Care staff perceptions of adults with profound learning disabilities: contents and processes

Background and Aims:This research dissertation attempts to elicit care staff perceptions of clients with profound learning disabilities and the processes involved in these perceptions. There is little research in the area of staff perspectives in this field. Clinical psychologists working in this field often have extensive contact with staff regarding clients, and conflict regarding perception of clients can arise. It is suggested that for psychologists to gain some insight into how staff perceive clients and the processes involved would help to facilitate understanding of, and co-operation, with care staff. Design and Participants: A qualitative design was employed as the study was seen as exploratory and was investigating the personal experiences and perspectives of participants. Participants were nine direct care staff who worked in a variety of service settings. Measures: Each respondent completed a written free response description of a client of their choice. This was followed by a semi-structured interview that aimed to explore the processes involved in staff perceptions of clients. Results: Written descriptions shared some factors in common with free response description within the general population. However, novel categories included communication issues, behavioural difficulties and the disability itself The interviews suggested that there were complex processes operating that made it difficult for respondents to acknowledge the disability and still feel positive about the clients and the work. There was also a marked change over time described by respondents in their perceptions of clients. Implications: It is suggested care staff need a forum for acknowledging and exploring difficult feelings. Clinical psychologists are well placed to facilitate this but must also be aware of their own problems regarding acknowledging and coping with profound disability. Awareness of the issues might also help psychologists to work more sensitively and productively with staff

Drivers of Early Technology Sector Development in Ireland

This paper explores the origins of the electronics and software sector, now called the Information Communications and Technology (ICT) Sector in the Republic of Ireland and its subsequent development from 1960 to 2010 inclusive. The research sought to identify key developments that influenced the emergence of the sector. For the purposes of this study, the ICT sector is defined as the foreign-owned and indigenous firms actively involved in the production, design and/or servicing of hardware and software electronic products within the Republic of Ireland. Empirical evidence in the form of 15 semi-structured interviews was analysed and validated by three respondents as well as one external ICT expert. Two key drivers found in the data were the development of a capable managerial cohort and a spinoff mechanism

Life in the FASt Lane: Speedy Workflows for Providing a Faculty Assisted Submission (FAS) Service for Your IR

Including faculty papers in your repository is an essential function of an IR, but it can be tough to manage the solicitation and review of previously published materials. What can we legally add to faculty collections? Are there any requirements for posting? Can you rely on faculty to submit their work and comply with publisher policies? At the University of Pennsylvania, we have been developing workflows and processes to systematically run permissions on faculty CVs and upload them to Penn’s IR, ScholarlyCommons. Through our Faculty Assisted Submission (FAS) service, we are maximizing the libraries’ ability to support faculty works in the repository with as little effort as possible for the faculty member and the IR manager. Now in the second year of this program, we have quadrupled the number of faculty papers submitted since the first year, adding thousands to our collections. By leveraging free tools and common Library purchases, we have expanded the breadth of participation and fostered a growing sense of faculty interest in participating in Penn’s IR. All of this has been achieved by implementing a comprehensive training program for student workers and external administrators with oversight from a two-person scholarly communications team. While this program is by no means completely effortless, by investing heavily in the training of student workers up front, we have engaged students in scholarly communication literacy and provided the library with a mechanism for reliable ingestion of faculty materials into the IR. In this presentation, we will provide our shareable resources and give a step-by-step overview of our training module, permissions process, and ingestion workflows. We will discuss some of the challenges we still face and how you can leverage these approaches for your own institution

LOWER LIMB COORDINATION DURING A LAND-CUT TASK FOLLOWING ANTERIOR CRUCIATE LIGAMENT RECONSTRUCTION AND REHABILITATION

This study compared the lower limb coordination of the previously injured leg of ACL injured participantsparticipants (ACLr, n=18), against their non-injured leg and a control (nACL, n=18) leg. The lower limb joint and segment couplings were calculated during maximal drop-jump land and unanticipated cutting task. Differences between the previously injured and nACL control leg were present in all but one of the lower limb joint and segment couplings. Differences between the previously injured and nACL control leg were present in the hip rotation - knee abduction adduction, and knee rotation knee abduction adduction couplings. The hip and thigh were the main areas where differences were reported. Altered proximal neuromuscular function may be the origin of these altered coordination patterns

