Loneliness, social relations and health and wellbeing in deprived communities

There is growing policy concern about the extent of loneliness in advanced societies, and its prevalence among various social groups. This study looks at loneliness among people living in deprived communities, where there may be additional barriers to social engagement including low incomes, fear of crime, poor services and transient populations. The aim was to examine the prevalence of loneliness, and also its associations with different types of social contacts and forms of social support, and its links to self-reported health and wellbeing in the population group. The method involved a cross-sectional survey of 4,302 adults across 15 communities, with the data analysed using multinomial logistic regression controlling for sociodemographics, then for all other predictors within each domain of interest. Frequent feelings of loneliness were more common among those who: had contact with family monthly or less; had contact with neighbours weekly or less; rarely talked to people in the neighbourhood; and who had no available sources of practical or emotional support. Feelings of loneliness were most strongly associated with poor mental health, but were also associated with long-term problems of stress, anxiety and depression, and with low mental wellbeing, though to a lesser degree. The findings are consistent with a view that situational loneliness may be the product of residential structures and resources in deprived areas. The findings also show that neighbourly behaviours of different kinds are important for protecting against loneliness in deprived communities. Familiarity within the neighbourhood, as active acquaintance rather than merely recognition, is also important. The findings are indicative of several mechanisms that may link loneliness to health and wellbeing in our study group: loneliness itself as a stressor; lonely people not responding well to the many other stressors in deprived areas; and loneliness as the product of weak social buffering to protect against stressors

The Effect of Employee Involvment on Firm Performance: Evidence from an Econometric Case Study

We provide some of the most reliable evidence to date on the direct impact of employee involvement through participatory arrangements such as teams on business performance. The data we use are extraordinary --daily data for rejection, production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period, almost 53,000 observations. Our key findings are that: (i) membership in offline teams initially enhances individual productivity by about 3% and reduces rejection rates by more than 25%; (ii) these improvements are dissipated, typically at a rate of 10 to 16% per 100 working days; (iii) the introduction of teams is initially accompanied by increased rates of downtime and these costs diminish over time. In addition: (iv) the performance-enhancing effects of team membership are greater and more long-lasting for team members who are solicited by management to join teams; similar relationships exist for more educated team members. These findings, which are best interpreted as lower bound estimates of the effects of teams, are consistent with the diverse hypotheses including propositions that: (i) employee involvement will produce improved enterprise performance through diverse channels including enhanced discretionary effort by employees; (ii) various kinds of complementarities accompany many changes in organizational design (such as between teams and formal education); (iii) the introduction of high performance workplace practices are best viewed as investments, though there are significant learning effects; (iv) differences in performance for team members solicited by mangers compared to those who volunteer are consistent with various hypotheses including management signaling and opportunistic behavior by employees, but inconsistent with hypotheses based on Hawthorne effectshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39998/2/wp612.pd

Interventions to improve hand hygiene compliance in patient care

Four studies met the criteria for the review: two from the original review and two from the update. Two studies evaluated simple education initiatives, one using a randomized clinical trial design and the other a controlled before and after design. Both measured hand hygiene compliance by direct observation. The other two studies were both interrupted times series studies. One study presented three separate interventions within the same paper: simple substitutions of product and two multifaceted campaigns, one of which included involving practitioners in making decisions about choice of hand hygiene products and the components of the hand hygiene program. The other study also presented two separate multifaceted campaigns, one of which involved application of social marketing theory. In these two studies follow-up data collection continued beyond 12 months, and a proxy measure of hand hygiene compliance (product use) was recorded. Microbiological data were recorded in one study. Hand hygiene compliance increased for one of the studies where it was measured by direct observation, but the results from the other study were not conclusive. Product use increased in the two studies in which it was reported, with inconsistent results reported for one initiative. MRSA incidence decreased in the one study reporting microbiological data

Genome scan of Diabrotica virgifera virgifera for genetic variation associated with crop rotation tolerance

Crop rotation has been a valuable technique for control of Diabrotica virgifera virgifera for almost a century. However, during the last two decades, crop rotation has ceased to be effective in an expanding area of the US corn belt. This failure appears to be due to a change in the insect's oviposition behaviour, which, in all probability, has an underlying genetic basis. A preliminary genome scan using 253 amplified fragment-length polymorphism (AFLP) markers sought to identify genetic variation associated with the circumvention of crop rotation. Samples of D. v. virgifera from east-central Illinois, where crop rotation is ineffective, were compared with samples from Iowa at locations that the behavioural variant has yet to reach. A single AFLP marker showed signs of having been influenced by selection for the circumvention of crop rotation. However, this marker was not diagnostic. The lack of markers strongly associated with the trait may be due to an insufficient density of marker coverage throughout the genome. A weak but significant general heterogeneity was observed between the Illinois and Iowa samples at microsatellite loci and AFLP markers. This has not been detected in previous population genetic studies of D. v. virgifera and may indicate a reduction in gene flow between variant and wild-type beetles

Study protocol for the Anesthesiology Control Tower—Feedback Alerts to Supplement Treatments (ACTFAST-3) trial: A pilot randomized controlled trial in intraoperative telemedicine [version 1; referees: 2 approved]

