David Woods, Gerry Leavey, Rosie Meek and Gavin Breslin
The high prevalence of mental illness within the prison population necessitates innovative mental health awareness provision. This purpose of this feasibility study with 75 males…
Abstract
Purpose
The high prevalence of mental illness within the prison population necessitates innovative mental health awareness provision. This purpose of this feasibility study with 75 males (47 intervention; 28 control) was to evaluate State of Mind Sport (SOMS), originally developed as a community based mental health and well-being initiative, in a notoriously challenging prison setting.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed 2 (group) × 2 (time) factorial design was adopted. Questionnaires tested for effects on knowledge of mental health, intentions to seek help, well-being and resilience. For each outcome measure, main and interaction effects (F) were determined by separate mixed factors analysis of variance. Two focus groups (N = 15) further explored feasibility and were subjected to general inductive analysis.
Findings
A significant group and time interaction effect were shown for mental health knowledge, F(1, 72) = 4.92, p=0.03, ηp2 = 0.06, showing a greater post-programme improvement in mental health knowledge score for the intervention group. Focus group analysis revealed an increase in hope, coping efficacy and intentions to engage more openly with other prisoners regarding personal well-being as a result of the SOMS programme. However, fear of stigmatisation by other inmates and a general lack of trust in others remained as barriers to help-seeking.
Originality/value
The implications of this study, the first to evaluate a sport-based mental health intervention in prison, are that a short intervention with low costs can increase prisoner knowledge of mental health, intentions to engage in available well-being opportunities and increase a sense of hope, at least in the short term.
Details
Keywords
This ethnographic investigation of a general hospital aims to critically analyse a much lauded corporate culture. Rather than accepting the managerial and academic claims…
Abstract
Purpose
This ethnographic investigation of a general hospital aims to critically analyse a much lauded corporate culture. Rather than accepting the managerial and academic claims concerning the mobilisation of corporate culture at face value, this study builds upon a labour process analysis and takes a close look at how it actually seems to work.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper explores and describes how executive managers seek to design and impose corporate culture change and how it affects the nursing employees of this organisation. This was achieved by means of a six month field study of day‐to‐day life in the hospital's nursing division.
Findings
The results lend little support to the official claims that, if managerial objectives are realised, they are achieved through some combination of shared values and employee participation. The evidence lends more support to the critical view in labour process writing that modern cultural strategies lead to increased corporate control, greater employee subjection and extensive effort intensification. The contradiction this brings into the working lives of the employees leads to the conclusion that the rhetoric of corporate culture change does not affect the pre‐existing attitudes and value orientations of nursing employees. However, there were considerable variations in how employees received the managerial message and thus, by their degree of misbehaviour and adaptation, affected the organisation itself as well as using the cultural rhetoric against the management for their own ends.
Originality/value
The paper concludes that an extended labour process analysis is necessary to challenge the way in which corporate culture change is explored and described by management academics and practitioners.
Details
Keywords
Robert Loynes and Richard Proctor
This paper discusses statistical analyses of the effect of reductions in opening hours on book issues of public library authorities (PLAs). Monthly issue statistics over a three�…
Abstract
This paper discusses statistical analyses of the effect of reductions in opening hours on book issues of public library authorities (PLAs). Monthly issue statistics over a three‐ to four‐year period for twenty‐six libraries in four PLAs (Sheffield, Ealing, Hereford and Worcester, and Lancashire) were analysed using graphic analysis and time series modelling. The results, with one or two exceptions, showed little, if any, significant relationship between reductions in hours and book issues. There were indications that other variables such as seasonality, patterns of opening hours and the accessibility of other libraries might be masking any impact. Annual issue and book fund statistics over a twenty‐three year period for libraries in Sheffield PLA were also analysed. This latter investigation suggests that reductions in the level of issues, related to both opening hours and materials expenditure, are discernible after a period of about two years. One model showed that the impact of opening hours cuts may be discernible within a year, materials fund cuts after a lag of one to two years. The study demonstrates clearly the difficulties involved in using statistical data to make accurate predictions of the impact of individual reductionsin opening hours on book issues. It identifies a number of variables which may affect the impact of reductions.
Details
Keywords
First January 1973 will not only mark the beginning of a New Year but a year which history will mark as a truly momentous one, for this is the year that Britain, after centuries…
Abstract
First January 1973 will not only mark the beginning of a New Year but a year which history will mark as a truly momentous one, for this is the year that Britain, after centuries of absence, re‐enters the framework of Europe as one of the Member‐States of the enlarged European Community. This in itself must make for change on both sides; Britain is so different in outlook from the others, something they too realize and see as an acquisition of strength. There have been other and more limited forms of Continental union, mainly of sovereignty and royal descent. Large regions of France were for centuries under the English Crown and long after they were finally lost, the fleur de lis stayed on the royal coat of arms, until the Treaty of Amiens 1802, when Britain retired behind her sea curtain. The other Continental union was, of course, with Hanover; from here the Germanized descendants of the Stuarts on the female line returned to the throne of their ancestors. This union lasted until 1832 when rules of descent prevented a woman from reigning in Hanover. It is interesting to speculate how different history might have been if only the British Crown and the profits of Tudor and Stuart rule had been maintained in one part of central Europe. However, Britain disentangled herself and built up overwhelming sea power against a largely hostile Europe, of which it was never conceived she could ever be a part, but the wheel of chance turns half‐circle and now, this New Year, she enters into and is bound to a European Community by the Treaty of Rome with ties far stronger, the product of new politico‐economic structures evolved from necessity; in a union which cannot fail to change the whole course of history, especially for this country.
