Sex offender community re-entry is a process fraught with many challenges. As jurisdictions face increasing demands from the public and legislative bodies for mandatory community supervision and treatment, those tasked with adequate risk management in our communities must often balance the needs of community safety and policy compliance with what is most beneficial and most realistic for the offender. Such challenges are more pronounced in rural communities with limited resources. Identifying clinicians who are willing to provide sex offender treatment services and able to communicate effectively with involved agents (e.g., offices of probation and parole), locating additional treatment services for offenders who struggle with other co-morbid issues like mental illness or addictions, and finding adequate residential and vocational placements, are some of the specific obstacles that clients face in any setting, but perhaps more so when returning to rural or isolated communities. Are such communities equipped for the needs of these clients? In this presentation, sex offender community reintegration within the context of rural treatment settings will be discussed. This will include a discussion of pilot research that has identified barriers to effective risk management, such as a need for intensive case management and follow-up, coordination with the courts and other responsible agencies, struggles with compliance with residency restrictions, stigma, and unique challenges in ensuring a good quality of life for sex offenders in small communities. Additional preliminary results from an ongoing survey of community and primary care providers describing knowledge, training, and experience related to offender treatment and working with clients involved in the forensic mental health and correctional systems will be included. Here, implications for provider training will be discussed, as well as future directions for more effective interaction between interdisciplinary providers in community settings to facilitate comprehensive risk management for this client population.

Is increased access to social capital associated with a lower likelihood of poverty? Using data from a survey of nearly 10,000 residents of Iowa taken in 1994 and again in 2004, this study seeks to understand what types of social capital are associated with higher or lower likelihood of poverty at both the community and individual levels. Results suggest that higher bonding social capital at both levels is associated with a higher likelihood of poverty. The inverse of this relationship is found between bridging social capital and poverty. Although high bonding is generally an asset, when combined with low levels of bridging social capital, it is associated with significantly higher rural poverty rates in 1994 and 2004— exceeding the statewide average poverty rate of 15%. It is not clear, however, if high levels of bonding social capital cause high poverty rates by creating more insular networks in the context of low social bridging or if high bonding and low bridging are the direct result of high rural poverty.

To attract visitors to stay and enjoy the rural landscapes and reduce out-migration to cities, there is a need to enhance practices and policies to boost rural community well-being. Community well-being is about residents' feeling of satisfaction with their local place with considering the social and physical environment, the services, and facilities regarding place attachment (Forjaz et al., 2011; McCrea et al., 2015). In this study, the extent to which farm shops as agriculture diversification strategies impact the community well-being in rural areas is investigated. Kalmar Län, the southern county in Sweden, is the chosen case study to learn more about the subject. For this research, eight interviews were conducted with farmers, and data were analyzed with thematic analysis.  Findings of this study indicate that farm shop owners' motivation to start and continue their activities is not limited to financial incentives, and there are other influential factors that encourage farmers to start and continue their farm shop businesses. Moreover, Farmers in Kalmar County are working as a network and feel connected with one other in varied ways. Furthermore, the direct impacts of farm shops on health and nature were expressed by farmers as well. According to the farmers, these shops impact society by providing spaces for social interaction, which is a critical performance of farm shops. And all these factors increase the feeling of attachment to the place for both farmers and visitors and motivate visitors to visit farm shops more often and encourage farmers to continue their activities in the rural area, and consequently enhance the well-being of community in the rural regions.

Exclusive breastfeeding has been recognised as an important public health tool for the primary prevention of child morbidity and mortality. Consequently, the WHO and UNICEF have recommended exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months after delivery, followed by introduction of complementary foods and continued breastfeeding for 24 months or more. Even so, however, efforts to promote exclusive breastfeeding have either achieved limited successes or run into severe problems due in part to poor understanding of the several influences on the practice. As a social institution and more importantly the basic unit of society, the aim of this study was to seek an in-depth understanding of family influences on exclusive breastfeeding in rural Ghana. Using a qualitative method with unstructured interviews as data collection instrument, a total of fourteen respondents comprising breastfeeding women and family from Moglaa in the Savelugu/Nanton Municipality in Ghana participated in this study. All Interviews were audio taped, transcribed, and analysed using seven analytic procedures. Four themes emerged in relation to the forms of family influences on exclusive breastfeeding: family knowledge of exclusive breastfeeding; collective sense of duty; family beliefs and practices; and learning to breastfeed. Given how the family participate and influence infant feeding practices, it is suggested that public health education must aim at increasing the familiarity of family members on breastfeeding recommendations and also endeavour to work with traditional and religious leaders so as to modify and/or discourage practices that involve feeding newborns with herbal teas and ritual concoctions.

This study aims to apply a rural perspective in an area where the politics assume an urban norm. Considering the special circumstances in the rural areas of Sweden in terms of geographics and access to services it is substantial to map in what ways these areas differ from the urban life. Hence, this study constitutes a contribution to crisis management in Sweden by introducing the rural perspective and applying in what ways social capital plays a role in strengthening the community resilience. Previous studies have shown that the informal household preparedness is essential to the rural life and how knowledge and experience makes a difference in how different households prepare for crisis. The study is qualitative with an inductive approach and utilizes both an interview study based on semi structured interviews as the main empirical material, as well as a text study to provide supplementary empirical evidence to the conclusions. The informants that take part in the study provides three different practical perspectives along with further empirical material to broaden the conclusions.

Participation in non-classroom activities has been documented to extend the intellectual, social, and psychosocial outcomes of the college experience. However, the benefits of non-classroom activities are often difficult to quantify due their voluntary nature, with findings mostly related to students within four-year institutions. The purpose of this study was to determine whether rural community college full-time freshman students who participate in non-classroom activities differ from nonparticipants with regard to self-identified values of academic integration, social integration, degree commitment, collegiate stress, and institutional commitment. These five factors have been demonstrated to influence student persistence and were adopted from Davidson et al.’s (2015) College Persistence Questionnaire, Version 2 (CPQ-V2). CPQ-V2 data were collected using an electronic survey distributed during the Fall 2021 semester. Survey participants offered details about their personal background and involvement in non-classroom activities, followed by responses to a series of questions from an adapted form of the CPQ-V2. The chi-square test of independence and one-way ANOVA were used to identify significant associations or relationships between variables. Data were analyzed through the lens of Astin’s theory of student involvement and Tinto’s theory of student departure. The results of analysis detected statistically significant associations between students’ level of involvement and their program of study, residency, employment, parental education, and volume of online classes. Their type of involvement was found to have a significant association with student residency. The level of involvement among students was also found to be significantly associated with their self-reported sense of social integration and degree commitment, a finding that was accompanied by the types of involvement and their statistical significance to their sense of social integration. Results from the survey instrument can vary across institutions and student populations; still, the results further demonstrate the differences among student groups in their non-classroom involvement. Accordingly, practitioners should continuously monitor their institution’s effectiveness in providing non-classroom opportunities that meet community college students’ needs and support their persistence efforts.

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