179 research outputs found

    The relationship between residential satisfaction, sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place in a Western Australian urban planned community

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    Residential satisfaction is important as it contributes to a personā€Ÿs psychological wellbeing and quality of life. Residential satisfaction develops due to physical factors such as the provision of parks and amenities within a community, social factors such as a feeling of belongingness to the community and social support within the community and personal factors such as homeownership and length of residence. Sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place also influence residential satisfaction; however, the extent that these contribute is unclear. As a result, this study investigated the contribution of these constructs to the development of residential satisfaction in the planned community of Ellenbrook, designed to promote these concepts. Additionally, this study investigated the relationship between residential satisfaction, sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place as well as the factors that comprise of these constructs. A quantitative approach was utilised in which 300 residents completed published questionnaires measuring residential satisfaction, sense of community, sense of place and sense of belonging. to examine the extent that social, physical and personal predictors contributed to the development of residential satisfaction, sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place, a Kruskal-Wallis analysis was undertaken. The findings indicated that the social and physical factors: feelings of belongingness, community attachment, community participation, minimal fear of crime, community layout and design and housing density contribute to the experience of high levels of residential satisfaction, sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place. Regarding personal factors: age, ethnicity, homeownership, length of residence and educational level did not contribute to the development of residential satisfaction, sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place. However, marital status contributed to the development of sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place but not residential satisfaction. Household income and number of people known in the community contributed to the development of sense of community and sense of belonging, while gender contributed to the development of residential satisfaction and sense of community. These findings indicate that a community developed with sensitivity to peopleā€Ÿs social and personal needs as well as specific spatial planning elements, contribute to the development of residential satisfaction. The interrelation of sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place and their impact on residential satisfaction was explored through factor analysis. Results showed nine factors to emerge. One factor consisted of several residential satisfaction items along with the attraction to neighbourhood components of sense of community, and the place attachment components of sense of place, indicating the communality of these items. Despite efforts to use distinctive measures of these concepts, there is to a certain degree, an inseparable nature of the dimensions of residential satisfaction, sense of community and sense of place. The sense of belonging items emerged as a separate factor indicating it to have a unique identity from residential satisfaction, sense of place and sense of community. Additionally, three of the four place identity items emerged on one factor, as did the residential satisfaction items referring to feelings of dissatisfaction, suggesting the uniqueness of these items. To examine the relationship between residential satisfaction, sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place, regression analyses were performed. There was a significant positive relationship between residential satisfaction and sense of community Ļ‡2 (1,300) = 40.127, p \u3c .05; residential satisfaction and sense of place Ļ‡2 (1,300) = 56.805, p \u3c .05 and residential satisfaction and sense of belonging Ļ‡2 (1,300) = 25.848, p \u3c .05. This indicates that sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place contribute to the development of residential satisfaction, supporting previous research. The examination of these concepts in conjunction is a new concept. As a result, this research provides a theoretical understanding of the interrelation, as well as the uniqueness, of residential satisfaction, sense of community, sense of belonging and sense of place. Practically, this research assists policy makers and planners to develop communities that encompass these concepts to avoid issues faced by unplanned communities

    History as reflective practice: a model for integrating historical studies into nurse education

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    The role of history in developing professional identity in nursing is well known, and the discipline of nursing history research continues to flourish. Yet this work often struggles to find its way into undergraduate university nurse education courses. We put forward a model for history as reflective practice in which we suggest that historical studies can be used as a form of evidence to develop critical thinking and clinical reasoning, as well as situate nursing practice within its social and political context. In this model, we draw on historical scholarship related to the profession, practice and person, focusing on work which demonstrates nursing\u27s contribution to broader systems of health care. Drawing on Lewenson and Lynaugh\u27s \u27history by stealth\u27 approach, curriculum mapping and constructive alignment techniques are used to identify the moments in an existing programme where historical scholarship is relevant to an intended learning outcome. We then use an interdisciplinary team to develop learning activities and assessment tasks drawing on both primary and secondary sources that are then embedded within existing subjects. This model encourages students to consider history as a way of knowing and as a form of evidence within their reflective practice. Furthermore, it creates knowledge that continues to foster and acknowledge nurses\u27, and nursing\u27s, contribution to the development of human health

