Prosocial Messaging During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longitudinal Examination of Email Advertisements

Purpose This study aims to evaluate how brands communicate with consumers through the COVID-19 pandemic and how messaging has shifted over time. The authors identify a typology drawn from extant literature and use it to understand how brands shape consumers’ behavior. Design/methodology/approach Through a mix of interpretive and thematic analysis, the authors examine 858 US email advertisements and how these messages have evolved throughout the pandemic. Findings The authors findings demonstrate brand communication ranges from prosocial to brand messaging and brands employed different strategies at different phases of the pandemic. Specifically, while brands started out emphasizing socially desirable behavior before and directly after a national emergency was declared, COVID-19-related communications shifted to predominantly marketing-related messages later in the pandemic. Originality/value This study provides valuable insight into how brands adjust communication strategies through a prolonged cultural trauma and how these messages relate to authenticity, the triple bottom line and a social (versus branded) focus

Motivations for contralateral prophylactic mastectomy as a function of socioeconomic status

BACKGROUND: Despite no demonstrated survival advantage for women at average risk of breast cancer, rates of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) continue to increase. Research reveals women with higher socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to select CPM. This study examines how indicators of SES, age, and disease severity affect CPM motivations. METHODS: Patients (N = 113) who underwent CPM at four Indiana University affiliated hospitals completed telephone interviews in 2013. Participants answered questions about 11 CPM motivations and provided demographic information. Responses to motivation items were factor analyzed, resulting in 4 motivational factors: reducing long-term risk, symmetry, avoiding future medical visits, and avoiding treatments. RESULTS: Across demographic differences, reducing long-term risk was the strongest CPM motivation. Lower income predicted stronger motivation to reduce long-term risk and avoid treatment. Older participants were more motivated to avoid treatment; younger and more-educated patients were more concerned about symmetry. Greater severity of diagnosis predicted avoiding treatments. CONCLUSIONS: Reducing long-term risk is the primary motivation across groups, but there are also notable differences as a function of age, education, income, and disease severity. To stop the trend of increasing CPM, physicians must tailor patient counseling to address motivations that are consistent across patient populations and those that vary between populations

Social Network, Surgeon, and Media Influence on the Decision to Undergo Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy

OBJECTIVES: The rate of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) has risen sharply in the past decade. The current study was designed to examine social network, surgeon, and media influence on patients' CPM decision-making, examining not only who influenced the decision, and to what extent, but also the type of influence exerted. METHODS: Patients (N=113) who underwent CPM at 4 Indiana University-affiliated hospitals between 2008 and 2012 completed structured telephone interviews in 2013. Questions addressed the involvement and influence of the social network (family, friends, and nonsurgeon health professionals), surgeon, and media on the CPM decision. RESULTS: Spouses, children, family, friends, and health professionals were reported as exerting a meaningful degree of influence on patients' decisions, largely in ways that were positive or neutral toward CPM. Most surgeons were regarded as providing options rather than encouraging or discouraging CPM. Media influence was present, but limited. CONCLUSIONS: Patients who choose CPM do so with influence and support from members of their social networks. Reversing the increasing choice of CPM will require educating these influential others, which can be accomplished by encouraging patients to include them in clinical consultations, and by providing patients with educational materials that can be shared with their social networks. Surgeons need to be perceived as having an opinion, specifically that CPM should be reserved for those patients for whom it is medically indicated

Optimizing the design and analysis of clinical trials for antibacterials against multidrug-resistant organisms:a white paper from COMBACTE's STAT-Net

Innovations are urgently required for clinical development of antibacterials against multidrug-resistant organisms. Therefore, a European, public-private working group (STAT-Net; part of Combatting Bacterial Resistance in Europe [COMBACTE]), has reviewed and tested several innovative trials designs and analytical methods for randomized clinical trials, which has resulted in 8 recommendations. The first 3 focus on pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling, emphasizing the pertinence of population-based pharmacokinetic models, regulatory procedures for the reassessment of old antibiotics, and rigorous quality improvement. Recommendations 4 and 5 address the need for more sensitive primary end points through the use of rank-based or time-dependent composite end points. Recommendation 6 relates to the applicability of hierarchical nested-trial designs, and the last 2 recommendations propose the incorporation of historical or concomitant trial data through Bayesian methods and/or platform trials. Although not all of these recommendations are directly applicable, they provide a solid, evidence-based approach to develop new, and established, antibacterials and address this public health challenge

Remote ischaemic preconditioning versus sham procedure for abdominal aortic aneurysm repair: An external feasibility randomized controlled trial

