Search results

The purpose of this study is to see if the affirmative results seen in the pilot study of the positive addiction recovery therapy (PART) programme are replicable and durable given a new cohort of participants. PART is a programme of work designed to improve the recovery and well-being of people in early addiction recovery. Its foundation is in the G-CHIME (growth, connectedness, hope, identity, meaning in life and empowerment) model of addiction recovery. It also uses the values in action character strengths and includes a set of recovery protection techniques.

This study uses a mixed method experimental design, incorporating direct replication and a follow-up study. Measures for recovery capital, well-being and level of flourishing are used to collect pre-, post- and one-month follow-up data from participants. The replication data analysis uses the non-parametric Wilcoxon test, and the follow-up analysis uses the Friedman test with pairwise comparison post hoc analysis. The eligibility criteria ensure participants (n = 35) are all in early addiction recovery, classified as having been abstinent for between three and six months.

This study found a statistically significant improvement in well-being, recovery capital and flourishing on completion of the PART programme. These findings upheld the hypotheses in the pilot study and the successful results reported. It also found these gains to be sustained at a one-month follow-up.

This study endorses the efficacy of the PART programme and its continued use in a clinical setting. It also adds further credibility to adopting a holistic approach when delivering interventions which consider important components of addiction recovery such as those outlined in the G-CHIME model.

This study adds to the existing evidence base endorsing the PART programme and the applied use of the G-CHIME model.

The purpose of this study is to examine the Values in Action (VIA) character strengths profile of people in addiction recovery, to identify which strengths are meaningfully represented in this population. This was compared with the generalised profile of a normative population to identify the differentiating features. Reasons for the profile variance and the significance this has for addiction recovery have also been explored.

An independent group design was adopted using purposive sampling. This saw participants (n = 100) complete the VIA Inventory of Strengths-P assessment to establish a character strengths profile for people in addiction recovery. To identify the differences in this profile, a mean score and rank order comparison was conducted, using data taken from a normative population. Additional exploratory analysis was conducted to establish if there were any significant differences in the character strength profile of males and females.

In descending order, the top five ranked strengths were kindness, humour, honesty, fairness and teamwork. The lesser five strengths in the profile were spirituality, zest, perseverance, prudence and self-regulation. A distinguishing feature was the presence of humour as a top five strength for people in addiction recovery. The existence of teamwork also deviated from the generalised normative population. There were two strengths shown to have a meaningfully higher score for females, teamwork and love. This did not change the strengths present in the overall top five for males or females, however.

This study contributes useful knowledge to the understanding of character strengths in addiction recovery. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time character strengths have been examined in a sample of people in addiction recovery.

This study is a radical interactionist analysis of family conflict. Drawing on both a negotiated order perspective and Athen's theory of complex dominative encounters, this study analyzes the role that domination plays in conflicts among intimates. As the family engages in repeated conflicts over roles, the family also engages in negotiations over the family order, what role each party should play, interpretations of past events, and plans for the future. These conflicts take place against a backdrop of patriarchy that asymmetrically distributes power in the family to determine the family order. The data from this study come from a content analysis of mothers with substance use problems as depicted in the reality television show Intervention. The conflicts in these families reveal that these families develop a grinding family order in which families engaged in repeated conflict but also continued to operate as and identify as a family. These conflicts are shaped by and reinforce patriarchal expectations that mothers are central to family operation. The intervention at the end of each episode offered an opportunity for the family to engage in a concerted campaign to try to force the mother into treatment and reestablish the family order.

The positive addiction recovery website (https://positiveaddictionrecovery.com) has been created following a successful pilot study of a programme of work known as positive addiction recovery therapy (PART). The aim of the website is to disseminate PART to an online audience, extending its reach to a larger population. The purpose of this study is to explain the process of creating this online resource and to conduct a user evaluation to understand how well received the website is likely to be to its target audience.