Mahmoud Alquraan and Abed Alnaser Aljarah
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the psychometric properties of a Jordanian version of the Metamemory in Adulthood (MIA) questionnaire of Dixon, Hultsch and Hertzog.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the psychometric properties of a Jordanian version of the Metamemory in Adulthood (MIA) questionnaire of Dixon, Hultsch and Hertzog.
Design/methodology/approach
The sample for this study consisted of 656 students randomly selected from Yarmouk University‐Jordan. Translation‐back‐translation, classical test theory, IRT Rasch model, and confirmatory factor analysis procedures were used to evaluate the psychometric properties of a Jordanian version of the MIA (MIA‐Jo).
Findings
The results of these analyses show that 76 items (out of 108 original MIA items) provide sufficient evidence in support of the reliability and validity of the MIA‐Jo. The results also show that the MIA‐Jo has the same structure or subscales as the original MIA.
Research limitations/implications
The sample for this study consisted of 656 students randomly selected from Yarmouk University‐Jordan. Therefore, the study recommends the necessity to conduct more research on the MIA‐Jo using samples that have a wider range of age (up to 80 years) and other strata of Jordanian society.
Originality/value
This study is expected to provide researchers and educators in Jordan with a valid and reliable instrument to do more research on metamemory and its relationship with other cognitive variables.
– The purpose of this paper is to present a focused viewpoint of coercion in psychiatry from the perspective of a survivor and activist.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a focused viewpoint of coercion in psychiatry from the perspective of a survivor and activist.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper takes elements from and builds on three recent conference and seminar presentations presented in France and the UK in 2014: International Congress on Clinical Ethics Consultation 2014, Paris: Comité Européen Droit Ethique et Psychiatrie, June 2014, Perpignan and Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Annual Congress, London 2014.
Findings
Coercion in psychiatry runs counter to the highest human rights standards, rules out genuine care and profoundly undermines trust.
Research limitations/implications
Additional research from a user and survivor experience would offer a different and more grounded perspective of how coercion is actually exerted and experienced through, for instance, a narrative approach.
Originality/value
The paper is proposed from the viewpoint of a survivor of psychiatry and human rights activist. It is a contribution towards a more user/survivor oriented discourse in this area.
Details
Keywords
In this article I examine one film, Puberty Blues, directed by Bruce Beresford in 1981. According to the Australian Film Commission, the film is number forty four of the top…
Abstract
In this article I examine one film, Puberty Blues, directed by Bruce Beresford in 1981. According to the Australian Film Commission, the film is number forty four of the top Australian films at the Australian Box Office from 1966 to 2005 having earned over three million dollars. The view put here is that this film throws light on the history of the comprehensive coeducational high school at a particular moment. The article maintains that Puberty Blues pursues a damning representation of the ineffectual and irrelevant nature of school life for the students it features. This unsettling film shows the comprehensive coeducational secondary school, itself a product of a middle class vision of the civil society, to be failing in its promise of extending ‘respectable’ and materially aspirant middle class values to youth. It is suggested that the decline in patronage of the public coeducational comprehensive school by the middle class and aspiring others may in part be attributable overall to the powerful negative images of schools such as those in Puberty Blues that have widely circulated in Australian and Anglophone popular culture, especially in feature film. It also hypothesises that the middle class flight from the comprehensive high school may be in part attributable to the fact that some of their children may have ‘deserted’ the schools first.
Details
Keywords
In 1974 the University of Newcastle, Australia, established a mature age access programme called the Open Foundation. Since that time, thousands of adults have entered university…
Abstract
In 1974 the University of Newcastle, Australia, established a mature age access programme called the Open Foundation. Since that time, thousands of adults have entered university through the Open Foundation portal. This article explores the layers of context for the establishment of the Open Foundation in the early 1970s. It seeks to understand the reasons why the University of Newcastle, which already provided the means for direct entry for some adults, sought to widen participation for adults at that time by creating a year long pre‐tertiary programme. Pascoe’s explanation that matureage entry schemes in Australian universities were prompted by ‘pragmatic considerations’ such as the disruption to intakes due to the lengthening of secondary schooling in New South Wales in 1969 and the falling demand for university places in the late 1970s and 1980s, does not satisfactorily account for the establishment of the Open Foundation Programme. Rather this article argues that the Open Foundation was set up in response to a variety of international, national and local influences, and as a reflection of educational ideas that were flowing from overseas at the time, especially around the establishment of the Open University in the United Kingdom, and in which not only pragmatism, but also idealism figured.
Details
Keywords
Saleh Al-Omar, Ammar Alalawneh and Ayman Harb
This paper aims to examine the direct impact of entrepreneurship education on university students' entrepreneurial intention and the moderating role of perceived governmental…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the direct impact of entrepreneurship education on university students' entrepreneurial intention and the moderating role of perceived governmental support in terms of financial support and policies and regulations.
Design/methodology/approach
The study collected data using questionnaires from students enrolled in compulsory entrepreneurship courses at three public Jordanian universities. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze 1,228 valid questionnaires and test the hypotheses.
Findings
The study revealed that entrepreneurship education positively and significantly affects students' entrepreneurial intentions. On the other hand, perceived governmental support in terms of financial support and policies and regulations has a nonsignificant moderating role in the relationship between entrepreneurship education and students' entrepreneurial intention.
Originality/value
This study enriches the literature with new evidence that entrepreneurship education has a positive, direct impact on students' intention to become entrepreneurs. It also contributes to the body of knowledge as the first to examine the role governments’ play besides encouraging entrepreneurship education through their education policies.