Comparing Apples and Bananas? A/B Testing for Discovery System Optimization

Discovery systems have changed the ways in which students are able to search academic library resources by providing a simplified, customizable user interface. Librarians often make discovery system customization decisions based on instincts about what will work best for students or on small usability studies. A/B testing, commonly used by commercial enterprise but infrequently by libraries, employs two simultaneous, live versions of a web interface to gauge the effects of changing variables. This method has the advantage of reaching a large number of users performing authentic search tasks. The authors combined A/B testing with scenario-based usability testing to explore variables such as facet labels, facet order, and placement of search options. The results provide insight into the extent to which interface changes prompt users to employ available search options, allowing libraries to make decisions about discovery system customization driven by user data

Unspectacular Youth? Evening Leisure Space and Youth Culture in Sheffield, c.1960-c.1989

This thesis is a sustained look at ordinary young people’s leisure patterns and changing lifestyles in Sheffield between 1960 and 1989. It argues that the post-war period witnessed dramatic and significant changes in the types of leisure opportunities available to young people and, correspondingly, to their lifestyles and patterns of consumption in the leisure; this is particularly the case for young women. This thesis examines the intricacies of young people’s engagement with youth culture, where they socialised, and how they socialised, with a level of detail not afforded by national studies of youth culture. It argues that understanding the development and impact of regulatory practices with regards to evening leisure space is essential to understanding the leisure choices of young people. By charting and examining the impact of Sheffield’s licensing magistrates and other local authorities, this thesis demonstrates how heavily young people’s access to evening leisure space was mediated and controlled by authoritative bodies, and how it was influenced by wider societal concerns about young people’s drinking, sexuality, and morality. Ultimately, it argues that the development of evening leisure space forms a central, and often overlooked, part of young people’s engagement with youth culture. Centring on young people’s use of evening leisure space, this thesis argues that there were many ways of engaging with youth culture, influenced by factors including access to disposable income, social groupings, and parental tolerance. It posits that personal cultural interests such as music and fashion tastes, while an important part of identity curation and presentation of the self, were only one set of a wider series of factors shaping how young people engaged with consumption in the leisure sphere. As such, this thesis argues that a close-focus study such as this offers important insights into the lived experience of ordinary young people in post-war Britain

Injury Rates and Characteristics Associated with Participation in Organized Dance Education:A Systematic Review

Introduction: Several studies and recent systematic reviews have investigated injury in dance settings and have largely focused on specific concert dance genres (i.e., ballet, contemporary) and elite levels (i.e., pre-professional, professional) of dance. Less is known about the health of those who participate in dance education settings, namely teachers and students from private dance studios. Given that these individuals constitute a large proportion of the dance community, greater clarity of risks in the dance training environment could benefit an underserved majority by informing the development of effective injury prevention strategies.Objective: The primary objective was to describe injury rates and characteristics associated with participation in organized dance education settings.Methods: Six electronic databases were searched to April 2021 (Medline, EMBASE, SportDiscus, CINAHL, SCOPUS, Cochrane). Selected studies met a priori inclusion criteria that required original data from dance teacher and student samples within formal dance education settings. All genres of dance were eligible. Studies were excluded if no injury outcomes or estimates of dance exposure were reported, if injuries occurred during rehearsal and performance, or if dance was used as a therapeutic intervention or exercise. Two reviewers independently assessed each paper for inclusion at abstract and full text screening stages. The quality of included studies was assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute Level of Evidence tool.Results: The initial database search identified 1,424 potentially relevant records, 26 were included and scored. Most studies (n = 22) focused on dance students only, three included only dance teachers, and one study included both. Among both dance students and teachers, the majority of injuries reported were overuse or chronic and involved the lower limb. For studies that reported injury rates (n = 14), estimates ranged from 0.8 to 4.7 injuries per 1,000 dance hours, 4.86 per 1,000 dancer-days, and 0.21 to 0.34 per 1,000 dance exposures.Conclusions: Based on the current research, dance students and teachers experience a similar rate of injury to concert and professional dancers, and their injuries are most commonly overuse injuries involving the lower extremity. There have been few high-quality investigations of injury specific to the dance training environment. Therefore, consensus around the burden of injury in the dance education settings remains difficult. Future dance epidemiological investigations that examine the burden of injury among dance teachers and students, include operational injury and exposure definitions, and utilize prospective designs are warranted.<br/