Footprints: faith, values and religious experience among Argentine youth

BackgroundYoung people, aged 16–24, in southern Malawi have high uptake of HIV self-testing (HIVST) but low rates of linking to services following HIVST, especially in comparison, to older generations. The study aim is to explore the barriers and facilitators to linkage for HIV prevention and care following uptake of HIV self-testing among young Malawians.MethodsWe used qualitative methods. Young people aged 16–24 who had received HIVST; community-based distribution agents (CBDAs) and health care workers from the linked facilities were purposively sampled from two villages in rural southern Malawi.ResultsWe conducted in-depth interviews with thirteen young people (9 female) and held four focus groups with 28 healthcare workers and CBDAs. Young people strongly felt the social consequences associated with inadvertent disclosure of HIV sero-status were a significant deterrent to linkage at their stage in life. They also felt communication on testing benefits and the referral process after testing was poor. In contrast, they valued encouragement from those they trusted, other’s positive treatment experiences and having a “strength of mind”. CBDAs were important facilitators for young people as they are able to foster a trusting relationship and had more understanding of the factors which prevented young people from linking following HIVST than the healthcare workers. Young people noted contextual barriers to linkage, for example, being seen on the road to the healthcare centre, but also societal gendered barriers. For example, young females and younger adolescents were less likely to have the financial independence to link to services whilst young males (aged 19–24) had the finances but lacked a supportive network to encourage linkage following testing. Overall, it was felt that the primary “responsibility” for linking to formal healthcare following self-testing is shouldered by the young person and not the healthcare system.ConclusionsYoung people are happy to self-test for HIV but faced barriers to link to services following a self-test. Potential interventions for improving linkage suggested by this analysis include the establishment of youth-friendly linkage services, enhanced lines of communication between young people and healthcare providers and prioritising linkage for future interventions when targeting young people following HIVST.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Youth (and) Violence

Young trans people's experiences of leisure and mental health: Belonging, creativity, and navigation

Religious Experience and Religious Lives: An Epistemology defends a moderate approach to religious experiences in which they can contribute to the justification of central religious beliefs, most importantly belief in God. Epistemologists of religion disagree about what evidential value religious experiences have. Some argue that religious experiences have no evidential value while others argue that religious experiences constitute proof of God’s existence. However, Walter Scott Stepanenko argues that religious experiences can contribute to these justificatory cases in several distinct ways and that several justificatory cases are philosophically viable. This book contends that this joint justificatory viability is best explained by the diversity and development of religious lives: as religious believers grow in a faith tradition, their access to an evidential base can develop and the contributory work religious experiences provide in defense of religious belief can change. This suggests that various epistemologies of religious experience implicitly emphasize different life stages or different prototypical religious believers and that a fully adequate epistemology of religious experience will be expansive, pluralistic, and responsive to the diversity of religious believers and their development in a religious tradition.

The personalization of service provision and responding to patients’ expressed needs are key components of government plans to improve children and young people’s mental health services in England. This qualitative study explored the use of patient experience research in these services. Despite national level commitments to listening to and acting on the “patient’s voice,” both service users (young people) and parents of this group reported never having been invited to participate in patient experience research. Most professional respondents reported that such research was frequently tokenistic and conducted solely to meet an administrative requirement. Senior policy makers justified the limited investment in, and use made of patient experience research, by pointing to what they felt were more urgent priorities facing children and young people’s mental health services. These included unprecedented levels of demand and critical underfunding of mental health services and related youth- and community-based services. The conceptualization of patient experience research within the National Health Service (NHS) as a service improvement issue was found to have led to its status being diminished to one concerned with relatively cosmetic matters, such as the color scheme or choice of pictures on the walls of clinics. Senior policy makers argued that it was important to rethink the role and value of patient experience research, and to recognize its unique contribution to addressing the existential questions facing services.

