Attachment Aware Schools:Working with Families to Enhance Parental Engagement and Home-School Relationships

Background:- Application of attachment theory in school contexts lacks empirical evidence. The Attachment Aware Schools pilot project was commissioned by two Local Authorities in England to improve the educational outcomes of Looked After Children, and to build an evidence base. Informed by attachment research, Attachment Aware Schools programs provide a coherent and integrated theoretical framework, discourse, and practice for all practitioners working with children and young people. Objective:- The primary focus was to provide whole school and targeted attachment-based strategies to support children’s well-being, behaviour, and academic attainment. This paper; however, documents a secondary objective, which was to facilitate collaborative partnerships with families. Method:- As part of the mixed methods approach to the Attachment Aware Schools project, a series of case studies were collected and thematically coded. The case studies were generated by practitioners using an outcomes-based framework. Results:- Although the case study sample size is small (N=10), the case studies presented here illustrate how Attachment Aware Schools programs can promote increased home-school engagement and shared practice between home and school. Outcomes include improved home-school relationships, reductions in behavioral incidents, and improved family dynamics. Conclusion:- Attachment Aware Schools can be a vehicle for facilitating supportive home-school collaborative partnerships with positive outcomes for vulnerable children and young people

Triggering rainfall intensities for post-wildfire debris flows in the Sonoran Desertscrub plant community

Wildfire makes landscapes more vulnerable to debris flows by reducing soil infiltration capacity and decreasing vegetation cover. The extent to which fire affects debris-flow processes depends on the severity of the fire, the climatology of intense rainfall, the pre-fire plant community, and sediment supply, among other factors. As fire expands into new plant communities and geographic regions, there is a corresponding need to expand efforts to document fire-induced changes and their impacts on debris-flow processes. In recent years, several large wildfires have impacted portions of the Sonoran Desertscrub plant community in Arizona, USA, a plant community where fire has been historically infrequent. Following two of these fires, we monitored debris-flow activity at the watershed scale and quantified wildfire-driven changes in soil hydraulic properties using in-situ measurements with mini disk tension infiltrometers. Results indicate that rainfall intensity-duration thresholds for the initiation of post-fire debris flows in recently burned watersheds within the Sonoran Desertscrub plant community are substantially greater than those in nearby areas dominated by other plant communities, such as chaparral. Results provide insight into the impact of fire on debris-flow processes in a plant community where it is likely to be more impactful in the future and help expand existing post-fire debris flow databases into a plant community where there is a paucity of observations

Coming Home: Health Status and Homelessness Risk of Older Pre-release Prisoners

Older adults comprise an increasing proportion of the prison and homeless populations. While older age is associated with adverse post-release health events and incarceration is a risk factor for homelessness, the health status and homelessness risk of older pre-release prisoners are unknown. Moreover, most post-release services are geared towards veterans; it is unknown whether the needs of non-veterans differ from those of veterans. To assess health status and risk of homelessness of older pre-release prisoners, and to compare veterans with non-veterans. Cross-sectional study of 360 prisoners (≥55 years of age) within 2 years of release from prison using data from the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities. Veteran status, health status (based on self-report), and risk of homelessness (homelessness before arrest). Mean age was 61 years; 93.8% were men and 56.5% were white. Nearly 40% were veterans, of whom 77.2% reported likely VA service eligibility. Veterans were more likely to be white and to have obtained a high school diploma or GED. Overall, 79.1% reported a medical condition and 13.6% reported a serious mental illness. There was little difference in health status between veterans and non-veterans. Although 1 in 12 prisoners reported a risk factor for homelessness, the risk factors did not differ according to veteran status. Older pre-release prisoners had a high burden of medical and mental illness and were at risk for post-release homelessness regardless of veteran status. Reentry programs linking pre-release older prisoners to medical and psychiatric services and to homelessness prevention programs are needed for both veterans and non-veterans

Privacy in Transport? Exploring Perceptions of Location Privacy Through User Segmentation

