Using the Behaviour Change Wheel to identify barriers and enablers to the delivery of webchat counselling for young people

Webchat counselling is increasingly utilised to deliver mental health services to young people. Despite potential barriers to its delivery, a systematic investigation has not yet been conducted. This qualitative study examined barriers and enablers to the delivery of webchat counselling through text communication and identified possible strategies to tackle these, on behalf of counsellors volunteering for an online charity offering psychological support to young people aged below 25. The current investigation was conducted using the Behaviour Change Wheel, a validated and systematic framework employed to guide intervention development and optimisation. Qualitative interviews were carried out with eight volunteers. Thematic analysis identified 11 core themes. Barriers were lack of online communication skills, lack of training to work online with young people, technical difficulties, reduced technical supervision during out-of-office hours, duration of webchat counselling sessions, perceived level of effectiveness, perceived establishment of a therapeutic relationship and perceived confidence in delivering webchat counselling. Enablers were familiarity with technology, flexibility and the absence of physical characteristics. These themes were perceived by counsellors as barriers or enablers depending on factors such as experience with technology and work shifts. Using the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW), intervention functions and behaviour change techniques to address these barriers and optimise the service were identified, such as providing counsellors with training to work online with young people, learning new presence techniques to foster emotional connectedness between counsellors and clients, adding time to sessions to compensate for time taken to complete questionnaires and increasing technical support and supervision during out-of-office hours

Barriers and facilitators of young people’s engagement with webchat counselling: A qualitative analysis informed by the Behaviour Change Wheel

Young people's engagement with online counselling remains an endemic obstacle faced by mental health services. This study utilises the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) framework to systematically explore the barriers and facilitators of young people's behavioural engagement with online webchat counselling. The current study defines behavioural engagement as any observable or active contribution by the young person in the webchat sessions, such as written verbalisation and self-expression. Semi-structured interviews with counsellors (n = 8) and open-ended questionnaire data from 43 young people (aged 18–25 years) were gathered and then coded. Nine core themes were identified including communication difficulties, the safety of the webchat environment, absence of face-to-face communication, ambiguity in messages or pauses, reaching goals, optimism about outcomes, pre-existing anxieties, mood or well-being and wanting/not wanting to attend. Using the BCW framework, these themes were mapped to broad intervention functions and behaviour change techniques (BCTs) to provide suggestions to optimise young people's engagement with online counselling. These include the application of persuasive design features, the use of social strategies, increased counsellor training and greater personalisation of the online therapeutic approach. Future research can determine the effectiveness of these proposed strategies and BCTs to enrich the emerging engagement strategy field and the wider digital and mental health behaviour change literature

Generalized Bayesian Record Linkage and Regression with Exact Error Propagation

Record linkage (de-duplication or entity resolution) is the process of merging noisy databases to remove duplicate entities. While record linkage removes duplicate entities from such databases, the downstream task is any inferential, predictive, or post-linkage task on the linked data. One goal of the downstream task is obtaining a larger reference data set, allowing one to perform more accurate statistical analyses. In addition, there is inherent record linkage uncertainty passed to the downstream task. Motivated by the above, we propose a generalized Bayesian record linkage method and consider multiple regression analysis as the downstream task. Records are linked via a random partition model, which allows for a wide class to be considered. In addition, we jointly model the record linkage and downstream task, which allows one to account for the record linkage uncertainty exactly. Moreover, one is able to generate a feedback propagation mechanism of the information from the proposed Bayesian record linkage model into the downstream task. This feedback effect is essential to eliminate potential biases that can jeopardize resulting downstream task. We apply our methodology to multiple linear regression, and illustrate empirically that the "feedback effect" is able to improve the performance of record linkage.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Dynamics of waves in 1D electron systems: Density oscillations driven by population inversion

We explore dynamics of a density pulse induced by a local quench in a one-dimensional electron system. The spectral curvature leads to an "overturn" (population inversion) of the wave. We show that beyond this time the density profile develops strong oscillations with a period much larger than the Fermi wave length. The effect is studied first for the case of free fermions by means of direct quantum simulations and via semiclassical analysis of the evolution of Wigner function. We demonstrate then that the period of oscillations is correctly reproduced by a hydrodynamic theory with an appropriate dispersive term. Finally, we explore the effect of different types of electron-electron interaction on the phenomenon. We show that sufficiently strong interaction [$U(r)\gg 1/mr^2$ where $m$ is the fermionic mass and $r$ the relevant spatial scale] determines the dominant dispersive term in the hydrodynamic equations. Hydrodynamic theory reveals crucial dependence of the density evolution on the relative sign of the interaction and the density perturbation.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figure

A parallel algorithm for the enumeration of benzenoid hydrocarbons

We present an improved parallel algorithm for the enumeration of fixed benzenoids B_h containing h hexagonal cells. We can thus extend the enumeration of B_h from the previous best h=35 up to h=50. Analysis of the associated generating function confirms to a very high degree of certainty that $B_h \sim A \kappa^h /h$ and we estimate that the growth constant $\kappa = 5.161930154(8)$ and the amplitude $A=0.2808499(1)$.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Leibnizian, Robinsonian, and Boolean Valued Monads

This is an overview of the present-day versions of monadology with some applications to vector lattices and linear inequalities.Comment: This is a talk prepared for the 20th St. Petersburg Summer Meeting in Mathematical Analysis, June 24-29, 201

Boson-assisted tunneling in layered metals

A theory for boson-assisted tunneling via randomly distributed resonant states in a layered metals is developed. As particular examples, we consider the electron-phonon interaction and the interaction between localized and conduction electrons. The theory is applied to explain a non-monotonic variation of the out-plane resistivity with temperature observed in quasi-two-dimensional metals.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

The Effect of Air on Granular Size Separation in a Vibrated Granular Bed

Using high-speed video and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) we study the motion of a large sphere in a vertically vibrated bed of smaller grains. As previously reported we find a non-monotonic density dependence of the rise and sink time of the large sphere. We find that this density dependence is solely due to air drag. We investigate in detail how the motion of the intruder sphere is influenced by size of the background particles, initial vertical position in the bed, ambient pressure and convection. We explain our results in the framework of a simple model and find quantitative agreement in key aspects with numerical simulations to the model equations.Comment: 14 pages, 16 figures, submitted to PRE, corrected typos, slight change

Full counting statistics of a chaotic cavity with asymmetric leads

We study the statistics of charge transport in a chaotic cavity attached to external reservoirs by two openings of different size which transmit non-equal number of quantum channels. An exact formula for the cumulant generating function has been derived by means of the Keldysh-Green function technique within the circuit theory of mesoscopic transport. The derived formula determines the full counting statistics of charge transport, i.e., the probability distribution and all-order cumulants of current noise. It is found that, for asymmetric cavities, in contrast to other mesoscopic systems, the third-order cumulant changes the sign at high biases. This effect is attributed to the skewness of the distribution of transmission eigenvalues with respect to forward/backward scattering. For a symmetric cavity we find that the third cumulant approaches a voltage-independent constant proportional to the temperature and the number of quantum channels in the leads.Comment: new section on probability distribution and new references adde

Denaturation of Heterogeneous DNA

The effect of heterogeneous sequence composition on the denaturation of double stranded DNA is investigated. The resulting pair-binding energy variation is found to have a negligible effect on the critical properties of the smooth second order melting transition in the simplest (Peyrard-Bishop) model. However, sequence heterogeneity is dramatically amplified upon adopting a more realistic treatment of the backbone stiffness. The model yields features of ``multi-step melting'' similar to those observed in experiments.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, text and figures also available at http://matisse.ucsd.edu/~hw