Search results

This paper aims to explore the content of Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs) from older adult care homes to understand how safety is understood and might be measured in practice.

SARs relevant to older adult care homes from 2015 onwards were identified via the Social Care Institute of Excellence SARs library. Using thematic analysis, initial inductive coding was mapped to a health-derived safety framework, the Safety Measurement and Monitoring Framework (SMMF).

The content of the SARs reflected the dimensions of the SMMF but gaining a deeper understanding of safety in older adult care homes requires additional understanding of how this unique context interacts with these dimensions to create and prevent risks and harms. This review identified the importance of external factors in care home safety.

This study provides an insight into the scope of safety issues within care homes using the SARs content, and in doing so improves understanding of how it might be measured. The measurement of safety in care homes needs to acknowledge that there are factors external to care homes that a home may have little knowledge of and no ability to control.

This study aims to examine the role of deviant status (lower vs higher rank) and organizational structure (vertical vs horizontal) on individuals’ responses to workplace deviance.

Two studies (N = 472) were designed to examine the role of deviant status and organizational structure in responses to workplace deviance. Study 1 (N = 272) manipulated deviant status and organizational structure. Study 2 (N = 200) also manipulated deviant status but focused on participants’ subjective evaluations of the organizational structure of their workplace.

Study 1 found that participants reported lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and higher turnover intentions when they imagined being confronted with deviant behaviors displayed by a manager (vs by a subordinate), regardless of the type of organizational structure. Study 2 extended this finding by showing that the indirect effect of organizational structure (vertical vs horizontal) on turnover intention via job satisfaction and organizational commitment was moderated by deviant status: when the deviant’s status was higher, working in a vertical (vs horizontal) organization was associated with decreased job satisfaction and commitment, which, in turn, was associated with a higher level of turnover intentions.

The findings broaden our understanding of how individuals respond to deviance at the workplace, by simultaneously considering the effects of organizational structure (vertical vs horizontal) and deviant status (upward vs downward directions of deviance).

The purpose of this paper is to consolidate and evaluate the available research on animal abuse recidivism.

A narrative review of the animal abuse literature was conducted. Articles were included if they provided data/estimates of the rates of recidivism, findings regarding the static, dynamic and/or protective factors associated with animal abuse recidivism and available risk assessment tools, specifically for use with individuals who have a history of animal abuse.

The literature review highlighted high rates of reoffending amongst those who have harmed animals. Many risk and protective factors associated with animal abuse were common to the wider offending behaviour literature (e.g. antisocial attitudes, relationship issues), but more robust research is needed to highlight any distinct characteristics. Lastly, the review reports two risk assessment tools designed specifically for this offending group.

Clinicians and criminal justice personnel base their sentencing, detention and treatment decisions, at least in part, on the recidivism literature. This review provides a consolidation of the evidence base as an aide memoire for practitioners.

History of animal abuse is a risk factor for future animal harm specifically, and interpersonal violence more broadly. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review that presents the key research evidence on risk/protective factors and relevant risk assessment tools that can inform intervention planning to reduce risk of reoffending towards animals and humans alike when practitioners encounter clients who have a history of harming animals.

The effective use of machine‐readable information files depends on many factors. Not the least of these is what, for want of a better term, might be described as the ‘physical attributes’ of the materials. Since January 1967 the Chemical Society Research Unit has been operating a current‐awareness service based on magnetic tape versions of the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) publications Chemical Titles (CT), Chemical‐Biological Activities (CBAC) and the ‘Experiment in Selective Dissemination of Information’ (SDI experiment). During this period we have been made acutely aware of the problems of processing magnetic tapes over whose quality we have no control and which originate at a considerable distance from the site where they are finally used. In the hope that an awareness of these problems may assist other potential users of similar materials in planning their activities I shall describe the Unit's experiences in some detail, and suggest some possible courses of action to alleviate some of the difficulties. Where appropriate I will relate the Unit's experiences to those which have been reported to me by three other groups of users of magnetic tape retrieval files:

Support service provisions for domestic abuse victims have typically focussed on the immediate risk and etiological factors associated with abuse. Consequently, there is limited research exploring more persistent and pervasive factors involved in this cycle of abuse, such as subjective experiences and beliefs held by victims of domestic abuse. The purpose of this paper is to preliminary explore individual experience of domestic abuse including the belief systems of participants. Increasing our understanding of key factors and beliefs in the experience of domestic abuse could enable support services to create more long-term sustainable support for victims.

