test, and binary logistic regression, we examined the relationship between willingness to disclose an STI and intrapersonal and interpersonal factors, including age, masculinity values, interpersonal violence, partner cell phone monitoring, alcohol and/or drug use, condom use, number and characteristics of sex partners, and previous STI. Results reveal that among college-aged men, type of sex partner and masculinity values are significant variables in predicting whether or not an individual is willing to disclose. These data can inform STI control programs to more effectively address the complex issues associated with STI disclosure to sex partners.

Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion: Formerly Gang-Involved Youth as Domain Experts for Analyzing Unstructured Twitter Data

Mining social media data for studying the human condition has created new and unique challenges. When analyzing social media data from marginalized communities, algorithms lack the ability to accurately interpret off-line context, which may lead to dangerous assumptions about and implications for marginalized communities. To combat this challenge, we hired formerly gang-involved young people as domain experts for contextualizing social media data in order to create inclusive, community-informed algorithms. Utilizing data from the Gang Intervention and Computer Science Project—a comprehensive analysis of Twitter data from gang-involved youth in Chicago—we describe the process of involving formerly gang-involved young people in developing a new part-of-speech tagger and content classifier for a prototype natural language processing system that detects aggression and loss in Twitter data. We argue that involving young people as domain experts leads to more robust understandings of context, including localized language, culture, and events. These insights could change how data scientists approach the development of corpora and algorithms that affect people in marginalized communities and who to involve in that process. We offer a contextually driven interdisciplinary approach between social work and data science that integrates domain insights into the training of qualitative annotators and the production of algorithms for positive social impact.

Separation and Reunification: Mental Health of Chinese Children Affected by Parental Migration

Internal and international migration impacts family structure, parent–child relationships, and child care arrangements for the world’s ∼1 billion migrants.1 When parents migrate without their children, this experience of prolonged separation has profound repercussions on children’s development and well-being. Because international migration disrupts family systems globally, internal migration, such as rural-to-urban migration in low- and middle-income countries, also has massive impacts. In China alone, 61 million rural children are living apart from their parents who have migrated to urban areas.2 These so-called “left-behind children” comprise 34% of all rural children and 22% of the total child population in China.2 The well-being of children who are affected by parental migration has raised concerns worldwide. Although labor-related migration tends to improve a family’s socioeconomic circumstances, a prolonged separation from migrant parents can place children at an increased risk for psychosocial disorders.3 Even reunification with parents may lead to additional distress because of an abrupt restructuring of family dynamics.4,5 Despite the many clinical implications of parental migration and family separation, little information is available to help clinicians understand how parental migration may affect mental and behavioral development in children. Migrant parents often leave their children behind in the pursuit of employment even in Asian cultures, in which family connection is emphasized as the major source of identity and protection. Factors that prevent migrant parents from bringing their children along include residence permit policies, a high cost of living, and a lack of access to child care and education. … Address correspondence to Chenyue Zhao, PhD, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, School of Medicine, New York University, 1 Park Ave, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10016. E-mail: chenyue.zhao{at}nyumc.org

Youth Gun Violence Prevention in a Digital Age

Gakirah Barnes, a 17-year old who publicly claimed affiliation with a well-known Chicago gang, was killed just 3 blocks from her home in 2014. She had revealed her address in real time on social media, which directed the perpetrators to her exact location. Her Twitter account revealed a road map of clues about the trauma she endured and her own engagement in violence. Her online history included direct and indirect threats toward known rival gangs, boastful discussions of the perpetration of past violence, images and videos of her with semiautomatic handguns, and countless expressions of loss and grief. Although it is evident that Gakirah’s Twitter posts played a role in her killing, could the same social media information have been used to prevent her death? Firearm violence is a serious public health problem in the United States, where the firearm death rate is 10 times higher than other high-income, industrialized nations. Firearm violence is particularly acute in large cities, where violence tends to cluster in marginalized communities of color. In a report from the University of Chicago Crime Laboratory,1 researchers stated that Chicago experienced a 58% increase in homicides in 2016; 80% of those homicide victims were African American, and within that group, most were males between the ages of 15 and 34 with at least 1 previous arrest. In addition, for the first 6 months of 2017, Chicago logged 327 homicides, which puts it on pace to … Address correspondence to Desmond Upton Patton, PhD, MSW, Columbia University School of Social Work, 1255 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027. E-mail: dp2787{at}columbia.edu