Welfare and warfare an uneasy mix: personal experiences of and organisational responses to emotional and mental health issues in young ex-service personnel

'Shell-shock', which is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), was first identified during the First World War and since this time the mental health of service personnel has been an issue of concern, particularly during times of armed conflict. This is an exploratory piece of research, the purpose of which is to provide information from a range of stakeholders, primarily ex-service personnel but also their families and welfare staff about the mental health needs of young military personnel

Understanding recovery: the perspective of substance misusing offenders

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically regard the concept of recovery from the perspective of substance misusing offenders. It intended to understand how these individuals came to define recovery by asking “what does recovery mean to you?” Design/methodology/approach – In total, 35 semi-structured interviews were undertaken with individuals with a history of heroin and crack cocaine use as well as convictions for a range of offences. Interviews took place in both prison and community settings, reflecting a spectrum of experience. Findings – Whilst the constellation of recovery varied, it was at times made up of the same “stars” – and some re-occurring themes emerged; recovery was transient, fragile and unpredictable, it was ongoing, lacking a definitive end, it was more than abstinence and often involved a total psychological overhaul, recovery was about reintegrating with society and feeling “normal”. Practical implications – Practitioners and services need to value the individual interpretations of recovery rather than being prescriptive around what it “should” look like. The components of recovery that were raised by participants permit specific recommendations for practice to be made. Originality/value – This study sought the perspectives of those actually affected by and experiencing drug treatment in the Criminal Justice System. It allowed participants to tell their story without preconceived ideas or hypotheses, putting their voice at the centre of the stage. The study uses feedback from the ground to make informed recommendations for practice. </jats:sec

Romancing the Stone - Aiding Sense-Making in Organizations

Despite many years of implementations, issues surrounding the success or failure of information systems are still shrouded in mystery. In a quest to improve business outcomes from such systems an IS analyst should have a key role to play. Organizational IS can be seen as a composition of indi-vidual and organizational learning processes, and as such is in a constant state of change. Knowledge as an individual sense-making process is a shifting sand of lessons learnt, experiential practices, active reflection and is therefore historically unique. Even when the balance of individual com-petencies, skills and attributes would seem to have been sufficient for the task at hand failure can still result from the combination of factors within that particular project. Organizational sense-making activities suffer from irrationalities of action, skilled incompetence’s and a plethora of organizational defence mechanisms. Within the information systems field, contextual analysis is an initiative focused on addressing issues of organizational information systems. Such systems are \u27community\u27 initiated, where system development or change activity is mentored by the analyst through the developmental mechanism of continual learning and communication

Probabilistic expert systems for handling artifacts in complex DNA mixtures

This paper presents a coherent probabilistic framework for taking account of allelic dropout, stutter bands and silent alleles when interpreting STR DNA profiles from a mixture sample using peak size information arising from a PCR analysis. This information can be exploited for evaluating the evidential strength for a hypothesis that DNA from a particular person is present in the mixture. It extends an earlier Bayesian network approach that ignored such artifacts. We illustrate the use of the extended network on a published casework example

A PSYCHOLOGY BASED FRAMEWORK FOR CULTIVATING AND RESPECTING USER ATTITUDES

In social and cognitive psychology, theories related to human attitude change are well established. In recent years, it has become increasingly common for those who seek to change attitudes towards computer based information systems to employ attitude change notions that originate from psychology. In this paper, the findings of those who have employed ‘attitude change psychology’ to understand or change user attitudes, are synthesised to create a prototype framework by which it is proposed that user attitudes could be cultivated as part of a system implementation. Operating as a summary of existing knowledge, this frame work also unveils significant areas of empirical deficit, providing a basis for future investigation

An Investigation Into Students\u27 Experiences On E-Learning

E-learning refers to the way people communicate and learn electronically which has only recently emerged as a key source of competitive advantage in the information society. With the development of the Information and Communication Technologies, E-Learning is argued to become a new, effective learning method and environment besides class-room learning. Although still an emerging field, many researchers suggest that it offers many benefits that are radically different from a conventional classroom-based learning environment and can still generate result for students. It could be providing independent learning programme for internal students, external students, distant students, and training purpose. However, it is also revealed in literature that E-Learning has been used more indirectly as a tool for organising study courses and educational programmes. The questions such as “can E-Learning be made as a learning strategy” and “can E-Learning replace classroom-based modes of learning and teaching” remain unanswered. This research intends to explore various aspects with regards to how and to what extent E-Learning have been used to improve teaching and learning activities in the University of Bolton as a case study. The study also intends to verify the main findings from the literature review via employing a case study approach and hence make comparisons between the national trends of E-Learning usage and the chosen case. Here presents the outcome from the first step of this study