    The MaTE Toolā€”Enabling Engaged Scholars at a Regional University

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    Providing institutionally recognized evidence of community engaged scholarship has long been problematic for engaged scholars when applying for recognition through promotion or probation pathways. To combat this, the University of Wollongong [in New South Wales, Australia] developed an online tool for use by engaged scholars to track and measure their engagement activities in a consistent and institutionally recognized form. This article outlines the process that was undertaken to develop the online system for measuring and tracking engagement (the MaTE tool). It outlines the initial recognition of the key issues arising from a comprehensive review of the literature; the drafting process undertaken to develop a prototype for the tool; and the interview stage and subsequent re-drafting process and finalization of the tool. The article concludes with a consideration of future directions for the tool and its further implementation at the university

    Five-Year Change in Body Mass Index Predicts Conversion to Mild Cognitive Impairment or Dementia Only in APOE ɛ4 Allele Carriers

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    Background: Body mass index (BMI) has been identified as an important modifiable lifestyle risk factor for dementia, but less is known about how BMI might interact with Apolipoprotein E ɛ4 (APOE ɛ4) carrier status to predict conversion to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the interaction between APOE ɛ4 status and baseline (bBMI) and five-year BMI change (Ī”BMI) on conversion to MCI or dementia in initially cognitively healthy older adults. Methods: The associations between bBMI, Ī”BMI, APOE ɛ4 status, and conversion to MCI or dementia were investigated among 1,289 cognitively healthy elders from the National Alzheimerā€™s Coordinating Center (NACC) database. Results: After five years, significantly more carriers (30.6%) converted to MCI or dementia than noncarriers (17.6%), pā€Š\u3cā€Š0.001, ORā€Š=ā€Š2.06. Neither bBMI (ORā€Š=ā€Š0.99, 95%CIā€Š=ā€Š0.96ā€“1.02) nor the bBMI by APOE interaction (ORā€Š=ā€Š1.02, 95%CIā€Š=ā€Š0.96ā€“1.08) predicted conversion. Although Ī”BMI also did not significantly predict conversion (ORā€Š=ā€Š0.90, 95%CIā€Š=ā€Š0.78ā€“1.04), the interaction between Ī”BMI and carrier status was significant (ORā€Š=ā€Š0.72, 95%CIā€Š=ā€Š0.53ā€“0.98). For carriers only, each one-unit decline in BMI over five years was associated with a 27%increase in the odds of conversion (ORā€Š=ā€Š0.73, 95%CIā€Š=ā€Š0.57ā€“0.94). Conclusion: A decline in BMI over five years, but not bBMI, was strongly associated with conversion to MCI or dementia only for APOE ɛ4 carriers. Interventions and behaviors aimed at maintaining body mass may be important for long term cognitive health in older adults at genetic risk for AD

    The Association Between Parent Engagement and Child Outcomes in Social Skills Training Programs: Discovering the Secret Agent Society in Partnership

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    Previous research in clinical, community, and school settings has demonstrated positive outcomes for the Secret Agent Society (SAS) social skills training program. This is designed to help children on the autism spectrum become more aware of emotions in themselves and others and to ā€˜problem-solveā€™ complex social scenarios. Parents play a key role in the implementation of the SAS program, attending information and support sessions with other parents and providing supervision, rewards, and feedback as their children complete weekly ā€˜home missionā€™ assignments. Drawing on data from a school-based evaluation of the SAS program, this study examined whether parentsā€™ engagement with these elements of the intervention was linked to the quality of their childrenā€™s participation and performance. Sixty-eight 8-14 year olds (mean age 10.7) with a diagnosis of autism participated in the program. The findings indicated that ratings of parental engagement were positively correlated with childrenā€™s competence in completing home missions and with the quality of their contribution during group teaching sessions. However, there was a less consistent relationship between parental engagement and measures of childrenā€™s social and emotional skill gains over the course of the program

    Implementation, Evalution and Maintenance of a Social-Emotional Skills Training Program for Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder in a Specialist School Setting

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    Socialization difficulties in children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are often associated with peer rejection and impaired academic achievement. Schools might appear to offer an ideal setting for social-emotional skills (SES) instruction. However, common challenges to successful implementation of school-based programs include inadequate staffing and resourcing, and a lack of ASD-specific staff training. This paper describes how barriers to program implementation were overcome in a project evaluating the Secret Agent Society (SAS) SES training intervention within Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect) specialist classes. Questionnaire data was collected from school staff over a one-year period. Findings supported the effectiveness of the adoption process used, and suggest that SAS was feasible and acceptable to school staff