The human experience comprises four interconnected dimensions: physical, psychological, social and spiritual. Our spirituality is evidenced in the need to make sense of and find meaning, to feel our lives have purpose, to feel we matter and to feel connected to ourselves, others, the natural world and the sacred or divine. Having a life-shortening or life-threatening condition threatens spiritual well-being and causes spiritual suffering. While health care aspires to be holistic, the evidence on meeting spiritual needs and spiritual care in healthcare settings is limited, particularly for neonatal and paediatric populations. To generate evidence to support evidence-informed approaches for the spiritual care of children/young people and their parents, including the role of chaplaincy. A mixed-method, multicomponent design was used with the quantitative and qualitative data collected. There were four work packages. Work package 1: survey of chaplaincy services in the National Health Service acute trusts in England (n = 98/136). Work package 2: focus groups with National Health Service chaplains across 13 acute trusts (n = 77). Work package 3: interviews with young people (12-25 years) (n = 19) and parents (n = 62). Work package 4: focus groups with National Health Service clinical staff and allied health professionals based in services caring for children with life-threatening or life-shortening conditions (n = 48). Multiple threats to children's/young people's and parents' spiritual well-being were identified. These included struggling to make sense and find meaning in their situation; existing belief systems (or personal philosophies) found wanting, existential worries and concerns; a sense of disconnectedness from others and 'normal life'; and a lack of pleasure and joy, moral distress and feelings of insignificance and invisibility. Almost all described hiding their spiritual distress from themselves and others. At the same time, parents and young people also spoke of wishing for people on whom they could unburden themselves: either at critical moments, or to 'journey' with them. For some, chaplains had provided this care and support. Many, including those identifying themselves as not religious, described drawing comfort from religious rituals and practices (e.g. prayer and blessings). For some, a religious faith protected against spiritual distress. For others, it was regarded as irrelevant or unhelpful. All work packages revealed barriers to children's/young people's and parents' spiritual needs being met. Healthcare staff's accounts revealed a lack of understanding and an uncomfortableness with raising and exploring religious needs and spiritual distress and, for some, a mistrust of chaplaincy services. Survey findings indicated that chaplaincy services are less likely to have a routine presence in paediatric compared to adult settings. Key reasons for this were staff capacity and gatekeeping by healthcare staff. Minority faiths are under-represented in the samples recruited to the qualitative components. Having a life-threatening or life-shortening condition brings multiple threats to the spiritual well-being and lived experiences of children/young people and their parents. There are a number of barriers to National Health Service staff recognising and responding to these needs. These include workforce training and adequate resourcing of chaplaincy services and ensuring spiritual care is integrated into care pathways. Priority topics for future research include effective training for clinical staff on spirituality and spiritual care and integrating spiritual care into care pathways. This study is registered as Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN41288313. This award was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health and Social Care Delivery Research programme (NIHR award ref: NIHR128468) and is published in full in Health and Social Care Delivery Research; Vol. 13, No. 16. See the NIHR Funding and Awards website for further award information.

O ur appreciation of human life cycles and stages is about 150 years old, contrasted with hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. We recognized that children were not small sinful adults, as the Victorians preferred to view them—not homunculi, but in a developmentally distinct phase in human growth. This was the beginning of understanding human development and distinct stages in a person’s life. Along came Freud, who further defined the stages of human life with the childhood developmental stages of oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital/ puberty and adolescence, followed by adulthood. The stages of child development were expanded by Freud’s daughter Anna, who essentially revealed the life of the mind of a child. Freudian pioneers like Peter Blos and August Aichhorn revealed that adolescence comprises many substages; they elucidated the concept of adolescent ‘‘acting out’’ through delinquency and that these rebellions are transient in many. Anna Freud felt that the stage turmoil of adolescence is so profound that one should be wary to render a diagnosis during this life cycle, for even psychotic symptoms could disappear. These important pioneers of the human psyche revealed the developmental stages and cycles of life and defined them by affective and cognitive milestones. The concept of life cycle, stage, milestones, and ongoing development was further pioneered by a student teacher in Anna Freud’s school for children. Erik Homburger Erikson, who as a developing and unemployed artist found employment there through his friend Peter Blos, discovered psychoanalytic adolescence. Erikson understood that life cycles do not end after adolescence and that distinct cycles with needs, goals, and crises continue until death. It is unclear to many in the field of life stage psychology when these stages begin and end, and adolescence until age 30 is not unusual. Also, each stage develops an identity that does not disappear completely when the next one begins. The structures of the prior stage can be changed, altered, sculpted, and carried wholly or piecemeal into the next cycle. This profoundly alters our view of the power of the life stage/cycle, for the effect of prior stages does not die or wither away but remains an active influence. How active these life stages are, their ultimate complexity, and their relevance to understanding the human psyche, behavior, cognition, and identity needs appreciation. This may help us better understand medical residency as a life-altering and identity-transforming period in a young person’s life. Residency is where young people with a medical degree actually assume the personality and identity of ‘‘doctor’’ in its first and perhaps final incarnation. However, this fact seems to be contested by many for a host of reasons. First, we divide and famously compartmentalize our lives into work, personal, family, civic, and community components that we view and respect as separate. Second, we struggle and bumble over what is legal reality versus what are social, psychological, and biological realities. The legal opinion on the status of teenagers and young adults in school, college, and residency, versus the learners’/trainees’ relationships to their teachers, bosses, and leaders, appropriately but confusingly protects young people by determining that teachers are not in loco parentis. This important legal precedent—established to protect the autonomy of susceptible youth and to avoid abuses— ultimately drove wedges and schisms into real and lifealtering influences by role models. Embracing the precedent, teachers refuse or demur the role of models and accept a distant relationship with trainees; for they are not the biological parents, though they are surely the trainees’ role models, with life-influencing and sustaining impact throughout their lives. This abrogation of strong bonding relationships was a relief to and a lesser emotional burden on teachers that allowed them less authority and blame within the lives of young people, with the concomitant diminished influence and likelihood of accusation or possibility of injury, trauma, or abuse to young developing identities. Another of the many wedges between trainees and teachers in medicine was Osler’s historically dominant yet contested essay Aequanimitas, in which Osler prescribed an emotional distance. The pre-Flexnerian and peri-Flexnerian eras were rampant with mysticism, magic, varieties of alchemy in the practice of medicine (including hysteria), and charismatic and uncontrolled emotionalism on the part of both patients and doctors. Osler’s Victorian and maledominant ideas of the time attempted to introduce the Jacob J. Steinberg, MD, is Professor in the department of Pathology at the Montefiore Medical Center of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Menopause represents a natural transition in a woman's life, profoundly shaping her psychological well-being and social identity. This study aimed to explore the spiritual and psychological experiences of women during menopause in Turkey and to understand how religious and spiritual practices influence their coping processes and perceptions of womanhood. A qualitative research design based on semi-structured interviews was used with 17 women aged 40-65years, with diverse educational and occupational backgrounds. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed that menopause is a multidimensional process encompassing emotional, social, and spiritual transformation. Participants frequently used religious and spiritual practices such as prayer and worship to manage emotional distress and enhance psychological resilience. Four major themes emerged: identity and social roles, continuity and transformation of life, emotional experiences, and spirituality and faith. Overall, the study highlights that spirituality serves as a significant source of coping and meaning-making during menopause. Incorporating spiritual perspectives into healthcare counseling and support programs, including midwifery services, may strengthen women's psychological well-being during this life stage.

