Iara Teixeira

Lifetime HIV non-testing remains common among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Brazil, and its sociodemographic, psychosocial, and behavioral correlates have rarely been examined together. In a 2025 online survey of 1210 Brazilian cisgender and transgender MSM aged 18 or older, we examined lifetime non-testing with bivariate tests, modified Poisson regression (prevalence ratios, PR), and conditional inference trees. Overall, 9.5% (95% CI [8.0, 11.3]) had never been tested. Bivariately, never-tested men were younger, less educated, and lower income, more often students, single, living with family, and without a formal religion; they reported lower self-esteem, extraversion, and conscientiousness and greater loneliness, depressive symptoms, and internalized homonegativity; and they less often attended religious services or reported drug use during sex (erectogenic drugs or chemsex). Trees partitioned the sample only by education and age (38.9% [30.5, 48.2] among less educated men aged 24 or younger), by self-esteem (higher with low self-esteem), and by drug use during sex combined with religious attendance and alcohol use (highest, 18.4% [14.2, 23.4], among men reporting no drug use during sex, no religious attendance, and infrequent alcohol use; lowest among men reporting erectogenic drugs or chemsex). The domains appear complementary; the profiles may inform complementary testing strategies.

Aims: Despite social changes that have contributed to greater gender equality, there is still a long way to go, as differences in living conditions between women and men can affect their mental health. The main goal of this study is to examine the relationships among psychological distress, social discrimination, perceived social support, and resilience by gender. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study with 752 participants aged 18 to 84 years (M = 39.34; SD = 13.77). The tools used included the Brief Symptom Inventory, the Portuguese Everyday Discrimination Scale, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. Results: We identified a strong correlation between psychological distress and social discrimination (r = .642, p < .01), and a moderate link between resilience and perceived social support (r = .417, p < .01). Women make up 95% of those reporting gender as a reason for discrimination. In the linear regression analysis, gender was significant, with women showing higher psychological distress after adjustment. Men also showed higher levels of social discrimination and resilience when groups were compared. Discussion: These findings suggest that, despite differences in living conditions, men and women use distinct coping mechanisms for adversity, and these mechanisms do not follow a linear pattern. The results emphasize the value of a gender-sensitive approach when analyzing mental health, one that considers how multiple social identities may shape distress. Research in this field is crucial for public policies to address and promote gender equality, which, although improved, remains an ongoing challenge.

Work–life balance policies can redistribute time without transferring responsibility for anticipating and coordinating care. This conceptual article asks when changes in time and task allocation permit caregivers to stop monitoring care needs. Integrating research on cognitive household labor, work–family resources, psychological recovery, and social care, it develops a model linking responsibility, authority, and the opportunity to disengage. The model proposes that continued answerability sustains monitoring and anticipatory vigilance even when another person performs the associated tasks. A dependable successor, understood as a person or institution able to assume responsibility for a defined care need, is proposed as one relational condition supporting disengagement. Gender, socioeconomic conditions, family composition, institutional recognition, and workplace arrangements shape access to this condition. The contribution is to specify how responsibility is retained or transferred within broader accounts of demands and resources, rather than to treat those accounts as exclusively concerned with time. Testable propositions distinguish changes in task performance from changes in monitoring, identify boundary conditions, and guide research across care arrangements. Using European work–life balance provisions as an illustrative policy context, the article proposes indicators for evaluating whether leave, flexibility, and services redistribute cognitive responsibility and support recovery, alongside their effects on participation in employment.

This article examines psychosocial harm at work as a sociological problem of inequality rather than only an issue of individual stress. Drawing on Acker's concept of inequality regimes together with minority stress and intersectionality, and based on 60 in‐depth interviews with workers in Portugal, it analyses how overload, insecurity, work‐family conflict, poor leadership, and weak reporting systems are organized through gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and migration‐related relations of power. Reflexive thematic analysis developed three themes: the organization of harm through workload, insecurity, and leadership; recognition, legitimacy, and the cost of difference; and conditional belonging through redress, informal networks, and compounded exclusion. Across these themes, diversity initiatives organized around single categories left a structural gap for workers marginalized on several dimensions at once. Psychosocial harm was not evenly distributed but produced through labor‐process intensification, unequal legitimacy, conditional belonging, and the individualization of coping. Diversity and well‐being initiatives offered limited protection when unsupported by workload regulation, accountable management, and credible mechanisms of redress. The article contributes to sociology of work debates through an integrative framework that links inequality regimes and minority stress as complementary levels of a single account of psychosocial harm, showing how the proximal mechanisms of minority stress operate through the organisational arrangements that inequality regimes analysis identifies, and how recovery, credibility, and redress come to be distributed unequally through those arrangements across workers' intersecting positions. Workplace well‐being, on this account, requires structural reforms designed around workers' unequal and intersectional exposure to risk.

