2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Social Influences on Health Service Use Following Disasters

It is well known that the majority of disaster survivors who need mental health services do not receive them. Despite this, and acknowledging that disasters often affect access to services geographically and economically, predictors of post-disaster service use are less understood; many scholars report that it is hard to predict post-disaster use of health services, including mental health services. Social influences in particular are neglected in the study of health service use, whether associated with disasters or not. Thus, along with standard psychological, medical, and behavioral variables, this session looks at a variety of social influences on health service use to try to capture the unexplained variation in service use. Additionally, longitudinal research on disaster-related health service use is quite rarely conducted. The panel presents research that deals with change in the use of services over time and examines different subpopulations for different predictors, at different times. The analysis of subgroups over time for different factors is important for more accurately accounting for variation in health service use, particularly in extreme settings like disaster recovery.