Recent decades have witnessed a growing emphasis on patients as active consumers of health information. The literature about cancer-related information focuses on active and purposeful information seeking, but a great deal of exposure to cancer-relevant information may happen less purposively (termed information scanning). This article presents results from an in-depth interview study that examined information seeking and scanning behavior in the context of cancer prevention and screening decisions among a diverse sample of people living in a major metropolitan area. Results suggest that information scanning is quite common, particularly for information related to screening tests. Information seeking is rarer and occurs primarily among those who also are information scanners. Respondents report using a greater variety of sources for information scanning than for information seeking, but participants were much more likely to report that their decisions were influenced by information received through seeking than through scanning. These findings shed new light on how individuals navigate the media environment and suggest future research should examine predictors and effects of less purposeful efforts to obtain cancer-related information.

Social entrepreneurs have a dominant social mission and generate revenue to ensure financial viability. However, most research treats the extent to which social entrepreneurs actually adhere to social and economic mission as a black box. Performing higher order confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of social enterprises (N∼270), this study identifies dimensions and validates measures for understanding and delineating social and economic missions, and shows how the two constructs relate to each other. The theoretical untangling and the empirical validation of social and economic missions as distinct constructs—and multiple potential constellations of attached relative importance—opens up opportunities for quantitative hypothesis–testing research in social entrepreneurship.

The complexity of issues firms have to attend to make it impossible for CEOs to give their full attention to all issues concurrently. Drawing on the "attention-based view" of the firm, this paper opens the black box of attention allocation in for-profit social enterprises by showing how attention structures and the context in which the firm operates interplay. Utilizing empirical data on 148 for-profit social enterprises, findings show that the attention structures-other-regarding values, utilitarian identity, and resource availability-have a significant impact on the relative attention to social goals, while past firm performance as a context variable moderates these relations. Applying the principles of structural and situated attention, this paper makes an important contribution to management theory and attention allocation in for-profit social enterprises.

No abstract

The present study sought to replicate effects of the number of syndemic psychosocial health conditions on sexual risk behavior and HIV infection among a sample of high-risk African American men who have sex with men (MSM) and to identify resilience factors that may buffer these effects. We used baseline data from an HIV risk-reduction trial to examine whether a higher number of syndemic conditions was associated with higher rates of self-reported sexual risk behavior and HIV infection. Using logistic regression models, we tested for interactions between number of syndemic conditions and several potential resilience factors to identify buffering effects. Replicating previous studies, we found significant associations between numbers of syndemic conditions and higher rates of sexual risk behavior and HIV infection. Surprisingly, we also replicated a previous finding (Stall et al., 2003) that the effects of syndemic burden on HIV status fell off at the highest levels of syndemic conditions. Among a variety of potential resilience factors, two--optimism and education--buffered the syndemic effect on HIV prevalence. This is, to our knowledge, the first paper to identify resilience factors buffering against syndemic effects among MSM. It also constitutes a significant contribution to the literature regarding prevention among black MSM. These results point to the need to identify HIV-positive black MSM and provide effective treatment for them and to develop interventions addressing both syndemic and resilience factors.