Team Characteristics as Predictors of Collaboration on Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs)

Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs) are collaborative multidisciplinary groups designed to coordinate the response to sexual assault. SARTs were created through efforts to address issues related to sexual assault response, such as negative treatment of survivors by responders, low prosecution rates, and disorganized relationships among responders. The goal of SARTs is to improve cross-system collaboration in the response to sexual assault in communities. Although SARTs tend to have similar goals and foci, teams vary in the formal structures and the collaborative activities they adopt. Therefore, it is important to examine the characteristics of SARTs and how they relate to collaboration on these teams. Guided by community coalition action theory (CCAT), the purpose of this study was to examine how SARTs’ membership breadth, formal structures, and leaders/coordinators predicted teams’ engagement in collaborative activities. The researcher analyzed secondary data from a large-scale study conducted by Campbell, Greeson, Bybee, and Neal (2013) and funded by the National Institute of Justice. Phone interviews were conducted with a national random sample of n = 172 SARTs. Ordinal logistic regression analysis examined the effects of SART membership breadth on SARTs’ engagement in collaborative activities. Additionally, the presence of a leader or coordinator and the number of formal structures used by the team were also examined as moderators of the relationship between membership breadth and collaborative activities. Findings from this study suggest ways of enhancing collaboration and future research for SARTs

Collaborative CNIC: US-Argentina planning visits for fungal biodiversity investigation

This collaborative project aims to catalyze a research collaboration between US and Argentinian researchers. The project will be led by Drs. Russell Rodriguez at Symbiogenics and Regina Redman of the University of Washington, both in Seattle, Washington, and Dr. Laurie Connell at the University of Maine, Orono, for the US side. On the Argentinean side, Drs. Diego Libkind, Martin Molino and Virginia de Garcia of INIBIOMA (Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente, an Argentinean National Scientific and Technical Research Council Institute) and the University of Comahue, are the counterparts for the project. The Argentinian researchers bring to the collaboration expertise in fungal taxonomy and biodiversity, particularly of cold and extreme environments. The US researchers bring expertise in fungal and plant adaptation to stresses, particularly in diverse habitats of Antarctica. Overall, this collaboration aims to understand how function impacts bacterial community structures, an important challenge in predicting ecosystems responses to climate change. For this project the researchers will study fungal communities by investigating their diversity, physiology, and ecology in extreme habitats such as glacial water run-off in Patagonia. The results of these initial studies will lay the groundwork for further large-scale projects. The collaboration will provide training opportunities for students at different levels and has significant potential to increase our understanding of global nutrient cycling, inter-organismal relationships, and life in extreme environments

Participatory approaches involving community and healthcare providers in family planning/contraceptive information and service provision: a scoping review.

As efforts to address unmet need for family planning and contraception (FP/C) accelerate, voluntary use, informed choice and quality must remain at the fore. Active involvement of affected populations has been recognized as one of the key principles in ensuring human rights in the provision of FP/C and in improving quality of care. However, community participation continues to be inadequately addressed in large-scale FP/C programmes. Community and healthcare providers’ unequal relationship can be a barrier to successful participation. This scoping review identifies participatory approaches involving both community and healthcare providers for FP/C services and analyzes relevant evidence. The detailed analysis of 25 articles provided information on 28 specific programmes and identified three types of approaches for community and healthcare provider participation in FP/C programmes. The three approaches were: (i) establishment of new groups either health committees to link the health service providers and users or implementation teams to conduct specific activities to improve or extend available health services, (ii) identification of and collaboration with existing community structures to optimise use of health services and (iii) operationalization of tools to facilitate community and healthcare provider collaboration for quality improvement. Integration of community and healthcare provider participation in FP/C provision were conducted through FP/C-only programmes, FP/C-focused programmes and/or as part of a health service package. The rationales behind the interventions varied and may be multiple. Examples include researcher-, NGO- or health service-initiated programmes with clear objectives of improving FP/C service provision or increasing demand for services; facilitating the involvement of community members or service users and, in some cases, may combine socio-economic development and increasing self-reliance or control over sexual and reproductive health. Although a number of studies reported increase in FP/C knowledge and uptake, the lack of robust monitoring and evaluation mechanisms and quantitative and comparable data resulted in difficulties in generating clear recommendations. It is imperative that programmes are systematically designed, evaluated and reported

The Myth of Global Science Collaboration - Collaboration patterns in epistemic communities