Unanticipated accumulation and dissemination of accurate location information flows is the latest iteration of the privacy debate. This mixed-methods research contributes a grounded understanding of risk perceptions, enablers and barriers to privacy preserving behaviour in a cyber-physical environment. We conducted the first representative survey on internet privacy concerns, cyber and physical risk taking, privacy victimisation, usage of location sharing apps and transport choices in the UK with 466 participants. The responses segregated participants into four distinct, novel clusters (cyber risk takers, physical risk takers, transport innovators, and risk abstainers) with cross-validated prediction accuracy of 92%. In the second part of the study, we qualitatively explored these clusters through 12 homogeneous focus groups with 6 participants each. The predominant themes of the groups matched their clusters with little overlap between the groups. The differences in risk perception and behaviours varied greatly between the clusters. Future transport systems, apps and websites that rely on location data therefore need a more personalised approach to information provision surrounding location sharing. Failing to recognise these differences could lead to reduced data sharing, riskier sharing behaviour or even total avoidance of new forms of technology in transport

Replication of an emergency department-based recovery coaching intervention and pilot testing of pragmatic trial protocols within the context of Indiana's Opioid State Targeted Response plan

Solving the opioid crisis requires immediate, innovative, and sustainable solutions. A number of promising strategies are being carried out by U.S. states and territories as part of their Opioid State Targeted Response (STR) plans funded through the 21st Century Cures Act, and they provide an opportunity for researchers to assess effectiveness of these interventions using pragmatic approaches. This paper describes a pilot study of Project Planned Outreach, Intervention, Naloxone, and Treatment (POINT), the intervention that served as the basis for Indiana's STR-funded, emergency department (ED)-based peer specialist expansion that was conducted in preparation for a larger, multisite pragmatic trial. Through the pilot, we identified, documented, and corrected for challenges encountered while implementing planned study protocols. Per the project's funding mechanism, the ability to move to the larger trial was determined by the achievement of 3 milestones: (1) successful replication of the intervention; (2) demonstrated ability to obtain the necessary sample size; and (3) observe a higher level of engagement in medication for addiction treatment in the POINT group compared to standard care. Overall implementation of the study protocols was successful, with only minor refinements to proposed procedures being required in light of challenges with (1) data access, (2) recruitment, and (3) identification of the expansion hospitals. All three milestones were reached. Challenges in implementing protocols and reaching milestones resulted in refinements that improved the study design overall. The subsequent trial will add to the limited but growing evidence on ED-based peer supports. Capitalizing on STR efforts to study an already scaling and promising intervention is likely to lead to faster and more sustainable results with greater generalizability than traditional, efficacy-focused clinical research

Lawmakers\u27 Use of Scientific Evidence Can Be Improved

Core to the goal of scientific exploration is the opportunity to guide future decision-making. Yet, elected officials often miss opportunities to use science in their policymaking. This work reports on an experiment with the US Congress-evaluating the effects of a randomized, dual-population (i.e., researchers and congressional offices) outreach model for supporting legislative use of research evidence regarding child and family policy issues. In this experiment, we found that congressional offices randomized to the intervention reported greater value of research for understanding issues than the control group following implementation. More research use was also observed in legislation introduced by the intervention group. Further, we found that researchers randomized to the intervention advanced their own policy knowledge and engagement as well as reported benefits for their research following implementation

Rethinking Measures of Democracy and Welfare State Universalism: Lessons from Subnational Research

Democracy and the welfare state are two of the most extensively studied concepts and themes in the field of comparative politics. Debate about how to best measure the two concepts has failed to contemplate the extent to which political and social rights are uniformly present across distinct regions of the national territory, despite the presence of substantial subnational research that underscores wide variation inside countries. We argue that this omission hampers our understanding of the two phenomena and we propose a new measure of democracy and healthcare unversalism, which we call the Adjusted Measures of Democracy and Welfare Universalism. The new measures integrate territorial inequality into existing national-level indicators, providing a more accurate picture of country performance and opening the door to new, multi-level theory building