    DARIAH Beyond Europe

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    International audienceDARIAH, the digital humanities infrastructure with origins and an organisational home in Europe, is nearing the completion of its implementation phase. The significant investment from the European Commission and member countries has yielded a robust set of technical and social infrastructures, ranging from working groups, various registries, pedagogical materials, and software to support diverse approaches to digital humanities scholarship. While the funding and leadership of DARIAH to date has come from countries in, or contiguous with, Europe, the needs that drive its technical and social development are widely shared within the international digital humanities community beyond Europe. Scholars on every continent would benefit from well-supported technical tools and platforms, directories for facilitating access to information and resources, and support for working groups.The DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop series, organised and financed under the umbrella of the DESIR project (ā€œDARIAH ERIC Sustainability Refined,ā€ 2017ā€“2019, funded by the European Unionā€™s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program), convened three meetings between September 2018 and March 2019 in the United States and Australia. These workshops served as fora for cross-cultural exchange, and introduced many non-European DH scholars to DARIAH; each of the workshops included a significant delegation from various DARIAH bodies, together with a larger number of local presenters and participants. The local contexts for these workshops were significantly different in their embodiment of research infrastructures: on the one hand, in the U.S., a private research university (Stanford) and the de facto national library (the Library of Congress), both in a country with a history of unsuccessful national-scale infrastructure efforts; and in Australia, a system which has invested substantially more in coordinated national research infrastructure in science and technology, but very little on a national scale in the humanities and arts. Europe is in many respects ahead of both host countries in terms of its research infrastructure ecosystem both at the national and pan-European levels.The Stanford workshop had four main topics of focus: corpus management; text and image analysis; geohumanities; and music, theatre, and sound studies. As the first of the workshops, the Stanford group also took the lead in proposing next steps toward exploring actionable ā€œDARIAH beyond Europeā€ initiatives, including the beginnings of a blog shared among participants from all the workshops, extra-European use of DARIAHā€™s DH Course Registry, and non-European participation in DARIAH Working Groups.The overall theme of the Library of Congress workshop was ā€œCollections as Data,ā€ building on a number of U.S.-based initiatives exploring how to enhance researcher engagement with digital collections through computationally-driven research. In Washington, D.C., the knowledge exchange sessions focussed on digitised newspapers and text analysis, infrastructural challenges for public humanities, and the use of web-archives in DH research. As at Stanford, interconnecting with DARIAH Working Groups was of core interest to participants, and a new Working Group was proposed to explore global access and use of digitised historical newspapers. A further important outcome was the agreement to explore collaboration between the U.S.-based ā€œCollections as Dataā€ initiatives and the Heritage Data Reuse Charter in Europe. The third and final workshop in the series took place in March 2019 in Australia, hosted by the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Convened by the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH), together with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and DARIAH, this event was co-located with the Academyā€™s second annual Humanities, Arts and Culture Data Summit. The first day of the event, targeted at research leadership and policy makers, was intended to explore new horizons for data-driven humanities and arts research, digital cultural collections and research infrastructure. The two subsequent days focused on engaging with a wide variety of communities, including (digital) humanities researchers and cultural heritage professionals. Organised around a series of Knowledge Exchange Sessions, combined with research-led lightning talks, the participants spoke in detail about how big ideas can be implemented practically on the ground. This poster reflects on the key outcomes and future directions arising from these three workshops, and considers what it might look like for DARIAH to be adopted as a fundamental DH infrastructure in a complex variety of international, national, and regional contexts, with diverse funding models, resources, needs, and expectations. One major outcome of all workshops was the shared recognition that, in spite of extensive funding, planning, and goodwill, these workshops were not nearly global enough in their reach: most importantly they were not inclusive of the Global South. Our new DARIAH beyond Europe community has a strong shared commitment to address this gap

    Modelling cross-reactivity and memory in the cellular adaptive immune response to influenza infection in the host

