2022 Manners Awardees
Jakubowski · Goodkind & Shook · Rosso & Weinstein

"Investigating Intimate Partner Violence in the Context of Sleep Among Survivors"

Karen P. Jakubowski, PhD

Assistant Professor os Psychiatry
School of Medicine
University of Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT:   Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major public health issue for women. IPV includes threatened, attempted, or completed violence or abuse by a current or former spouse, intimate, or dating partner. Over 35% women in the U.S. report lifetime IPV, with rising numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Historically, IPV measurement has focused on physical, sexual, and psychological types of abuse. However, IPV can also involve attempts to control a partner's decisions and behaviors. Sleep is one behavior that abusive partners may attempt to restrict, interrupt, or control, however, there has been limited study into this issue. We conceptualize “sleep-related IPV” as a novel type of IPV that involves violent and controlling behaviors that intentionally target or impact women's sleep, such as deprivation/restriction, interference/interruption, monitoring/control, and fear/threats. Poor sleep has been related to worse mental health and risk for chronic diseases. Further, the cognitive and emotional consequences of insufficient sleep (e.g., compromised problem solving, attention, emotion regulation) may make women less able to cope and more vulnerable to further abuse. Critically, the contribution of sleep-related IPV to long-term sleep and health outcomes is unclear, which limits our ability to appropriately and effectively intervene on sleep among IPV survivors. The proposed study will: (1) characterize the construct of sleep-related IPV and (2) develop a self-report instrument to measure sleep-related IPV that is valid among diverse women, with the long-term goal of identifying prevalence, vulnerable subgroups, and associations with sleep, mood, and health. The risks of exposure to IPV are often associated with an expected female gender role or feminine gender expression through sex assigned at birth. Further, women from minoritized backgrounds are at greater risk for IPV compared to their white, cisgender, or heterosexual peers. Thus, this work will use purposive sampling to recruit a diverse sample of women across adulthood, including cisgender women and transgender and nonbinary individuals, as well as women who identify as racial/ethnic or sexual minorities. The proposed study will address two aims. Our first aim is to characterize the novel concept of sleep-related IPV among women with current or past history of IPV. We will conduct 30 semi-structured interviews with women aged 18 and older to identify themes regarding the restriction, interference, or control of sleep by current or former abusive partners and the impact of sleep-related IPV on women's sleep, mood, health, and functioning. Our second aim is to create a self-report instrument on sleep-related IPV. We will use the themes generated from Aim 1 to develop an item bank on sleep-related IPV, and conduct cognitive interviews with IPV survivors to obtain iterative feedback on the wording, clarity, and relevance of items, prior to broad administration and psychometric testing in an adequately-powered sample. This study will engage community experts on IPV and IPV survivors to inform the development, implementation, and dissemination of this work. Findings from this study have the potential to inform and innovate personalized interventions that improve sleep and health among IPV survivors.

"Fielding the ‘Trust and Disinformation in Allegheny County’ Survey"

Sara Goodkind, PhD

Associate Professor
School of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh

Jeffrey Shook, PhD

Associate Professor
School of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT:  We will field a survey to provide a nuanced, localized understanding of residents' information sources and usage; perceptions of trust and disinformation in Allegheny County. This survey will help identify points of weakness and resilience that will complement alternative computational approaches to understanding disinformation flows. Further, our work will identify previously hidden opportunities to strengthen ties across communities and improve citizens' abilities to connect with those outside their immediate information network. Support from the Manners Award would be used to (1) survey UCSUR's panel and provide participant incentives; (2) analyze the findings of the survey while preserving privacy; and (3) develop future iterations of the survey, including telephone interviews across western Pennsylvania and exploration of similar surveys for other regions both domestically and internationally. We anticipate that this initial survey data and related work will be critical in furthering understandings and impact from computational and community-based work from the Pitt Disinformation Lab and will result in publication. We also anticipate that this funding and resulting work will be significant in successfully pursuing additional external funding, including for continued annual survey work and the expansion of the survey work beyond Allegheny County.

"Neighborhood Environment and Risk of Cognitive Impairment in Older Adults across Southwestern Pennsylvania"

Andrea Rosso, PhD, MPH

Associate Professor
Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh

Andrea Weinstein, PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine
University of Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT: Prevalence of cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease and related dementias is expected to increase as the population ages. Cognitive impairment carries a heavy public health burden due to the associated physical, psychological, and financial burden on both affected individuals and their families. Most prevention efforts have focused on individual health and behaviors with little attention on community-level risk factors. There is some evidence that neighborhood factors, including walkability and greenspace, promote brain health. However, current research is limited in its consideration of differences in quality or meaning of these neighborhood factors based on geographic setting (urbanicity, racial composition). The goal of this study is to examine 1) how neighborhood environment (walkability, greenspace) relates to cognitive impairment and 2) whether associations between neighborhood and cognitive impairment differ by geographic setting (urbanicity, racial make-up). This proposal leverages existing cohort data and geospatial data sources, including those of the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center to inform prevention efforts that could better target neighborhood-level interventions to the most at-risk populations. We propose to harmonize data across 4 local studies of cognitive aging that cover a broad range of the local geographic region and neighborhood-level racial diversity. All studies have census tract of participants and cognitive status. This work will build a harmonized data set that can be leveraged for future external funding applications.