An implementation framework cognisant of positive computing, positive technology, contemporary understanding of human–computer interaction and knowledge acquired from the delivery of eHealth interventions from the past decade was used to create the website. To understand user opinion of the resultant website, data were collected using the mobile application ratings scale user version.

By adopting a tailored implementation framework, with appropriate determinant factors of wellbeing and evidenced theoretical input, a website resource was created that users considered engaging and informative. The findings also suggest that participants appreciated the importance of intended behavioural change, having interacted with the interventions on the website.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the website is the first online version of PART, a new programme of work aimed at people in addiction recovery.

This paper aims to examine policy innovation among street-level bureaucrats at low-threshold services to people who use drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark.

This paper builds on two research projects conducted during the first pandemic lockdown in Denmark. The first is a case study of how COVID-19 impacted on people who use drugs (PWUD) and services for PWUD at the open drug scene in the neighborhood of Vesterbro in Copenhagen. The second is an ethnographic study of how users of services at the intersection of drug use and homelessness were impacted by lockdown.

Drawing on Kingdon’s “multiple policy streams” approach, this study shows how lockdown opened a “policy window” for innovating services to people who use drugs. This paper further shows how the pandemic crisis afforded street-level bureaucrats new possibilities for acting as “policy entrepreneurs” in a context where vertical bureaucratic barriers and horizontal cross-sectoral silos temporarily collapsed. Finally, the authors show how this had more lasting effects through the initiation of outreach opioid substitution treatment.

In Denmark, the emergence of a “policy window” for street-level bureaucrats to act as street-level “entrepreneurs” occurred in a context of rapid government response to the pandemic. For crises to act as “policy windows” for innovation depends on strong, preexisting institutional landscapes.

This paper adds to existing literature on policy innovation during COVID-19 in two ways: methodologically by contributing an ethnographically grounded approach to studying policy innovation and theoretically by examining the conditions that allowed policy innovation to occur.

This study aims to analyse and understand the current state of research in the field of digital marketing in “library and information science”.

This study used a “bibliometric research design.” A lexical title search was used to obtain the required data set for executing this study, and a comprehensive “indexing and abstracting” database, Web of Science, was used as a data harvesting source. Louvain’s clustering algorithm was used for network metrics.

The findings revealed that research productivity and impact have grown considerably over time, indicating significant attention towards digital marketing research in library and information science (LIS). Moreover, the results showed that the overall author collaboration patterns were weak, hence creating room for development in the author’s collaboration patterns.

The current study could be very beneficial in providing a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the “digital marketing” research field scholarly output in LIS, which can be used by researchers, practitioners and policymakers to guide their work and make informed decisions.

The originality of this bibliometric study lies in its comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the current state of research in the field of “digital marketing” in LIS. This study provides a unique and in-depth understanding of the key authors, venues and papers in the field, as well as the trends and patterns in the research.

Brand stories are often created around the company’s humble beginnings as an underdog. The authors explore the effects of who is telling the underdog story and thus draw attention to the nature of the brand source by differentiating between family and non-family firms. The authors expect that who is telling the underdog story impacts consumers’ attitude toward the brand in terms of brand authenticity and trustworthiness perceptions.

The authors conducted an online experiment with a 2 × 2 between-subject design and an overall sample size of 314 respondents.

Most importantly, the authors find that the family-firm nature of the brand storyteller significantly impacts the underdog effect. The positive effects of underdog biographies on brand attitude in terms of authenticity and trustworthiness loom significantly larger for family firms compared with non-family firms.

The authors find that the underdog effect is significantly stronger for family firms that tell the underdog story. Managers of family firms with underdog roots should take advantage of this finding by integrating underdog stories into their marketing concepts. The findings of this study show that the communication of a company’s roots can serve as a valuable tool to build and maintain a positive brand image and help to increase purchase intentions, which is particularly true for firms capitalizing on their family nature when telling the underdog story.

The authors combine research on brand stories using the underdog effect with research on the consumer’s perception of family firms, further exploring the role of the brand storyteller in underdog narratives, resulting in important theoretical as well as practical implications.