Category: Faculty & Staff

A new study co-authored by School of Social Work PhD Program Director and Professor, Dr. Flávia Andrade, has been published in Journal of Aging and Health.

Amenable Mortality Among Older Brazilians: Evidence From the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSI-Brazil) examines how “amenable mortality, deaths preventable through timely and effective healthcare, is a widely used indicator of health system performance, yet evidence is lacking on its individual-level determinants in Brazil.”

The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health discusses the study further in their article, “UCLA Fielding School-led study of amenable mortality in Brazil provides new insight into preventable deaths“.

“While our recent work examined patterns of amenable (preventable) mortality, my current research increasingly focuses on how family support and partnerships shape health outcomes,” Andrade said about the study. “Supportive family members, such as partners and children, can help individuals recognize symptoms, access health services, navigate complex health care systems, and advocate for appropriate care. These social connections are very important factors in promoting health and longer lives

Two new articles co-authored by School of Social Work Professor Dr. Lissette Piedra have been published in the National Library of Medicine and Qualitative Social Work.

Beyond close ties: how social engagement shapes care-giver burden in later life discusses the importance of social connections and their role in shaping the well-being and health of older adults. The team examined how “core social networks and social engagement are associated with caregiver burden”. The findings revealed that “larger core social networks were associated with greater odds of caregiver burden, whereas all forms of social engagement—volunteering, group meetings, and religious attendance—reduced the odds of reporting caregiver burden. Higher levels of social engagement, such as having more friends or more frequent participation in social activities, similarly reduced the odds of reporting caregiver burden. Diverse engagement across multiple activities also lowered the likelihood of experiencing caregiver burden. These results suggest that caregiver burden may be shaped not only by the size of one’s core network but also by the breadth and frequency of social participation, particularly in settings that foster casual social ties.”

A logic of discovery: Interpretive inquiry’s contribution to science argues that “[i]nterpretive inquiry has spent much of its history defending its claim to scientific legitimacy. But the intellectual challenge has changed: the more pressing question is what interpretive inquiry contributes to scientific discovery—how it generates new understandings, unsettles established explanations, and works alongside other forms of scientific inquiry to produce knowledge.”

“Objectivist approaches provide powerful tools for measurement, causal inference, and generalization. Interpretive inquiry makes a different but equally essential contribution by recognizing when prevailing concepts, assumptions, and explanations no longer adequately account for an evolving social world,” Piedra writes, and concludes that, “[b]ringing these traditions together offers a more powerful approach to science—one capable not only of evaluating our answers, but of revealing when we need to ask different questions.”

Dr. Lissette Piedra will soon also be leading a $17 million NIH project on caregiving.

Doug Smith, Professor of Social Work and Director of the Center for Prevention Research and Development at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was recently featured on the topic of working with families on the Talking to Change podcast hosted by Glenn Hinds and Sebastian Kaplan.

In the episode, Smith discusses his 2025 book, Motivational Interviewing with Families. The conversation examines how motivational interviewing shifts when it extends beyond a single client and target behavior, including working with change talk across family members, balancing client autonomy with practitioner direction, and avoiding what Smith describes as the “superfluous engagement trap”.

You can listen to the podcast episode on the Talking to Change website.