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 13 No. 2 (2003) ISSN: 1546-2250 Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning Holloway, Sarah and Valentine, Gill (2000). London and New York: Routledge; 271 pages. ISBN 0415207304. Two recent books from Routledge, Children’s Geographiesand Geographies of Young Peopletrace a knife edge between an excited engagement with the spatiality ofchildren’s lives and a sober awareness of the limitations of thesespaces and the opportunities children and young people have forengaging them. It is in many ways an exciting and anxiety-provokingmoment to be studying and doing research with young people. These twovolumes in Routledge’s “Critical Geographies” series are evidence ofboth an expanded interest in children and young people in geography anda deepening of the sorts of inquiry taking place in the field. Readingthem- one a monograph by Stuart Aitken and the other a collectionedited by Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine- is to bear witness toreflective and trenchant conversations among contemporary researchersfocused on children’s relationships to place. They are accomplished,engaging books that are sure to bring broad attention to concerns atthe core of a growing field concerned with the geographies of youngpeople. Yet the burgeoning interest in childhood is partnered withdramatic social and spatial shifts that have serious consequences foryoung people and the compass of their experiences. Both volumes speakto the tensions in children’s everyday lives provoked by the social,economic, and political transformations associated with globalization,technological development, privatization, migration, and “security,”among other things. The authors are attentive to the geographicimplications of these concerns and make clear the subtle and manifestways that spatiality matters in understanding contemporary childhoodand young people’s everyday experiences. In their scope, both volumesare welcome additions to the geographic literature on children; theHolloway and Valentine for its international and historic perspectiveand the Aitken for the broad sweep of theories it addresses. 201 Children’s Geographies, edited by Holloway and Valentine, is animportant resource for the growing interdisciplinary social scienceaudience concerned with the shifting contexts of young people’s lives.While most of the authors work in the field of geography, this book isa fine example of the strength of interdisciplinary research and theoryconcerning issues at the interface between children and their everydayenvironments, including cyberspace, playgrounds, “nature,” commercialspaces, public spaces, and the home. While geographers may take forgranted that space, place, and nature matter in understanding youngpeople’s (or anyone’s) experience, each chapter in Children’s Geographiesmakes the nature of that importance vibrantly clear and will beappreciated by researchers in such fields as sociology, psychology, andanthropology who are now paying more attention to context. Holloway and Valentine are well-known and strong voices incritical geography whose work has been influential in advancing bothmore substantial conversations about contemporary young people andopening up the grounds for what these conversations encompass. Theirsis an important project, and in this volume they bring together a broadrange of serious, empirically grounded and theoretically informed workon which to build it. While the purview of their concerns is broad andthe book is international in scope (drawing on empirical work fromEurope, North and South America, Africa and Asia), it exhibits aproblematic tendency toward insularity in British geography. With fewexceptions, the authors in this collection work in the UK and areinadequately attentive to the breadth of scholarly work on children’sgeographies taking place in other places, notably in the Nordiccountries, North America, and Australia. This publication follows the widely read Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures(1998), a volume edited by Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine thatprovided geographers and others with a range of geographicallysensitive and critical analyses of the experiences and everydaypractices of contemporary youth in relation to issues of culture,representation and resistance. Children’s Geographies buildsupon this earlier work by focusing on young 202 people of all ages asactive agents negotiating the socio-spatial relations and structuresthat comprise their everyday lives and the horizons of their futures. The editors’ introduction develops a theoretical framework that setsthe stage for the subsequent chapters exploring constructions ofchildhood in different times and places as well as children’s manyengagements with space, place, and nature. Holloway and Valentine offera critical and historical review of issues relevant to what they callthe “new social studies of childhood,” a burgeoning...