Repeated surveys revise their instruments between rounds and document each revision item by item. Such documentation records what changed but not what the change does to a trend, so secondary users can mistake an instrument effect for change in the population. This article proposes a typology that classifies revisions by their consequence for the information in the released data (removal, redistribution, stimulus change, and misidentification), links each type to its identification status and remedy, and puts it into practice through a five-step diagnostic protocol: comparing source instruments, screening against a reference distribution of unmodified trend items, classifying the revision, choosing an estimand, and auditing metadata. Applied to the 2024 European Working Conditions Survey, the protocol shows that a filter and a self-labeling question placed before the discrimination battery leave the 2015 to 2024 contrast identified only as a lower bound; six of seven grounds fell below every unmodified reference item, and the observed decline would be real only if the new instrument retained more than 60 percent of reports. A new cyberbullying item redistributed reports from the adjacent bullying item, and the data bound the comparable change between odds ratios of 0.75 and 0.98. Changes in item order and response coding left a pace-of-work battery unresolved, while a minor stem change produced no detectable break. The metadata audit found nine variables labeled with the stem of a different question, in both data editions, and a harmonized trend variable that omits one of the two items its label combines. Comparability should be established from the source instruments and the released data before substantive analysis begins.

Introduction: Families of origin and chosen kin occupy a central yet under-theorized place in the lives of transgender women. This critical narrative review examines how transgender women’s family relationships are organized across contexts and develops a conceptual synthesis from that evidence, and asks what that evidence implies for policy. Methods: Twenty-four empirical studies from 15 countries, published between 2019 and 2026 and identified through August 2026 searches of PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, complemented by studies known from prior work, were read alongside ethnographic scholarship on trans kinship formations. Results: Four patterns recur. Family rejection operates as a relational and material process rather than a single event. Recognition is granted partially and function by function: relatives may offer money while refusing a name, or warmth in private while denying the relationship in public. Gender transition reorganizes kinship terms, roles, and public belonging over extended time. Chosen kin formations, including trans houses, mama figures, and sisterhood networks, operate concurrently with families of origin rather than as substitutes for them. Conclusions: Four propositions organize the synthesis: family recognition is multidimensional and negotiated; families transmit structural stigma through cisnormative investment; gender transition operates as a family boundary process without normative closure; and chosen kinship constitutes parallel institutional kinship, all under the scope condition that legal, religious, and economic regimes constitute these processes. Policy Implications: Institutional recognition of chosen kin in caregiving, visitation, and emergency decisions, and policies that buffer the material costs of family rejection, follow from the evidence reviewed.

How poverty translates into poor mental health is one of the central questions in social epidemiology. The bivariate association between economic deprivation and psychological distress is consisten...

Research increasingly frames its questions in an intersectional way, comparing the symptoms, exposures, or distress of groups defined by multiple social positions held simultaneously. The measureme...

Occupational health research treats psychosocial working conditions either as features of a job or as traits that help workers cope. This article proposes the Intersectional Occupational Health (IOH) framework, which instead treats these conditions as exposures that labor regimes allocate to differently positioned workers. Drawing on vulnerability theory and the sociology of work, the framework argues that a worker's psychosocial profile records where that worker has been placed, since who meets high-strain conditions, and for how long, is set by law, immigration rules, and welfare systems. On this reading, the uneven spread of these conditions measures a process that produces vulnerability rather than a tally of how well workers cope. The framework follows the path from social position to health outcome, and it treats a sound intervention as one that redistributes exposure rather than one that raises the average. Two cases, domestic work in Southern Europe and platform delivery in Germany, ground a set of recommendations for governments, ranging from household labor inspection to an enforceable presumption of employment.