Exploring the experience of acute inpatient mental health care from the perspective of family and carers of people experiencing psychosis: A qualitative thematic analysis study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic

Family and carers play an important role in supporting service users who are in receipt of acute mental health inpatient care, but they can also be significantly emotionally and physically impacted. The aim of this study was to examine their needs and priorities during this time. Fourteen family and carers of inpatients experiencing psychosis completed semi-structured interviews examining their experiences of inpatient care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thematic analysis was used to analyse data. Four key themes were identified: ‘A turbulent journey to hospital admission’, ‘I need information and support’, ‘Maintaining my relationship with my loved one’ and ‘Inpatient care is a mixed bag’. Each theme comprised four or five subthemes. The findings demonstrated that family and carers feel excluded from inpatient care and struggled to maintain contact with their loved ones, which was exacerbated by COVID-19 related restrictions. Communication and being regularly informed about their loved one’s care, as well as visiting loved ones, was particularly problematic. Inpatient care needs to be more inclusive of family and carers and ensure they are kept in mind at every stage of the admission

Ethnicity, Job Search and Labor Market Reintegration of the Unemployed

This paper is based on recently collected and rich survey data of a representative sample of entrants into unemployment in Germany. Our data include a large number of migration variables, allowing us to adapt a recently developed concept of ethnic identity: the ethnosizer. To shed further light on the native-migrant differences in economic outcomes, we investigate the labor market reintegration, patterns of job search, and reservation wages across unemployed migrants and natives in Germany. Our results indicate that separated migrants have a relatively slow reintegration into the labor market. We explain this finding by arguing that this group exerts a relatively low search effort and that it has reservation wages which are moderate, yet still above the level which would imply similar employment probabilities as other groups of migrants

Ethnic Identity and Educational Outcomes of German Immigrants and Their Children

Identity can be an important driving force for educational performance. Immigrants and their children face the challenge of identifying with their host country's culture. This paper examines whether young immigrants and their children who identify stronger with the German culture are more likely to increase their educational outcomes. I use a concept of ethnic identity which is designed to capture Germanness in immigrants' day-to-day routine - based on self-identification, language skills and cultural habits. The research design takes into account the issue of endogeneity of ethnic identity in an educational outcome equation by measuring education and identity at different moments and by using an endogenous latent factor methodology. The paper finds that identification with the German culture has an overall positive effect on educational outcomes and diminishes and renders the educational gap between immigrants and the second generation insignificant. The paper¿s results indicate that the second generation identifies stronger with the German culture than immigrants, no matter whether of German, European, Central European or Turkish background. Apart from the immigrant generation, own low educational attainment and high mother's educational attainment matter for identification with the German culture

A new integrative assessment indicator for damage caused by major pests and diseases in the vineyard

An original and integrative evaluation indicator has been developed to quantify the cumulated damage from major pests and diseases affecting grape bunches: downy mildew, powdery mildew, gray mould and tortricid moths. It made it possible to estimate the associated crop losses and to relate them to the plant protection strategy in different modes of production (organic farming, in-transition, conventional). Thus, overall plant losses were higher in 2012 than in 2011. The in-transition growers’ strategy, with reduced copper doses but increased numbers of sprays, led to a 20% increase in average severity on bunches (essentially due to Downy mildew). The more pragmatic approach of experienced organic growers and conventional ones (higher doses and fewer sprays) reduced the yield losses. The proposed indicator is used for two purposes, i) evaluating the quantitative losses due to pest attacks and ii) differentiating them from other non-pest ones. A more detailed analysis including the impact on performance will be achieved and published soon

Development and validation of the African Women Awareness of CANcer (AWACAN) tool for breast and cervical cancer.

BACKGROUND: Measuring factors influencing time to presentation is important in developing and evaluating interventions to promote timely cancer diagnosis, yet there is a lack of validated, culturally relevant measurement tools. This study aimed to develop and validate the African Women Awareness of CANcer (AWACAN) tool to measure awareness of breast and cervical cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). METHODS: Development of the AWACAN tool followed 4 steps: 1) Item generation based on existing measures and relevant literature. 2) Refinement of items via assessment of content and face validity using cancer experts' ratings and think aloud interviews with community participants in Uganda and South Africa. 3) Administration of the tool to community participants, university staff and cancer experts for assessment of validity using test-retest reliability (using Intra-Class Correlation (ICC) and adjusted Kappa coefficients), construct validity (comparing expert and community participant responses using t-tests) and internal reliability (using the Kuder-Richarson (KR-20) coefficient). 4) Translation of the final AWACAN tool into isiXhosa and Acholi. RESULTS: ICC scores indicated good test-retest reliability (≥ 0.7) for all breast cancer knowledge domains and cervical cancer risk factor and lay belief domains. Experts had higher knowledge of breast cancer risk factors (p 0.7, and lower (0.6) for the cervical cancer risk subscale. CONCLUSION: The final AWACAN tool includes items on socio-demographic details; breast and cervical cancer symptom awareness, risk factor awareness, lay beliefs, anticipated help-seeking behaviour; and barriers to seeking care. The tools showed evidence of content, face, construct and internal validity and test-retrest reliability and are available for use in SSA in three languages.Research reported in this article was jointly supported by the Cancer Association of South Africa (CANSA), the University of Cape Town and the South African Medical Research Council with funds received from the South African National Department of Health, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Africa Non-Communicable Disease Open Lab (via a supporting grant Project Number: 023), the United Kingdom Medical Research Council (via the Newton Fund)

Ethnic diversity and labor market success

The economic potential of ethnic and cultural diversity is often underestimated. This paper summarizes a number of recent studies which show that 'soft' factors such as attitudes, perceptions and identities - and in particular ethnic identities - significantly affect economic outcomes. More specifically, the studies analyze the process of cultural integration over migrant generations as well as the process of job search and labor market reintegration of the unemployed. The economy can thus gain productivity and efficiency by recognizing and incorporating such multi-ethnic factors. Cultural assimilation that goes along with a loss of migrants' own cultural heritage does not appear to be the sole or dominant strategy of an economically successful integration. To tap the full potential of ethnic and cultural diversity, an increased cultural and ethnic open-mindedness of the native population is desirable

New Loop Representations for 2+1 Gravity

Since the gauge group underlying 2+1-dimensional general relativity is non-compact, certain difficulties arise in the passage from the connection to the loop representations. It is shown that these problems can be handled by appropriately choosing the measure that features in the definition of the loop transform. Thus, ``old-fashioned'' loop representations - based on ordinary loops - do exist. In the case when the spatial topology is that of a two-torus, these can be constructed explicitly; {\it all} quantum states can be represented as functions of (homotopy classes of) loops and the scalar product and the action of the basic observables can be given directly in terms of loops.Comment: 28pp, 1 figure (postscript, compressed and uuencoded), TeX, Pennsylvania State University, CGPG-94/5-