Factors Leading to Giving by Known Catholic Donors

The much-publicized low-level giving of Catholic donors versus other denominations has been the source of much debate and a rich topic for many research studies and reports, especially within the last 10 years. The major focus of this current study was to show that Catholics are indeed generous and to seek factors that lead to their giving. The positive aspects of Catholic generosity were sought, rather than focusing on negative factors serving as barriers to giving. A self-administered questionnaire was sent to 208 known Catholic donors of the Diocese of Oakland in California during its Annual Bishop\u27s Appeal. Donors who had given $100.00 or more within a 24-month period received a survey during the month of September in the year 2000. Donors within three parishes in three different cities-Pleasant Hill, Union City, and San Ramon-were selected as a study sample. These were parishes with the most donors from the Annual Appeal and not the most wealthy parishes within the diocese. The survey asked 20 multiple-choice questions and two open-ended questions addressing the giving patterns of the respondents, their habits in terms of church attendance, personal characteristics including educational background, and their ability to give. Ninety-five individuals responded (46%), ranging in age from 32 to 83 years and an average age of 55.78 years. These respondents represented a core group of committed, involved, and generous parishioners. They were also deemed to be a representative sample of such individuals within any Catholic parish. If Catholics wish to continue meeting the needs of their increasing population, sufficient funds must be generated to build new schools, new churches, and to continue the outreach toward justice for which the Catholic church is known. This will mean a consistent focus on building the donor base in development offices of dioceses around the country. This goal also served as the purpose of the current study. The results suggest that the respondents were more involved in church life than their counterparts in other religious organizations. Additionally, their personal data showed them to be much more educated and, in fact, more sophisticated in their giving patterns. Most of the respondents planned their gifts, rather than giving from leftover funds. These findings could be taken to a diocesan-wide level and the study easily replicated and used in comparing other dioceses across the United States. This would aid in discovering if the core group of givers identified in this study indeed exists in every diocese. If so, are development directors providing these individuals with the proper means to facilitate their contribution, or are potential donors meeting barriers in their attempts to give? Greater understanding of the group of donors newly revealed in this study is needed to effectively increase fundraising efforts in support of the Catholic church

Lifestyle sports delivery and sustainability: clubs, communities and user-managers.

Lifestyle and informal sports have been recognised by policy makers as offering opportunities to increase participation in physical activity, particularly amongst hard to reach groups. Lifestyle sports are, however, double edged in their potential to achieve these goals. Their playful and non-traditional features may attract new participants less interested in traditional sports but the very liquidity of these activities may mean that the engagement of participants is fragmented and not sustained beyond a particular period in their lives. This article presents the perspective of mountain biking user-managers; those involved in the delivery, clubs and communities of mountain bikers across the United Kingdom. Findings suggest that whilst lifestyle sport communities are dependent on the work of formalised clubs to gain access to the funding and resources they need to sustain their activities, core participants will not always want to have to liaise or become involved formally within a club structure. In addition, clubs will not succeed in delivering sustained activities in line with sport policy to increase and maintain participation by relying on individual grants and without the support of an active informal user community. Accounts highlight the importance of engaging informal user communities with a sense of ownership such as locals to ensure new participants are integrated and the community is able to replenish

Factors affecting pathways to care for children and adolescents with complex vascular malformations: Parental perspectives

BACKGROUND: Complex vascular malformations (VMs) are rare disorders that can cause pain, coagulopathy, disfigurement, asymmetric growth, and disability. Patients with complex VMs experience misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, delayed or inappropriate treatments, and worsened health. Given the potential consequences of delaying expert care, we must identify the factors that impede or facilitate this access to care. RESULTS: We performed semi-structured interviews with 24 parents (21 mothers; 3 fathers; median age = 42.5 years) of children with complex VMs and overgrowth disorders living in the US, recruited through two patient advocacy groups - CLOVES Syndrome Community, and Klippel-Trenaunay Support Group. We performed thematic analysis to assess parental perspectives on barriers and facilitators to accessing expert care. We identified 11 factors, representing 6 overarching themes, affecting families\u27 ability to access and maintain effective care for their child: individual characteristics (clinician behaviors and characteristics, parent behaviors and characteristics), health care system (availability of specialist multidisciplinary teams, care coordination and logistics, insurance and financial issues, treatments and services), clinical characteristics (accuracy and timing of diagnosis, features of clinical presentation), social support networks, scientific progress, and luck and privilege. Additionally, access to information about VMs and VM care was a crosscutting theme affecting each of these factors. These factors influenced both the initial access to care and the ongoing maintenance of care for children with VMs. CONCLUSION: Parents of children with VMs report multiple factors that facilitate or impede their ability to provide their child with optimal care. These factors represent possible targets for future interventions to improve care delivery for families affected by VMs

Strategy for Generating Blinded Evidence for Single-Arm Trials with External Controls Using Expert Review of Home Video

