Soumik Mandal, Chirag Shah, Stephanie Peña-Alves, Michael L. Hecht, Shannon D. Glenn, Anne E. Ray and Kathryn Greene
Engagement is a critical metric to the effectiveness of online health messages. This paper explores how people engage in youth-generated prevention messages in social media.
Abstract
Purpose
Engagement is a critical metric to the effectiveness of online health messages. This paper explores how people engage in youth-generated prevention messages in social media.
Design/methodology/approach
The data sample consisted of engagement measures of 82 youth-generated messages hosted in a social media channel and a follow-up survey on content creators' motivation for promoting their messages and their dissemination strategies. A comparative analysis of engagement metrics along with qualitative analysis of the message types was performed.
Findings
Two types of messages were considered: stop messages and prevent messages. Our analyses found that people interacted with stop messages on social media more frequently than prevent messages. On analyzing the youth's motivation and promotion strategies, no significant difference was observed between stop message creators and prevent message creators.
Social implications
This work has implications for programs promoting prevention and health information in social media.
Originality/value
This is the first study in social media-based prevention programs the authors are aware of that differentiated between the strategies of youth-produced prevention messages.
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Michelle Miller‐Day, Jonathan Pettigrew, Michael L. Hecht, YoungJu Shin, John Graham and Janice Krieger
As interventions are disseminated widely, issues of fidelity and adaptation become increasingly critical to understand. This study aims to describe the types of adaptations made…
Abstract
Purpose
As interventions are disseminated widely, issues of fidelity and adaptation become increasingly critical to understand. This study aims to describe the types of adaptations made by teachers delivering a school‐based substance use prevention curriculum and their reasons for adapting program content.
Design/methodology/approach
To determine the degree to which implementers adhere to a prevention curriculum, naturally adapt the curriculum, and the reasons implementers give for making adaptations, the study examined lesson adaptations made by the 31 teachers who implemented the keepin’ it REAL drug prevention curriculum in 7th grade classrooms (n=25 schools). Data were collected from teacher self‐reports after each lesson and observer coding of videotaped lessons. From the total sample, 276 lesson videos were randomly selected for observational analysis.
Findings
Teachers self‐reported adapting more than 68 percent of prevention lessons, while independent observers reported more than 97 percent of the observed lessons were adapted in some way. Types of adaptations included: altering the delivery of the lesson by revising the delivery timetable or delivery context; changing content of the lesson by removing, partially covering, revising, or adding content; and altering the designated format of the lesson (such as assigning small group activities to students as individual work). Reasons for adaptation included responding to constraints (time, institutional, personal, and technical), and responding to student needs (students’ abilities to process curriculum content, to enhance student engagement with material).
Research limitations/implications
The study sample was limited to rural schools in the US mid‐Atlantic; however, the results suggest that if programs are to be effectively implemented, program developers need a better understanding of the types of adaptations and reasons implementers provide for adapting curricula.
Practical implications
These descriptive data suggest that prevention curricula be developed in shorter teaching modules, developers reconsider the usefulness of homework, and implementer training and ongoing support might benefit from more attention to different implementation styles.
Originality/value
With nearly half of US public schools implementing some form of evidence‐based substance use prevention program, issues of implementation fidelity and adaptation have become paramount in the field of prevention. The findings from this study reveal the complexity of the types of adaptations teachers make naturally in the classroom to evidence‐based curricula and provide reasons for these adaptations. This information should prove useful for prevention researchers, program developers, and health educators alike.
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Rebecca Lengnick-Hall, Karissa Fenwick, Michael S. Hurlburt, Amy Green, Rachel A. Askew and Gregory A. Aarons
Researchers suggest that adaptation should be a planned process, with practitioners actively consulting with program developers or academic partners, but few studies have examined…
Abstract
Purpose
Researchers suggest that adaptation should be a planned process, with practitioners actively consulting with program developers or academic partners, but few studies have examined how adaptation unfolds during evidence-based practice (EBP) implementation. The purpose of this paper is to describe real-world adaptation discussions and the conditions under which they occurred during the implementation of a new practice across multiple county child welfare systems.
Design/methodology/approach
This study qualitatively examines 127 meeting notes to understand how implementers and researchers talk about adaptation during the implementation of SafeCare, an EBP aimed at reducing child maltreatment and neglect.
Findings
Several types of adaptation discussions emerged. First, because it appeared difficult to get staff to talk about adaptation in group settings, meeting participants discussed factors that hindered adaptation conversations. Next, they discussed types of adaptations that they made or would like to make. Finally, they discussed adaptation as a normal part of SafeCare implementation.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations include data collection by a single research team member and focus on a particular EBP. However, this study provides new insight into how stakeholders naturally discuss adaptation needs, ideas and concerns.
