Public perceptions of self-harm: a test of an attribution model of public discrimination

This cross-sectional, questionnaire-based study applied Corrigan, Markowitz, Watson, Rowan, and Kubiak’s (2003) attribution model of public discrimination toward individuals with mental ill-health to explore public perceptions of self-harm—an underresearched topic, given the size and scale of the problem of self-harm.Participants (community-based adult sample, N=355, aged 18–67 years) were presented with 1 of 10, first-person, vignettes describing an episode of adolescent self-harm and completed self-report measures assessing dispositional empathy, familiarity with self-harm (professional; personal), perceived dangerousness, personal responsibility beliefs, emotional responses toward the person depicted in the vignette and helping/rejecting intentions. Vignettes were manipulated across conditions for the controllability of the stated cause (controllable; uncontrollable; unknown), stated motivation for self-harm (intrapersonal; interpersonal; unknown) and presentation format (video; text). Across the sample, attitudes were largely tolerant, with significantly higher levels of sympathetic than fearful or angry responding and significantly higher endorsement of helping responses than avoidance, segregative or coercive approaches. The manipulation of controllability of cause (controllable; uncontrollable), but not stated motivation (intrapersonal; interpersonal), was related to differences in cognitive, emotional or behavioral responding. Taken together, results were largely consistent with the attribution model, suggesting this may be a useful framework for understanding public perceptions of self-harm

Dealing with difficult days: functional coping dynamics in self-harm ideation and enactment

Background: Self-harm affords people a means of coping. However, little is known about how functional coping dynamics differ between stressful situations in which people self-harm (enactment), think about harming (ideation), or experience no self-harmful thoughts or behaviours. Methods: Participants (N = 1,157) aged 16 − 49 years (M = 18.21, SD = 3.24) with a recent history of self-harm (past 3 months) reported how they coped in response to their most significant recent stressor (3 months). Results: Almost 40% of participants, all of whom had self-harmed in the last 3 months, had no self-harm experience (thoughts or behaviours) in response to their most significant stressor in that timeframe. In multivariate analysis, adjusting for symptoms of depression and anxiety, reappraisal coping was predictive of self-harm thoughts. Approach, emotion regulation and reappraisal coping were predictive of self-harm behaviour. Emotion regulation coping differentiated self-harm ideation and enactment groups. Limitations: The cross-sectional design of the study precludes the ability to make inferences regarding causality. Further, there is no agreed definition of ‘recent’ self-harm. Conclusions: Taken together, the findings suggest that functional coping dynamics may be differentially associated with self-harm ideation and enactment. This is important, given that understanding the transitions between ideation and enactment has been identified as a critical frontier in suicide prevention. Further, results indicate that seemingly innocuous events may have a profound impact as a tipping point for enaction; this has implications for clinical practice, including the co-production of safety plans

The view from the trenches : satisfaction with eHealth systems by a group of health professionals

The integration and adoption of eHealth systems within the health sector faces challenges. As health care practitioners are the end users of eHealth systems, their perceptions of these systems are critical in order to address the issues surrounding their implementation and application. This paper presents the views that a group of health care professionals hold regarding the eHealth systems that they use as part of their day to day work. These views were analysed according to the perceptions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with eHealth systems that these professionals expressed. They expressed satisfaction with the information consistency, work efficiency, access to information, quality of information, and availability of technical support associated with their systems use. They expressed dissatisfaction with a lack of communication and compatibility between systems, deficiency in terms of system functionality, a lack of system reliability, a lack of initial and ongoing training, and a need to develop workarounds in order to achieve work goals. Overall this research indicates that satisfaction with eHealth systems is a complex issue, and that the negative aspects of system satisfaction need to be addressed and the positive aspects carefully built upon.<br /

Big cities – ‘quiet places’: tracing relationships between material and immaterial qualities of urban spaces