Introduction Neurodegenerative diseases cause developmental delays and loss of milestones in infants and children. However, scalable outcome measures that quantify features meaningful to parents/caregivers (P/CGs) and have regulatory precedence are lacking for assessing the effectiveness of treatments in clinical trials of neurodegenerative disorders. To address this gap, we developed an innovative, blinded strategy for single-arm trials with external controls using expert panel review of home video. Method We identified meaningful, observable, and objective developmental milestones from iterative interviews with P/CGs and clinical experts. Subsequently, we standardized video recording procedures and instructions to ensure consistency in how P/CGs solicited each activity. In practice, videos would be graded by an expert panel blinded to treatment. To ensure blinding and quality control, video recordings from interim time points would be randomly interspersed. We conducted a pilot study and a pretest of grading to test feasibility and improve the final strategy. Results The five P/CGs participating in the pilot study found the instructions clear, selected activities important and reflective of their children’s abilities, and recordings at-home preferrable to in-clinic assessments. The three grading experts found the videos easy to grade and the milestones clinically meaningful. Conclusion Our standardized strategy enables expert panel grading of developmental milestone achievements using at-home recordings, blinded to treatment and post-baseline time points. This rigorous and objective scoring system has broad applicability in various disease contexts, with or without external controls. Moreover, our strategy facilitates flexible, continued data collection and the videos can be archived for future analyses

Revealing the queer-spectrum in STEM: undergraduate student responses to diverse gender identity and sexual orientation demographics questions

includes bibliographical references.includes bibliographical references.Poster was to be presented at the NARST 2020 conference in Portland, Oregon, from March 15-18th, which was canceled.Queer individuals face notable heterosexist and gender-normative expectations in STEM, leading to lower persistence. However, research on the experiences of queer-spectrum individuals is limited by current demographic practices. We developed queer-inclusive demographics questions and administrated them as part of a larger study in undergraduate engineering and computer science classes. We ask: how do responses compare to nation-wide queer demographics, 3-7% for both sexual orientation and gender, and how common are heterosexist or binary-enforcing responses? In a data subset (n=314), 14% of students reported a queer sexual orientation and 1.3% of students reported a queer gender. Few students used the open-response box for gender binary-enforcing (1.3%) or heterosexist (0.3%) commentary (e.g. only two genders exist). Our high rate of queer sexual orientation responses may be explained by our broad definition of queer or differing population demographics for young adults. The low rate of queer gender identity may be due to under-representation, lack of self-reporting, or survey structure. These data will inform analysis of student experiences in our larger study. Additional work developing a research-based queered demographics instrument is needed for larger-scale changes in demographics practices, which will help others identify and address barriers that queer individuals face in STEM fields.Supported by the National Science Foundation under grant nos. 1726268, 1725880 and 1726088, as well as funding from Colorado State University's Office of the Vice President for Diversity and Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering

Simulation-Based Training for Patient Safety: 10 Principles That Matter

Simulation-based training can improve patient care when factors influencing its design, delivery, evaluation, and transfer are taken into consideration. In this paper, we provide a number of principles and practical tips that organizations in health care can use to begin implementing effective simulation-based training as a way to enhance patient safety. We commend the health care community for their efforts thus far. We hope that the information provided in this paper will encourage thinking beyond the bells and whistles of the simulation and bring to light full potential of simulation-based training in health care and patient safety

SURFACE MEASURED ACCELERATIONS DURING CRICKET FAST-BOWLING

The aim of this research was to quantify the magnitude and timing of surface measured accelerations during the fast-bowling action. Eleven males performed 6 maximum velocity deliveries with accelerometers positioned over: both ankles; knees; hips; L5; L1; and the C7 vertebrae. Accelerometer signals exhibited decreased peak and increased time to peak acceleration from the ankle to the C7 sensor. Even when distal accelerations were largest at front foot contact, the body was still able to dissipate more than 90% of the acceleration. Active and passive mechanisms such as joint compliance and spinal compression within the body therefore likely contribute to the progressive attenuation of accelerations. The effects of such compliance on investigations of the intersegmental forces and moments during cricket fast-bowling via inverse dynamics warrants further investigation. KEYWORDS: accelerometer, attenuation, inertial measurement unit, ground reaction force

Evaluation of an Afterschool Children’s Healthy Eating and Exercise Program

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine the feasibility of the Children’s Healthy Eating and Exercise Program (CHEE) in an afterschool program of an elementary school. Methods:Students in a low-income elementary school were recruited to participate in the program. Thirty-three children were in the intervention group. Twenty-four children in the comparison group were recruited from after school clubs in the same elementary school.The CHEE Program consisted of 18 sessions, featuring nutrition (20 min) and physical activity (40 min) lessons. Nutrition lessons were adapted from the Traffic Light Diet. Other lessons included MyPlate, my refrigerator, my lunchbox, and a healthy foods tasting activity. Multiple physical activities were utilized in the program including soccer, dance, relay races, tag, and other fun games. Data were collected at the beginning and end of the program. Results: Children in both groups reported eating more vegetables at the post-intervention measurement. Children in the intervention group indicated that they learned about healthy eating and new physical activities due to their participation in the program. Conclusions: Future studies are needed to discover barriers to behavior change as well as apply a more rigorous design to examine the impact of the CHEE Program

Observing cosmic string loops with gravitational lensing surveys

We show that the existence of cosmic strings can be strongly constrained by the next generation of gravitational lensing surveys at radio frequencies. We focus on cosmic string loops, which simulations suggest would be far more numerous than long (horizon-sized) strings. Using simple models of the loop population and minimal assumptions about the lensing cross section per loop, we estimate the optical depth to lensing and show that extant radio surveys such as CLASS have already ruled out a portion of the cosmic string model parameter space. Future radio interferometers, such as LOFAR and especially SKA, may constrain $G\mu/c^2 < 10^{-9}$ in some regions of parameter space, outperforming current constraints from pulsar timing and the CMB by up to two orders of magnitude. This method relies on direct detections of cosmic strings, and so is less sensitive to the theoretical uncertainties in string network evolution that weaken other constraints.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures. v3: Some clarification of text, revised figure, appendix added. Submitted to Phys. Rev.