In the not too distant past, it was thought that youth were not as susceptible as adults to mental health problems. Indeed, there was a time when it was believed that young people, especially children, were not even capable of experiencing significant psychopathology, such as depression (see Bemporad & Wilson, 1978). However, recent trends have made clear that not only can youth experience psychopathology but also that they do so at alarmingly high rates. For instance, recent estimates indicate that at least one third of adolescents have experienced a diagnosable disorder in their lifetime (Lewinsohn, Hops, Roberts, Seeley, & Andrews, 1993), as have nearly 60% of emerging adults (Kessler, Berglund, et al., 2005). It also was thought, fairly recently in fact, that romantic relationships in youth were not particularly important or formative. As Brown, Feiring, and Furman (1999) note in their seminal volume, researchers had “missed the love boat,” holding on instead to outdated ideas about youth romance. Recent trends have made clear that romantic relationships in youth are indeed important and formative. A growing body of research suggests that the romantic domain of youth's lives is prominent, affects how young people view the self, and is marked by intense emotional ups and downs (e.g., Connolly & Konarski, 1994; Larson, Clore, & Wood, 1999). The high rates of youth dating aggression attest to the serious dysfunction that can occur in the romantic lives of adolescents, which has the potential to have significant negative consequences (see Lewis & Fremoux, 2001).

Previous studies have identified several key barriers to Physical Education, Physical activity and Sport (PEPAS). However, there is a paucity of qualitative evidence investigating why young people do and do not participate in PA and the relationship between their levels of participation at different stages of life. This study builds on a previous study and aims to investigate the barriers to PEPAS in adolescents at transition stage. The extant literature highlights that instilling regular PA throughout life strongly relies on developing physical literacy through participation in high quality physical education. Despite the understanding of the importance of high quality physical education, there is an over emphasis on the short term outcomes of physical education (PE) sessions which have been noted to overemphasise immediate physical activity rather than focus on educational outcomes important to physical literacy. Anecdotally, the recent Covid 19 Global pandemic and subsequent lockdown has resulted in a digitalisation of PE in schools and a subsequent reliance of PA programmes based on adult fitness classes, which may not necessarily be categorised as PE in its true sense. Twenty-four respondents aged 16-19 were divided into five focus groups. Data were analysed verbatim using NVivo following the guidelines by Braun and Clark (2006) on thematic analysis. The findings indicated that most respondents equated PE with team sports. Findings suggest that Physical Educators need to acknowledge how past and present experience of PE impacts young people's future motivation to continue PA beyond school. Delivery of traditional PE lessons, prioritising sporting ability, can act as a participation barrier to pupils who consider themselves"non-sporty". Accordingly, a shift towards inclusive pedagogical models with an emphasis on a holistic approach, may best promote the physical literacy necessary for the competence and confidence to continue movement in a lifelong capacity.