Practical implications
Understanding adaptation discussions can help managers engage frontline staff who are using newly implemented EBPs, identify adaptation needs and solutions, and proactively support individuals who are balancing adaptation and fidelity during implementation.
Originality/value
This study’s unique data captured in vivo interactions that occurred at various time points during the implementation of an EBP rather than drawing upon data collected from more scripted and cross-sectional formats. Multiple child welfare and implementation stakeholders and types of interactions were examined.
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Barry M. Mitnick and Martin Lewison
Despite the existence of a variety of approaches to the understanding of behavioral and managerial ethics in organizations and business relationships generally, knowledge of…
Abstract
Despite the existence of a variety of approaches to the understanding of behavioral and managerial ethics in organizations and business relationships generally, knowledge of organizing systems for fidelity remains in its infancy. We use halakha, or Jewish law, as a model, together with the literature in sociology, economic anthropology, and economics on what it termed “middleman minorities,” and on what we have termed the Landa Problem, the problem of identifying a trustworthy economic exchange partner, to explore this issue.
The article contrasts the differing explanations for trustworthy behavior in these literatures, focusing on the widely referenced work of Avner Greif on the Jewish Maghribi merchants of the eleventh century. We challenge Greif’s argument that cheating among the Magribi was managed chiefly via a rational, self-interested reputational sanctioning system in the closed group of traders. Greif largely ignores a more compelling if potentially complementary argument, which we believe also finds support among the documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza as reported by Goitein: that the behavior of the Maghribi reflected their deep beliefs and commitment to Jewish law, halakha.
Applying insights from this analysis, we present an explicit theory of heroic marginality, the production of extreme precautionary behaviors to ensure service to the principal.
Generalizing from the case of halakha, the article proposes the construct of a deep code, identifying five defining characteristics of such a code, and suggests that deep codes may act as facilitators of compliance. We also offer speculation on design features employing deep codes that may increase the likelihood of production of behaviors consistent with terminal values of the community.
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On the evening of 22 December 1988 the world lost one of its most dedicated environmental leaders. Chico Mendes, born Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, was shot down by ranchers as he…
Abstract
On the evening of 22 December 1988 the world lost one of its most dedicated environmental leaders. Chico Mendes, born Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, was shot down by ranchers as he walked out of the back door of his home in Xapuri, Brazil. Although Mendes achieved worldwide recognition for his efforts to protect the Amazonian rain forest and, in fact, has been proclaimed an “eco‐martyr,” his original and foremost concern was securing workers' rights for the indigenous people of the forest and preserving the land they lived on.
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Cristiano Codagnone, Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews
Defining features of the American corporate apex have evolved in recent decades from a modest classwide coherence to a more dispersed amalgam of company-focused management and…
Abstract
Defining features of the American corporate apex have evolved in recent decades from a modest classwide coherence to a more dispersed amalgam of company-focused management and then to greater director engagement in company leadership. The rise of institutional investing had moved executives and directors to focus more on the specific interests of their own firms and less on their common concerns. More recently, the nation’s borders that have long defined its business elite have been giving way to an elite-ness transcending those boundaries. While the classwide sinews of the American business elite are diminishing within the United States, we find evidence that they have at the same time been strengthening with other national business elites to create a transnational informal network with a modicum of global coherence.
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Muhsin Michael Orsini, David L. Wyrick, William B. Hansen, Rita G. O’Sullivan, Denise Hallfors, Allan B. Steckler and Ty A. Ridenour
Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs use typically increases in prevalence and frequency during middle and late adolescence. School health instruction often focusses on…
Abstract
Purpose
Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs use typically increases in prevalence and frequency during middle and late adolescence. School health instruction often focusses on providing facts and rarely provides tools for addressing the psychosocial risk factors needed to prevent substance use. The purpose of this paper is to report about the effectiveness of a prevention programme delivered in US high school health classes. The intervention augments typical instruction by providing teachers with activities that can be infused in their daily teaching.
Design/methodology/approach
In total, 26 schools were randomly assigned to receive the intervention or serve as controls. Pupils were pretested near the beginning of the school year, posttest near the end of the school year and administered a final test near the beginning of the following school year. Teachers in treatment schools were provided with activities designed to target psychosocial variables known to mediate substance use onset and self-initiated cessation. These include normative beliefs, intentionality, lifestyle incongruence, beliefs about consequences of use, peer pressure resistance skills, decision-making skills, goal setting skills and stress management skills.
Findings
Hierarchical modelling analytic strategies revealed the intervention to have definable positive impacts on alcohol and cigarette use. Moreover, the intervention had strongest effects on alcohol and cigarette use among pupils who were identified at pretest as being lower-than-average risk.
Originality/value
This research provides support for providing teachers with a strategy for preventing alcohol, tobacco and other drugs that can be used in a flexible manner to augment the instruction they are already mandated to provide.