Background: Each year, over 300 million people undergo surgical procedures worldwide. Despite efforts to improve outcomes, postoperative morbidity and mortality are common. Many patients experience complications as a result of either medical error or failure to adhere to established clinical practice guidelines. This protocol describes a clinical trial comparing a telemedicine-based decision support system, the Anesthesiology Control Tower (ACT), with enhanced standard intraoperative care. Methods: This study is a pragmatic, comparative effectiveness trial that will randomize approximately 12,000 adult surgical patients on an operating room (OR) level to a control or to an intervention group. All OR clinicians will have access to decision support software within the OR as a part of enhanced standard intraoperative care. The ACT will monitor patients in both groups and will provide additional support to the clinicians assigned to intervention ORs. Primary outcomes include blood glucose management and temperature management. Secondary outcomes will include surrogate, clinical, and economic outcomes, such as incidence of intraoperative hypotension, postoperative respiratory compromise, acute kidney injury, delirium, and volatile anesthetic utilization. Ethics and dissemination: The ACTFAST-3 study has been approved by the Human Resource Protection Office (HRPO) at Washington University in St. Louis and is registered at clinicaltrials.gov (NCT02830126). Recruitment for this protocol began in April 2017 and will end in December 2018. Dissemination of the findings of this study will occur via presentations at academic conferences, journal publications, and educational materials

Improving the effectiveness of collaborative group work in primary schools: effect on Science attainment

This longitudinal research tests the effectiveness of the SPRinG programme which was developed through a collaboration between researchers and teachers and designed to provide teachers with strategies for enhancing pupil group work in ‘authentic’ classroom settings. An evaluation study involved comparing pupils in SPRinG classrooms and trained in group work skills with those who were not in terms of science attainment. There were 560 and 1027 pupils (8-10 years) in the experimental and control groups respectively. ‘Macro’ attainment data were collected at the start of the year. ‘Micro’ attainment data were collected in the spring and summer before and after science lessons involving either group work (intervention) or the control teachers’ usual approach. SPRinG pupils made greater academic progress than control pupils. Findings are discussed relative to enhancing the quantity and quality of group work in schools and a social pedagogic approach to classroom learning

The effects of demand characteristics on research participant behaviours in non-laboratory settings: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND: The concept of demand characteristics, which involves research participants being aware of what the researcher is investigating, is well known and widely used within psychology, particularly in laboratory-based studies. Studies of this phenomenon may make a useful contribution to broader consideration of the effects of taking part in research on participant behaviour. This systematic review seeks to summarise data from studies of the effects of demand characteristics on participant behaviours in non-laboratory settings. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Electronic databases were searched to identify eligible studies. These had to be purposely designed to evaluate possible effects of demand characteristics on at least one behavioural outcome under the autonomous control of the participants and use longitudinal study designs. Only 7 studies were included, 6 providing observational data and 1 experimental study, with 5 studies involving examination of possible effects on health behaviours. Although studies provided some evidence of effects of demand characteristics on participant behaviour, heterogeneous operationalisation of the construct, the limited number of studies and poor quality of study designs made synthesis and interpretation of study findings challenging. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Although widely accepted as important in psychology, there have been few dedicated studies of the effects of demand characteristics on research participant behaviours outside laboratory settings. This body of literature does not currently contribute to the wider study of research participation effects. A systematic review of data from laboratory-based studies is needed, as are high-quality primary studies in non-laboratory settings. We suggest that unqualified use of the term demand characteristics should be abandoned

The "Illimitable Dominion" of Charles Dickens: Transatlantic Print Culture and the Spring of 1842

This article explores Edgar Allan Poe’s May 1842 edition of Graham’s Monthly Magazine in the context of debates about international copyright circulating in the press at the time of Charles Dickens’s famous tour of the US. I offer a reading of Poe’s short story ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales that sees these texts as interventions in transatlantic debates at the forefront of the public imagination in the Spring of 1842. In particular, through an original close reading of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ I demonstrate how Poe subtly drew upon penny press exposés to inform the short story’s discussion of class, status and rights of access. I also suggest that the argument Poe made in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne about the importance of ‘invention, creation, imagination [and] originality’ to the ‘prose tale’ is usefully considered in the same context, as an American response to questions of authorship that were also raised by the popular hysteria surrounding Dickens

The Effect of Employee Involvment on Firm Performance: Evidence from an Econometric Case Study

We provide some of the most reliable evidence to date on the direct impact of employee involvement through participatory arrangements such as teams on business performance. The data we use are extraordinary --daily data for rejection, production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period, almost 53,000 observations. Our key findings are that: (i) membership in offline teams initially enhances individual productivity by about 3% and reduces rejection rates by more than 25%; (ii) these improvements are dissipated, typically at a rate of 10 to 16% per 100 working days; (iii) the introduction of teams is initially accompanied by increased rates of downtime and these costs diminish over time. In addition: (iv) the performance-enhancing effects of team membership are greater and more long-lasting for team members who are solicited by management to join teams; similar relationships exist for more educated team members. These findings, which are best interpreted as lower bound estimates of the effects of teams, are consistent with the diverse hypotheses including propositions that: (i) employee involvement will produce improved enterprise performance through diverse channels including enhanced discretionary effort by employees; (ii) various kinds of complementarities accompany many changes in organizational design (such as between teams and formal education); (iii) the introduction of high performance workplace practices are best viewed as investments, though there are significant learning effects; (iv) differences in performance for team members solicited by mangers compared to those who volunteer are consistent with various hypotheses including management signaling and opportunistic behavior by employees, but inconsistent with hypotheses based on Hawthorne effectsProductivity, High Performance Work Practices, Employee Participation, Human Resource Management Practices