© 2015 Mouton et al. Background: Despite advances in perioperative care, elective abdominal aorta aneurysm (AAA) repair carries significant morbidity and mortality. Remote ischaemic preconditioning (RIC) is a physiological phenomenon whereby a brief episode of ischaemia-reperfusion protects against a subsequent longer ischaemic insult. Trials in cardiovascular surgery have shown that RIC can protect patients' organs during surgery. The aim of this study was to investigate whether RIC could be successfully introduced in elective AAA repair and to obtain the information needed to design a multi-centre RCT. Methods: Consecutive patients presenting for elective AAA repair, using an endovascular (EVAR) or open procedure, in a single large city hospital in the UK were assessed for trial eligibility. Patients who consented to participate were randomized to receive RIC (three cycles of 5 min ischaemia followed by 5 min reperfusion in the upper arm immediately before surgery) or a sham procedure. Patients were followed up for 6 months. We assessed eligibility and consent rates, the logistics of RIC implementation, randomization, blinding, data capture, patient and staff opinion, and variability and frequency of clinical outcome measures. Results: Between January 2010 and December 2012, 98 patients were referred for AAA repair, 93 were screened, 85 (91 %) were eligible, 70 were approached for participation and 69 consented to participate; 34 were randomized to RIC and 35 to the sham procedure. There was a greater than expected variation in the complexity of EVAR that impacted the outcomes. Acute kidney injury occurred in 28 (AKIN 1: 23 %; AKIN 2: 15 % and AKIN 3: 3 %) and 7 (10 %) had a perioperative myocardial infarction. Blinding was successful, and interviews with participants and staff indicated that the procedure was acceptable. There were no adverse events secondary to the intervention in the 6 months following the intervention. Conclusions: This study provided essential information for the planning and design of a multi-centre RCT to assess effectiveness of RIC for improving clinical outcomes in elective AAA repair. Patient consent was high, and the RIC intervention was carried out with minimal disruption to clinical care. The allocation scheme for a definite trial should take into account both the surgical procedure and its complexity to avoid confounding the effect of the RIC, as was observed in this study. Trial registration: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN19332276(date of registration: 16 March 2012). The trial protocol is available from the corresponding author

Exploring Organizational Structures for Women in Academe: A Feminist Exploration of Career and Care

In 2008, Women’s Studies in Communication released a special issue entitled “Conversations and Commentary on Redefining the Professor(iate): Valuing Commitments to Care and Career in Academe” where the authors discussed how a lack of support for multiple and competing roles related to care and career responsibilities negatively impacted the careers of women faculty members. Today, women faculty members still experience more challenges associated with advancement, tenure, and promotion compared to their male counterparts and are also more likely to leave academia as leaks in the pipeline to pursue another career. Previous research has demonstrated that these challenges for women in the academy and subsequent leaks in the pipeline are due to organizational barriers rather than individual choices and abilities (McMurtrie, 2013; Slaughter, 2012). As such, this study employs two theoretical frameworks to explore career challenges in more detail. First, structuration theory (Giddens 1979; 1984) is utilized to examine the academic organizational structure, specifically how the duality of structure comes to bear on career trajectory for female faculty as well as their personal care work responsibilities. Structuration theory will enable the researcher to examine multiple levels of analysis within the academic organizational structure: individual, group, organizational, and interorganizational levels of analysis. Second, feminist intersectional theory is utilized to examine how the organizational structure is both gendered and leads to privilege of certain organizational members based on multiple facets of identity (Crenshaw, 1988; 1989/1993; 1991). Because a feminist intersectional framework allows the researcher to pay particular attention to identity and adds a layer of feminist critique when organizational members are marginalized, it is useful in the context of academe to discover barriers to career and care. Coupled together, structuration theory and feminist intersectional theory enable the researcher to understand what structures enable and constrain tenure/promotion and care needs/responsibilities and to be critical of those structures and who they privilege along the way. Three specific research questions were asked: (1) How is tenure/promotion enabled and/or constrained by the academic organizational structure?; (2) How are care needs/responsibilities enabled and/or constrained by the academic organizational structure?; and (3) (How) do female faculty members exert their agency to transform the organizational structure? Semi-structured interviews (n=49), in combination with document collection (n=433) and logging, were used to assess the organizational structure and the movement of participants through the structure. Analysis of the documents and interviews illustrate rules and resources that both enable and constrain tenure, promotion, and care work for female faculty. The study illustrates that formal policies at the macro level are enforced by rules and guidelines at the micro level (including rules associated with research, teaching, service, extension, and mentoring). There are also resources offered by the macro and micro structures (both formal and optional resources), which both enable care and career work when they are known and utilized, but also constrain care and career work when they are unknown or unevenly distributed. Identity is a major contributor to the experience and enforcement of the rules as well as the accessibility and availability of the resources. As such, it is clear that the organizational structure both enables and constrains tenure and promotion as well as care work