In total, 12 women with a history of domestic abuse participated in an exploratory interview about their general beliefs and thoughts surrounding their domestic abuse experience. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis.

The thematic analysis identified four belief themes: personal responsibility, antisocial attitudes, environmental factors and negative attitudes towards police.

The paper highlights the value of understanding subjective, personalized experiences and beliefs of domestic abuse victims; identifies the importance of belief systems as potential treatment targets for domestic abuse victims; and acknowledges an avenue for more effective support provision for victims of domestic abuse.

This preliminary study offers new insights into the role of belief systems amongst a sample of domestically abused women. Understanding the significance of personalized, subjective experiences of domestic abuse victims is a step towards designing and implementing effective interventions. The findings further emphasize the need for more empirical research and theory development within the area of beliefs and domestic abuse victims.

Community festivals ‐ Local community festivals can be a lot of fun to those who participate in them and, incidentally, help to strengthen community awareness and develop skills, but for those called upon or lumbered with the job of planning and organising them, they can be a nightmare. The task is made easier by the existence of an excellent little book, the Community festivals handbook, which has just been released in its 3rd edition by Community Projects Foundation. The kind of festival covered by this essentially practical handbook is that in which there is a concentrated mixture of activities lasting for a day, a weekend or maybe a week, based in a particular locality, with some emphasis on community participation. It would also be relevant to other forms of community‐based work, such as running a barbecue or a social, trying to raise money, expanding the activities of an adventure playground, setting up a city farm or engaging in a local campaign. The handbook can serve as a checklist of ideas and aspects that need to be thought about from the reasons for running a festival to financial ‘post‐mortems’. On the way the book covers organising committees, involving local people, planning, publicity, legal and administrative aspects, site management and catering. An excellent guide that won't guarantee success but, if you follow its advice, will make it more possible. Costs £2.00 including postage from CPF, 60 Highbury Grove, London N5 2AG.

The following paper discusses the costs involved when a library adds online bibliographic searching to the services it offers to its patrons. Reviewed in the study are total online costs, comparisons of manual and online search results, various pricing policy alternatives, and some probable future changes for online bibliographic searching.

At the Chemical Society Research Unit in Nottingham we are providing a service to some two hundred and sixty research chemists in which we search magnetic tapes produced by Chemical Abstracts Service of Columbus, Ohio (CAS), and which appear in a published form as Chemical Titles (CT), and Chemical‐Biological Activities (CBAC). In the course of this activity we are continuously presented with the problem of defining the interest of the user in a way which makes it possible to pull out from our information files those elements of information that are of most interest to him. In our particular system we do not rely on any pre‐indexing process, but rather input the data in a virtually unmodified form. When we are searching this information file we produce a search profile which defines the information of interest by means of a set of logically associated keywords or key phrases, which may be contained in the title, in the case of Chemical Titles, or in the digest material, in the case of Chemical‐Biological Activities, stored on the magnetic tape. Consequently my experience is most heavily directed towards that of searching free language information files, which have not had any great intellectual effort put into their input phase. Nevertheless I shall attempt in this paper to say something about the philosophy of indexing of text, and discuss whether substantial indexing is always necessary or even desirable, and to compare this process with that of indexing structural formulae, whose syntax and semantics are much less complicated than those of the English language.

It seems hardly necessary to sell the view that ready access to information is a ‘good’ thing. As members of Aslib we all, in one way or another, depend for our livelihood on the belief that the storage, retrieval and dissemination of information is as necessary, indeed as fundamental, an element in scientific research and development as it is in every other field of human endeavour. Happily our belief in the service we perform appears, in general terms, to be shared by those we serve. It would be very easy, of course, to catalogue the frustrations of both the users and the providers of information and to give the impression that the art (I cannot give any serious credence to the view that it is a science) of the information ‘middle‐man’ serves only as a barrier to the effective flow of information from the producer to the ultimate user. But I hope that you will agree with me that the evidence of the need for, and value of; the ‘middle‐man’ is too strong for us to have any doubt that, if I asked the question ‘Information services in science—have they any future?’ the answer would be an unqualified ‘yes’.

Enquires into the feasibility of a European interlending system. Considers which mechanism should be developed. Comments on location instruments, requesting, processing, transmitting mechanisms, charging procedures and copyright agreements. Concludes that location and requesting can be mastered but much more work will be needed on the other four components.