"A place at the table:" a qualitative analysis of community board members' experiences with academic HIV/AIDS research.

BACKGROUND: Community advisory boards (CAB) are proposed as one mechanism to carry out successful community based participatory research (CBPR), but the presence of CABs may be insufficient to optimize academic-community partnerships. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured interviews with minority members of a CAB partnered with a HIV/AIDS research center and identified three themes. RESULTS: First, lack of trust in researchers included two subthemes: researchers' lacked respect for community-based organizations' (CBO's) interests and paid inadequate attention to building trust. Second, power imbalance included three subthemes: CAB members felt like inferior "token" members, felt that a lack of communication led to disempowerment, and held preconceived beliefs of researchers that led to perceived power imbalance. Third, CAB members suggested best practices, including using collaborations to build trust, actively allocating power, and sharing tangible research benefits with CBOs. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate that CABs must be founded on trust and instilled with power to meet the tenets of CBPR.

National Evaluation of Safe Start Promising Approaches: Assessing Program Implementation.

Children's exposure to violence (CEV)-including direct child maltreatment, witnessing domestic violence, and witnessing community and school violence-can have serious consequences, including a variety of psychiatric disorders and behavioral problems, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. Fortunately, research has shown that interventions for CEV can substantially improve children's chances of future social and psychological well-being. Safe Start Promising Approaches (SSPA) was the second phase of a planned four-phase initiative focusing on preventing and reducing the impact of CEV, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). OJJDP selected 15 program sites across the country that proposed a range of intervention approaches, focused on multiple types of violence, included variations in ages and age-appropriate practices, and would be implemented in different settings. Each site participated in a national evaluation, conducted by the RAND Corporation. The evaluation design involved three components: a process evaluation, an evaluation of training, and an outcomes evaluation. This article presents the results of the first two evaluations. It describes the program and community settings, interventions, and implementations of the 15 SSPA programs for the first two years of implementation (through March 2009), as well as the training evaluation results.

Establishing State Health Insurance Exchanges: Implications for Health Insurance Enrollment, Spending, and Small Businesses.

The RAND Corporation's Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts microsimulation model was used to analyze the effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) on employers and enrollees in employer-sponsored health insurance, with a focus on small businesses and businesses offering coverage through health insurance exchanges. Outcomes assessed include the proportion of nonelderly Americans with insurance coverage, the number of employers offering health insurance, premium prices, total employer spending, and total government spending relative to what would have been observed without the policy change. The microsimulation predicts that PPACA will increase insurance offer rates among small businesses from 53 to 77 percent for firms with ten or fewer workers, from 71 to 90 percent for firms with 11 to 25 workers, and from 90 percent to nearly 100 percent for firms with 26 to 100 workers. Simultaneously, the uninsurance rate in the United States would fall from 19 to 6 percent of the nonelderly population. The increase in employer offer rates is driven by workers' demand for insurance, which increases due to an individual mandate requiring all people to obtain insurance policies. Employer penalties incentivizing businesses to offer coverage do not have a meaningful impact on outcomes. The model further predicts that approximately 60 percent of businesses will offer coverage through the health insurance exchanges after the reform. Under baseline assumptions, a total of 68 million people will enroll in the exchanges, of whom 35 million will receive exchange-based coverage from an employer.