Scientific collaboration is often perceived as a joint global process that involves researchers worldwide, regardless of their place of work and residence. Globalization of science, in this respect, implies that collaboration among scientists takes place along the lines of common topics and irrespective of the spatial distances between the collaborators. The networks of collaborators, termed 'epistemic communities', should thus have a space-independent structure. This paper shows that such a notion of globalized scientific collaboration is not supported by empirical data. It introduces a novel approach of analyzing distance-dependent probabilities of collaboration. The results of the analysis of six distinct scientific fields reveal that intra-country collaboration is about 10-50 times more likely to occur than international collaboration. Moreover, strong dependencies exist between collaboration activity (measured in co-authorships) and spatial distance when confined to national borders. However, the fact that distance becomes irrelevant once collaboration is taken to the international scale suggests a globalized science system that is strongly influenced by the gravity of local science clusters. The similarity of the probability functions of the six science fields analyzed suggests a universal mode of spatial governance that is independent from the mode of knowledge creation in science.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

An overview of research activities and achievement in Geotechnics from the Scottish Universities Geotechnics Network (SUGN)

ABSTRACT: Design of geotechnical systems is often challenging as it requires the understanding of complex soil behaviour and its influence on field-scale performance of geo-structures. To advance the scientific knowledge and the technological development in geotechnical engineering, a Scottish academic community, named Scottish Universities Geotechnics Network (SUGN), was established in 2001, composing of eight higher education institutions. The network gathers geotechnics researchers, including experimentalists as well as centrifuge, constitutive, and numerical modellers, to generate multiple synergies for building larger collaboration and wider research dissemination in and beyond Scotland. The paper will highlight the research excellence and leading work undertaken in SUGN emphasising some of the contribution to the geotechnical research community and some of the significant research outcomes. RÉSUMÉ: Conception de systèmes géotechniques est souvent difficile car elle nécessite la compréhension du comportement des sols complexes et son influence sur la performance échelle du champ de géo-structures. Pour faire avancer la connaissance scientifique et le développement technologique en ingénierie géotechnique, une communauté universitaire écossais, nommé écossais universités Géotechnique réseau (SUGN), a été créé en 2001, la composition des huit établissements d'enseignement supérieur. Le réseau réunit géotechnique chercheurs, y compris les expérimentateurs ainsi que centrifugeuse, constitutif, et les modélisateurs numériques, de générer des synergies multiples pour la construction de plus grande collaboration et une plus large diffusion de la recherche en Ecosse et au-delà. Le document mettra l'accent sur l'excellence de la recherche et de diriger le travail entrepris dans SUGN soulignant certains de la contribution à la communauté de recherche en géotechnique et certains des résultats importants de la recherche

Catalytic Community Development

Community development and economic development in rural areas increasingly go hand in hand. Today, counterpoint to purely free market approaches to economic development -- in which large multinationals are the primary engines of change -- calls for more local decision-making and more locally based economic ventures. At the center of this new approach is strong community commitment to provide resources and information, overcome collective action problems, and improve the functioning of local labor markets. Enhancing community agency, or the capacity for collective action, therefore plays a significant role in effective community and economic development. Communities must focus on development both in communities (job creation, infrastructure improvement) and of communities (enhancing local problem-solving capacities). Kenneth Pigg and Ted Bradshaw, in their chapter in "Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century", outline a new model of community development, assembled from a collection of approaches. In this new "catalytic development" model, the emphasis is on mobilizing local talent and leveraging local resources and networks to find local solutions, and ultimately foster development in and of communities. This issue brief is a joint product of the Rural Sociological Society and the National Coalition for Rural Entrepreneurship, a collaboration of four Regional Rural Development Centers: The Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development, the Southern Rural Development Center, the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, and the Western Rural Development Center. Funding was also made available from the Ford Foundation. This brief is part of a policy brief series by the Rural Sociological Society and the Regional Rural Development Centers that stresses the importance of community collective action and developing the capacity of people and organizations to meet the community's needs The Rural Sociological Society and the Regional Rural Development Centers creates new Public Policy Issue Brief series based on its recent book, "Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century". The briefs synthesize the context and substance of important issues raised in the book and address alternative policy options, with the goal of bringing important research to the policy community

Planning and Leveraging Event Portfolios: Towards a Holistic Theory

This conceptual paper seeks to advance the discourse on the leveraging and legacies of events by examining the planning, management, and leveraging of event portfolios. This examination shifts the common focus from analyzing single events towards multiple events and purposes that can enable cross-leveraging among different events in pursuit of attainment and magnification of specific ends. The following frameworks are proposed: (1) event portfolio planning and leveraging, and (2) analyzing events networks and inter-organizational linkages. These frameworks are intended to provide, at this infancy stage of event portfolios research, a solid ground for building theory on the management of different types and scales of events within the context of a portfolio aimed to obtain, optimize and sustain tourism, as well as broader community benefits