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    The cellular adaptive immune response plays a key role in resolving influenza infection. Experiments where individuals are successively infected with different strains within a short timeframe provide insight into the underlying viral dynamics and the role of a cross-reactive immune response in resolving an acute infection. We construct a mathematical model of within-host influenza viral dynamics including three possible factors which determine the strength of the cross-reactive cellular adaptive immune response: the initial naive T cell number, the avidity of the interaction between T cells and the epitopes presented by infected cells, and the epitope abundance per infected cell. Our model explains the experimentally observed shortening of a second infection when cross-reactivity is present, and shows that memory in the cellular adaptive immune response is necessary to protect against a second infection.Comment: 35 pages, 12 figure

    Isolation, small population size, and management influence inbreeding and reduced genetic variation in Kā€™gari dingoes

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    Small island populations are vulnerable to genetic decline via demographic and environmental stochasticity. In the absence of immigration, founder effects, inbreeding and genetic drift are likely to contribute to local extinction risk. Management actions may also have a greater impact on small, closed populations. The demographic and social characteristics of a species can, however, delay the impact of threats. Kā€™gari, aā€‰~ā€‰1 660 km2 island off the Australian east coast and UNESCO World Heritage Site (Fraser Island 1842ā€“2023), supports an isolated population of approximately 70ā€“200 dingoes that represent an ideal opportunity to explore the small island paradigm. To examine temporal and spatial patterns of genetic diversity in this population we analysed single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotype data (72 454 SNPS) for 112Ā Kā€™gari dingoes collected over a 25-year period (1996 to 2020). Genetic diversity was lower in Kā€™gari dingoes than mainland dingoesĀ at the earliest time point in our study and declined significantly following a management cull in 2001. We did not find any spatial genetic patterns on the island, suggesting high levels of genetic connectivity between socially discrete packs. This connectivity, combined with the social structure and behaviour of dingoes, may act in concert to buffer the population from the impacts of genetic drift in the short term. Nevertheless, a general decline in genetic variation via inbreeding and drift has occurred over the past 20 years which we suggest should be considered in any future management planning for the population. Monitoring patterns of genetic variation, together with a clearer understanding of the social ecology of Kā€™gari dingoes, will aid in the development of measurable genetic targets set over ecologically meaningful timelines, and help ensure continued survival of this culturally important population

    The AEDUCATE Collaboration. Comprehensive antenatal education birth preparation programmes to reduce the rates of caesarean section in nulliparous women. Protocol for an individual participant data prospective meta-analysis

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    Introduction: Rates of medical interventions in normal labour and birth are increasing. This prospective meta-analysis (PMA) proposes to assess whether the addition of a comprehensive multicomponent birth preparation programme reduces caesarean section (CS) in nulliparous women compared with standard hospital care. Additionally, do participant characteristics, intervention components or hospital characteristics modify the effectiveness of the programme? Methods and analysis: Population: women with singleton vertex pregnancies, no planned caesarean section (CS) or epidural. Intervention: in addition to hospital-based standard care, a comprehensive antenatal education programme that includes multiple components for birth preparation, addressing the three objectives: preparing women and their birth partner/support person for childbirth through education on physiological/hormonal birth (knowledge and understanding); building womenā€™s confidence through psychological preparation (positive mindset) and support their ability to birth without pain relief using evidence-based tools (tools and techniques). The intervention could occur in a hospital-based or community setting. Comparator: standard care alone in hospital-based maternity units. Outcomes: Primary: CS. Secondary: epidural analgesia, mode of birth, perineal trauma, postpartum haemorrhage, newborn resuscitation, psychosocial well-being. Subgroup analysis: parity, model of care, maternal risk status, maternal education, maternal socio-economic status, intervention components. Study design: An individual participant data (IPD) prospective meta-analysis (PMA) of randomised controlled trials, including cluster design. Each trial is conducted independently but share core protocol elements to contribute data to the PMA. Participating trials are deemed eligible for the PMA if their results are not yet known outside their Data Monitoring Committees. Ethics and dissemination: Participants in the individual trials will consent to participation, with respective trials receiving ethical approval by their local Human Research Ethics Committees. Individual datasets remain the property of trialists, and can be published prior to the publication of final PMA results. The overall data for meta-analysis will be held, analysed and published by the collaborative group, led by the Cochrane PMA group. Trial registration number: CRD42020103857
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