Inciting advanced levels of practitioner reflection through progressive graphic elicitation

Qualitative research routinely requires experienced practitioners in a given field to be interviewed, and there are a range of methods known to elicit dialogue. The method for elicitation presented in this paper, however, goes a stage further it seeks not only to elicit dialogue but to provide subjects with additional knowledge, which they are encouraged to use as a lens for reflection on their own experience. Using a progressive series of related information graphics, accompanied by explanations, subjects are quickly taught a new topic and are asked to reflect on their own practice while the learning occurs. The research project is described to contextualise the elicitation method within the wider engagement. The approach was tested with a number of Information Technology (I.T.) specialists, each with extensive experience of encouraging users to participate in new I.T. environments. Subjects were provided with information graphics that incrementally increased their understanding of psychological theories related to attitude change, namely cognitive dissonance and the elaboration likelihood model. As their knowledge increased, they were guided to reflect on occasions where they had encountered phenomena related to such psychological theory, its effect and affiliated best practice. Over all, this approach was effective, with over 130,000 words of relevant, advanced discourse forthcoming. In this paper, the elicitation method, its affiliated epistemology, an overview of the project and the research methodology are presented, along with some early results

Is Superdiversity a Useful Concept in European Medical Sociology?

Medical sociology has a poor track record of researching diversity in theoretically innovative ways. This paper notes usage of the term superdiversity in migration and urban studies, to ask about its utility in general and more specifically for researching the social production of health and illness. Referring to a multi-country interview study about healthcare seeking strategies, the need to understand the diversification of diversity and the challenges for multi-method health research are described. Six interviews each were conducted in Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, to give a diversity sample of 24 adults who described their strategies and practice when seeking healthcare. In discussing how far superdiversity can help to model socioeconomic and cultural changes already identified as challenging health policy and service provision, the paper draws on case study material. The complex intersecting dimensions of population diversity to which superdiversity draws attention are undoubtedly relevant for commissioning and improving healthcare and research as well as policy. Whether models that reflect the complexity indicated by qualitative research can be envisaged in a timely fashion for quantitative research and questions of policy, commissioning, and research are key questions for superdiversity’s ongoing usefulness as a concept

Sex allocation theory reveals a hidden cost of neonicotinoid exposure in a parasitoid wasp

P.R.W. was funded by the University of Stirling, C.V.B. and S.M.G. were funded by Nuffield Research Placements and N.C., J.G. and D.M.S. were funded by NERC (NE/J024481/1).Sex allocation theory has proved to be one the most successful theories in evolutionary ecology. However, its role in more applied aspects of ecology has been limited. Here we show how sex allocation theory helps uncover an otherwise hidden cost of neonicotinoid exposure in the parasitoid wasp Nasonia vitripennis. Female N. vitripennis allocate the sex of their offspring in line with Local Mate Competition (LMC) theory. Neonicotinoids are an economically important class of insecticides, but their deployment remains controversial, with evidence linking them to the decline of beneficial species. We demonstrate for the first time to our knowledge, that neonicotinoids disrupt the crucial reproductive behaviour of facultative sex allocation at sub-lethal, field-relevant doses in N. vitripennis. The quantitative predictions we can make from LMC theory show that females exposed to neonicotinoids are less able to allocate sex optimally and that this failure imposes a significant fitness cost. Our work highlights that understanding the ecological consequences of neonicotinoid deployment requires not just measures of mortality or even fecundity reduction among non-target species, but also measures that capture broader fitness costs, in this case offspring sex allocation. Our work also highlights new avenues for exploring how females obtain information when allocating sex under LMC.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

How End-of-Life Blogs Re-Affirm the "Power to be Oneself".

Powerlessness generally denotes loss of control and may be experienced among those with a terminal diagnosis and, as such, empowerment is a dominant discourse in end-of-life policy in the western Anglo-Saxon world. This paper analyzes thematically blogs authored by three people with a terminal diagnosis to examine the "power to be oneself," a concept which was identified in the "Ethics of Powerlessness" project conducted in the UK. The analysis demonstrates that the bloggers assert the "power to be themselves" which is expressed in three principal ways. Firstly, through assertion of agency to promote self-affirmation and control. Secondly, through claiming a "moral authority" expressed by providing advice not just on illness and death but also on how life should be lived. Thirdly, through discussing ideas about the future and creating a legacy. The blogs are a mechanism used to express and reinforce self-identity and to carve out a "sacred space" between life and death to nurture personal change and to project this onto a public arena. This analysis demonstrates the key role patient empowerment plays in constructing an identity with a terminal diagnosis, an element that is often overlooked in end-of-life policy