Dynamic disorders: narratives of eating disorders and the father-daughter relationship

2011 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Eating disorders affect women all over the world, particularly adolescents, at a rate which has grown in the last several decades. As obesity becomes one of the most battled health risks, those seriously underweight are ignored, praised, and/or forgotten, and as the fear of obesity grows, so does the incidence and prevalence of eating disorders. Previous research on eating disorders has focused on the family system and/or the mother-daughter dyad for their etiological significance, but relatively little attention has been given to the father's place in the family system or the father-daughter dyad in this context. Using Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological model as a lens, this thesis expands the literature of eating disorders by asking questions about the father-daughter relationship and the father's role(s) in the development, maintenance, and recovery of their daughter's eating disorder experiences. Narrative interviews, which record daughters' perceived experiences of the father-daughter relationship in the context of their eating disorders, were collected from women who self-identify as having an eating disorder. Analysis of the daughters' narrative accounts reveals six themes that define the father-daughter relationship and daughters' experiences of their eating disorders. Throughout the narratives, daughters communicatively construct their relationships with their fathers through the dialectical tensions of closeness/distance and openness/closedness. Interestingly, daughters do not communicatively construct their relationships with their fathers based on interactions about food, weight, or appearance but rather around issues of quality interactions, support, and closeness, as daughters construct the father-daughter relationship as an evolving emotional experience. Eating disorders, then, are perceived as relational artifacts of the father-daughter relationship, marking certain relational turning points. Within the narratives, fathers potentially enable the development of the eating disorder through actions and inactions nonrelated to daughters' food intake, appearance, or behavior and potentially further enable the performance of the eating disorder through their silence and passive reactions to their daughters' disorders. However, fathers have the potential to aid in the recovery process with care, support, and expressed closeness, and when fathers do actively participate in their daughters' recovery, the relationship and the recovery process can both benefit from their active participation. These findings highlight the need for further research on fathers (and other father-figures) in this context. Future studies should examine and compare narratives of both fathers and daughters in this context to gain a more complete picture of the father-daughter relationship experience. In addition, future studies should inquire about the family's influence on eating disorders but also the eating disorder's influence on family interactions. Finally, future research should conduct studies with relational dialectics and relational turning points as their main focus in families with eating disorders

Improving Patient Accrual to Research Studies and Clinical Trials through Communication Design Interventions

This chapter focuses on several systems-based barriers, including infrastructure support, identification of eligible patients, and key barriers to physician participation in the research study recruitment process. There are a number of potential pitfalls that may be avoided with careful attention to formative research as part of the Communication Design process. Multidisciplinary research in communication, policy, health care, education, nursing, etc. is needed to address wicked problems associated with clinical trial recruitment of underserved populations. Recruiters often struggle to simply find the physical space they need to discuss research studies and clinical trials with patients. While poverty, illiteracy, and medical distrust are extremely difficult to address through the design of interventions, it is possible to make other changes that can transform communication within a health care context that will increase the successful accrual of patients to research studies and clinical trials. Redesigning communication protocols around recruitment should lead to improved treatments for a wide variety of diseases and medical conditions. This chapter focuses on several systems-based barriers, including infrastructure support, identification of eligible patients, and key barriers to physician participation in the research study recruitment process. There are a number of potential pitfalls that may be avoided with careful attention to formative research as part of the Communication Design process. Multidisciplinary research in communication, policy, health care, education, nursing, etc. is needed to address wicked problems associated with clinical trial recruitment of underserved populations. Recruiters often struggle to simply find the physical space they need to discuss research studies and clinical trials with patients. While poverty, illiteracy, and medical distrust are extremely difficult to address through the design of interventions, it is possible to make other changes that can transform communication within a health care context that will increase the successful accrual of patients to research studies and clinical trials. Redesigning communication protocols around recruitment should lead to improved treatments for a wide variety of diseases and medical conditions

Clinical Trial and Research Study Recruiters' Verbal Communication Behaviors

The lack of accrual to research studies and clinical trials is a persistent problem with serious consequences: Advances in medical science depend on the participation of large numbers of people, including members of minority and underserved populations. The current study examines a critical determinant of accrual: the approach of patients by professional recruiters who request participation in research studies and clinical trials. Findings indicate that recruiters use a number of verbal strategies in the communication process, including translating study information (such as simplifying, using examples, and substituting specific difficult or problematic words), using linguistic reframing or metaphors, balancing discussions of research participation risks with benefits, and encouraging potential participants to ask questions. The identification of these verbal strategies can form the basis of new communication protocols that will help medical and nonmedical professionals communicate more clearly and effectively with patients and other potential participants about research studies and clinical trials, which should lead to increased accrual in the future