ICT Resource Accessibility and Competencies In Usage After The Covid-19 Partial Closure of Pre-Tertiary Schools In Ghana: Administrators’ Perspective

School administrators’ technological competencies serve as an essential element in school excellence. As a lead for curriculum implementation, school administrators anchor technological integration in the school settings and operations, curriculum and pedagogy and create an enabling environment for ICT development competencies between and among teachers and students. As a result, this study aimed to investigate the ICT resource accessibility and pre-tertiary administrators’ competencies in usage after the covid-19 partial closure of schools in Ghana. The study used a sequential explanatory mixed-method approach and a descriptive survey design. The target population was 70 Public Senior High School (PSHS) administrators in the five in the Birim Central Municipality. The census survey was used to include all the 70 PSHS administrators, expert purposive sampling technique used for selection of 10 respondents to be interviewed, whiles the 60 PSHS were required to complete the questionnaire. The study revealed that computers were the most accessible ICT equipment in the school but were without internet accessibility and connectivity for administrative work. Furthermore, the study showed that school administrators had a low level of competency in using the Microsoft Office suite and internet application tools. Furthermore, ICT accessibility and competency can statistically predict the use of ICT by school administrators to facilitate administrative work. As a result, there is statistically significant impact of administrators\u27 ICT accessibility and competency on the use of ICT in the SHSs in the Birim Central Municipality. Therefore, school administrators need to pursue competency-based programmes in ICT because the confidence in using a system is directly related to the user\u27s competence in using the technology system, which translates into perceived ease of use

Effective CCTV and the challenge of constructing legitimate suspicion using remote visual images

This paper compares the effectiveness of public CCTV systems according to meta-reviews, with what might be expected based upon theoretical predictions. The apparent gulf between practice and prediction is explored in the light of the challenges faced by CCTV operators in terms of effective target selection. In addition, counter-intuitive reactions by members of the public to situational symbols of crime deterrence may also undermine the efficacy of CCTV. Evidence is introduced and reviewed that suggests CCTV operators may employ implicit profiles to select targets. Essentially, young, scruffy males who appear to be loitering are disproportionately targeted compared with their base rate use of surveyed areas. However, the extent to which such a profile is diagnostic of criminal intent or behaviour is unclear. Such profiles may represent little more than ‘pattern matching’ within an impoverished visual medium. Finally, suggestions for future research and effective CCTV operator practice are offered in order to improve target selection.Peer reviewe

Time and its uses in accounts of conditional discharge in forensic psychiatry

This paper presents an analysis of time relevant talk by patients and workers in forensic mental health care services. In doing so it presents new knowledge of the use of time and its patterning in contemporary mental health care. Regularities and discontinuities in discharge and aftercare planning are examined. Regularities include timed phases for movement towards discharge and other discretionary aftercare arrangements. Discontinuities include awareness of mismatches between discharge plans and arrangements often between hospital and community based resources. Bench-marking is evident in which individuals gauge progress or lack of it against others within the system. Time also functions as a resource for establishing distance between past selves and current or imagined future identities. Time is therefore an important feature in building post-hospital lives. Workers for their part position time as one element in a complex series of judgments on post-discharge constructions of the person and their risk status

Train‐the‐trainer: Methodology to learn the cognitive interview

Research has indicated that police may not receive enough training in interviewing cooperative witnesses, specifically in use of the cognitive interview (CI). Practically, for the CI to be effective in real‐world investigations, police investigators must be trained by law enforcement trainers. We conducted a three‐phase experiment to examine the feasibility of training experienced law enforcement trainers who would then train others to conduct the CI. We instructed Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement trainers about the CI (Phase I); law enforcement trainers from both agencies (n = 4, 100% male, mean age = 50 years) instructed university students (n = 25, 59% female, mean age = 21 years) to conduct either the CI or a standard law enforcement interview (Phase II); the student interviewers then interviewed other student witnesses (n = 50, 73% female, mean age = 22 years), who had watched a simulated crime (phase III). Compared with standard training, interviews conducted by those trained by CI‐trained instructors contained more information and at a higher accuracy rate and with fewer suggestive questions.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147804/1/jip1518_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147804/2/jip1518.pd