This paper investigates the theme particular places from the perspective of ‘quiet places’, by examining potential links between material and immaterial qualities of four distinct typologies of urban spaces in the landscape metropolis, and offering five thematic lenses to sharpen our view for the particular. While the relationship between green spaces and restorative qualities for humans has long been acknowledged, the present research investigates other types of urban spaces, not focusing on ‘green’ or dB ratio as such but instead on confluences of soundscape, cityscape, flowscape, and other ‘scapes’ i.e. ‘material-immaterial landscapes’ in particular places in the two cities. This kind of particularity is an under-researched field also in methodological terms. We therefore set up a survey, in which we asked people about their appreciations of various material and immaterial qualities of the place; the conceptualisation of which derived partly from a pilot study and partly from a structured literature review. The responses revealed noticeable differences between the four typologies and less between similar types in the two cities. The results of the survey also showed a variety of expressions, deepening our understanding of the experienced qualities and simultaneously opening up for a new vocabulary addressing this interaction and its importance for ‘quiet places’, discussed in relation to methodological considerations. &nbsp

Big cities – ‘quiet places’: tracing relationships between material and immaterial qualities of urban spaces

This paper investigates the theme particular places from the perspective of ‘quiet places’, by examining potential links between material and immaterial qualities of four distinct typologies of urban spaces in the landscape metropolis, and offering five thematic lenses to sharpen our view for the particular. While the relationship between green spaces and restorative qualities for humans has long been acknowledged, the present research investigates other types of urban spaces, not focusing on ‘green’ or dB ratio as such but instead on confluences of soundscape, cityscape, flowscape, and other ‘scapes’ i.e. ‘material-immaterial landscapes’ in particular places in the two cities. This kind of particularity is an under-researched field also in methodological terms. We therefore set up a survey, in which we asked people about their appreciations of various material and immaterial qualities of the place; the conceptualisation of which derived partly from a pilot study and partly from a structured literature review. The responses revealed noticeable differences between the four typologies and less between similar types in the two cities. The results of the survey also showed a variety of expressions, deepening our understanding of the experienced qualities and simultaneously opening up for a new vocabulary addressing this interaction and its importance for ‘quiet places’, discussed in relation to methodological considerations.

Forskningsbibliotekerne i BiblioteksVagten.dk

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Stor tilfredshed med Biblioteksvagten.dk

I disse dage (december 2006) er det 4 år siden de første 4 forskningsbiblioteker gik med i Biblioteksvagten.dk. Siden har endnu 13 biblioteker - i disse fusionstider skal man måske snarere sige betjeningssteder, tilsluttet sig

CLA og andre stoffer i mælk relateret til den humane sundhed - hvordan kan primærproducenten påvirke indholdet

Mælkens indhold af CLA er interessant ud fra en human ernæringssynsvinklen, idet flere undersøgelser har vist en positiv sammenhæng mellem indtag af CLA og risikoen for cancer. Der blev fundet en betydelig variation mellem bedrifter i mælkens indhold af CLA, og ikke noget entydigt billede af niveauet i konventionel og økologisk mælk. Resultater viser desuden at foderrationens sammensætning påvirker niveauet, men også at der synes at være en forskel mellem de enkelte køer

Light and Media Projections in Patient Rooms: A Preliminary Case Study

New media and lighting technology and new ways to connect and control it have the potential to improve the environment in hospitals with the goal of increasing patient satisfaction. How should such system be designed to do so and how can it be tested? In this paper it is investigated how a specific case, an interactive lighting and media system installed in a patient room, can be improved to support a greater experience of patient satisfaction. Through questionnaires given to 14 mothers who have just given birth and their husbands staying in an interactive patient room, the experience of staying in the room and the patient satisfaction have been assessed. The results from the questionnaires are hereto combined to data log on how the media system has been used, which additionally leads to a design evaluation for the interactive media system. The results imply several areas which can be improved to meet the specific needs of the patients and thereby provide higher patient satisfaction. Hereto, the main findings suggest that the control of the lighting needs to be less complicated, the different lighting settings needs to be better tailored to the actual needs, noise from the projector and light coming from the iPad needs to be reduced, and for critical situations, the medical equipment needs to be an exact copy of what the caregivers are used to