The complex set of political, social, economic and environmental factors that result from military conflicts have an indirect and prolonged effect on public health. The destruction of medical and public health infrastructure complicates the process of providing assistance to victims, limiting both access and quality. Mental health is an important dimension of human capital that significantly affects aspects of human life such as well-being, employment, work, capital, stigma, and so on. According to the WHO, in situations of armed conflict, about 10% of traumatized people will have serious mental health problems, and another 10% will develop behaviors that interfere with their ability to function effectively. Depression, anxiety and psychosomatic problems, such as insomnia, are the most common consequences. The younger generation living in conflict-affected areas is vulnerable to mental health problems. During the war, young people face two types of traumatic events: type I (sudden traumatic event) and type II (prolonged exposure to adverse events, which leads to dysfunctional coping mechanisms). As a result, young people suffer from anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and dissociative disorders. The most important variables that determine the impact of war on the mental health of young people are the deprivation of basic resources (housing, water, food, education, health, etc.); broken family relationships (due to loss, separation or relocation); stigma and discrimination (significantly affect identity); pessimistic worldview (constant feeling of loss and grief, inability to see a bright future). Meta-analyzes use mixed methods to study mental health and psychosocial well-being in non-standard settings, such as focus groups and in-depth interviews. This is necessary for the formation of the research question, modification of tools for the analysis of local situations and interpretation of the collected epidemiological data. Models of rehabilitation of psychosocial systems are based on the need for a multilevel approach to psychosocial interventions that take into account the individual, family and the community as a whole. The public health model requires the interaction between social and individual age and time variables, with particular emphasis on risk and protection groups at different stages of life.

This article reviews recent research focused on kibbutz youth at that stage of life between high‐school graduation and their early thirties. Their attitudes and behaviour were analysed at four biographical substages: (1) voluntary community service, (2) military service, (3) leave of absence from the kibbutz and (4) higher education. It shows that there is an association between the ability of the socialising agents in the kibbutz to develop and encourage adolescents’ identity and their personal democratic resources, and the attitudes and values of kibbutz youth in relation to social issues, democratic obligation, commitment to the community and responsibility.

In relation to the post-compulsory religious education program of a Catholic secondary college for boys, this research study set out to ascertain the role of art as a medium for the self-revelation of God in the linking of aesthetic and religious experience. In other words, this research study proposed to provide a group of students with a space and opportunity for a ‘calling to attend’ experience of God; that is, an experience that was compelling. The theoretical framework called on two types of concepts: first, those related to the theological investigation of revelation and its connection with the aesthetic and religious experience; and secondly, those developed from current educational research and research into Religious Education paradigms. The development of this research study therefore: established the context within which the study was situated; discussed a theological framework from Hans Urs von Balthasar and its links with this research study; examined the theory of Bernard Lonergan that art was a carrier of meaning for religious experience; discussed the role of revelation, aesthetic and religious experience and the religious imagination located within the ‘graced nature’ concept of Catholic theology; and sought to determine the contribution such a learning experience could make to the religious development of post-compulsory students in a boys’ senior secondary college. This study operated within a constructivist paradigm using case study and qualitative research methods. A focus group provided the research instrument for data gathering and included: participant observation; field notes; focus group discussions; and transcript analysis of the taped conversations of participants. The findings of this research study provided direction for further research and practice in post-compulsory religious education classroom program.

Two different systems for the screening and diagnosis of hypertension (HTN) in children currently coexist, namely, the guidelines of the 2017 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the 2016 European Society for Hypertension (ESH). The two systems differ in the lowered cut-offs proposed by the AAP versus ESH. We evaluated whether the reclassification of hypertension by the AAP guidelines in young people who were defined non-hypertensive by the ESH criteria would classify differently overweight/obese youth in relation to their cardiovascular risk profile. A sample of 2929 overweight/obese young people (6-16 years) defined non-hypertensive by ESH (ESH-) was analysed. Echocardiographic data were available in 438 youth. Using the AAP criteria, 327/2929 (11%) young people were categorized as hypertensive (ESH-/AAP+). These youth were older, exhibited higher body mass index, Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance (HOMA-IR), triglycerides, total cholesterol to high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (TC/HDL-C) ratio, blood pressure, left ventricular mass index and lower HDL-C (p <0.025-0.0001) compared with ESH-/AAP-. The ESH-/AAP+ group showed a higher proportion of insulin resistance (i.e. HOMA-IR ≥3.9 in boys and 4.2 in girls) 35% vs. 25% (p <0.0001), high TC/HDL-C ratio (≥3.8 mg/dl) 35% vs. 26% (p = 0.001) and left ventricular hypertrophy (left ventricular mass index ≥45 g/h2.16) 67% vs. 45% (p = 0.008) as compared with ESH-/AAP-. The reclassification of hypertension by the AAP guidelines in young people overweight/obese defined non-hypertensive by the ESH criteria identified a significant number of individuals with high blood pressure and abnormal cardiovascular risk. Our data support the need of a revision of the ESH criteria.