"Of and beyond medical consequences": Exploring health information scanning and seeking behaviors of Filipino domestic service workers in Hong Kong.

The increasing trend for women in developing countries to engage in international and temporary labor migration has exposed female migrant workers to health inequities. In this article, we problematize the impact of international and temporary labor migration on the health of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong by exploring their general patterns of health information acquisition. Through a series of focus group discussions with Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, we found that employers serve as stakeholders in migration health, social networking sites can be a platform for participatory health promotion, and religious beliefs and behaviors can promote favorable health behaviors.

The divided communities of shared concerns: mapping the intellectual structure of e-Health research in social science journals.

PURPOSE: Social scientific approach has become an important approach in e-Health studies over the past decade. However, there has been little systematical examination of what aspects of e-Health social scientists have studied and how relevant and informative knowledge has been produced and diffused by this line of inquiry. This study performed a systematic review of the body of e-Health literature in mainstream social science journals over the past decade by testing the applicability of a 5A categorization (i.e., access, availability, appropriateness, acceptability, and applicability), proposed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as a framework for understanding social scientific research in e-Health. METHODS: This study used a quantitative, bottom-up approach to review the e-Health literature in social sciences published from 2000 to 2009. A total of 3005 e-Health studies identified from two social sciences databases (i.e., Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index) were analyzed with text topic modeling and structural analysis of co-word network, co-citation network, and scientific food web. RESULTS: There have been dramatic increases in the scale of e-Health studies in social sciences over the past decade in terms of the numbers of publications, journal outlets and participating disciplines. The results empirically confirm the presence of the 5A clusters in e-Health research, with the cluster of applicability as the dominant research area and the cluster of availability as the major knowledge producer for other clusters. The network analysis also reveals that the five distinctive clusters share much more in common in research concerns than what e-Health scholars appear to recognize. CONCLUSIONS: It is time to explicate and, more importantly, tap into the shared concerns cutting across the seemingly divided scholarly communities. In particular, more synergy exercises are needed to promote adherence of the field.

Predicting intentions to adopt safe home food handling practices. Applying the theory of planned behavior.

While most home cooks know about safe home food handling procedures, compliance is generally low and has not been much improved by campaigns. Foodborne disease is a common cause of illness, hospitalization and even death, and many of these illnesses are caused by unsafe home food practices. Using the theory of planned behavior as a model, survey data were analyzed. Perceived behavioral control was the strongest predictor of behavioral intentions for both hand washing and food thermometer use. Subjective norm was the next strongest predictor for thermometer use, while attitude towards the behavior was the next strongest predictor for hand washing. This is consistent with earlier focus group results for thermometer use and suggests some possible strategies for designing future home food safety messages.