The lived experience of working with female patients in a high secure hospital

Women’s secure hospitals are often considered to be stressful and demanding places to work, with these environments characterised as challenging and violent. The staff experience of working in this environment is however not well represented in the literature. This study is the first to examine the ‘lived experience’ of seven nurses working in the National High Secure Healthcare Service for Women. Interview transcripts were analysed with the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and the findings presented within four superordinate themes ‘horror’, ‘balancing acts’, ‘emotional hard labour’, and ‘the ward as a community’. These themes all depict the challenges that participants experience in their work, the ways in which they cope with these challenges and how they make sense of these experiences. A meta-theme of ‘making sense by understanding why’ is also presented, which represents the importance for participants to attempt to make sense of the tensions and challenges by formulating a fuller meaning. The findings suggest the importance of workforce development, in terms of allowing sufficient protected time for reflection and formulation (for example within the format of group supervision or reflective practice), and for staff support mechanisms (e.g. clinical supervision, counselling, debriefs) to be inbuilt into the ethos of a service, so as to provide proactive support for staff ‘on the frontline’

Is metal theft committed by organized crime groups, and why does it matter?

Using the example of metal theft in the United Kingdom, this study used mixed methods to evaluate the accuracy of police estimates of the involvement of organised crime groups (OCGs) in crime. Police estimate that 20-30% of metal theft is committed by OCGs, but this study found that only 0.5% of metal thieves had previous convictions for offences related to OCGs, that only 1.3% were linked to OCGs by intelligence information, that metal thieves typically offended close to their homes and that almost no metal thefts involved sophisticated offence methods. It appears that police may over-estimate the involvement of OCGs in some types of crime. The reasons for and consequences of this over-estimation are discussed

Music-making for health and wellbeing in youth justice settings: mediated affordances and the impact of context and social relations

© 2017 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL. Young people in the criminal justice system experience significant health and wellbeing issues that often stem from poverty and disadvantage and, in turn, are linked with offending and reoffending behaviour. There is ongoing interest in interventions such as participatory music programmes that seek to foster social reintegration, support mental wellbeing and equip young offenders with life skills, competencies and emotional resilience. However, there is a need for a situated understanding of both positive and negative experiences that shape potential outcomes of music projects. This article reports on a research study undertaken between 2010 and 2013 with 118 young people aged 13–21years across eight youth justice settings in England and Wales. Using mixed methods we explored the experiences of young people and their responses to a participatory music programme led by a national UK arts charity. Here, we explore the impact of young people's encounters with music and musicians with reference to the notion of ‘musical affordances’ (DeNora,). We examine the ways that such affordances, including unintended outcomes, are mediated by features of the youth justice environment, including its rules and regulations, as well as issues of power, identity and social relations

Drawing the answers: Sketching to support free and probed recall by child witnesses and victims with autism spectrum disorder

The success of witness interviews in the criminal justice system depends on the accuracy of information obtained, which is a function of both amount and quality of information. Attempts to enhance witness retrieval such as mental reinstatement of context have been designed with typically developed adults in mind. In this paper, the relative benefits of mental and sketch reinstatement mnemonics are explored with both typically developing children and children with autism. Children watched a crime event video, and their retrieval of event information was examined in free and probed recall phases of a cognitive interview. As expected, typically developing children recalled more correct information of all types than children with autism during free and probed recall phases. Sketching during free recall was more beneficial for both groups in both phases in reducing the amount of incorrect items, but the relative effect of sketching on enhancing retrieval accuracy was greater for children with autism. The results indicate the benefits of choosing retrieval mnemonics that are sensitive to the specific impairments of autistic individuals, and suggest that retrieval accuracy during interviews can be enhanced, in some cases to the same level as that of typically developing individuals

The probation service in England and Wales: A decade of radical change or more of the same?

This article reviews developments in probation in England and Wales since 2010, a decade in which services were exposed to the logic of competition and profit. In 2014, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms promised an end to a top-down, target-centric culture of state intervention by outsourcing services for low-to-medium risk offenders to 21 privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). And yet, just four years after the reforms were implemented, the Conservative government announced that CRCs’ contracts would be terminated, with all offender management services returned to the public sector. With a focus on the private sector, the article argues that radical change to the probation service’s structure has entrenched a focus on centrally-administered performance targets and audit. In other words, contrary to the decentralising rhetoric at the core of TR, the decade has in many ways produced more of the same managerialism that the reforms were presented as a means to displace. The result has been a general decline in the quality of probation services