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The purpose of this service user narrative and viewpoint article is to describe interprofessional and interpersonal barriers to peer support on a men’s mental health ward over the course of a year from a lived experience perspective.

A reflective journal was kept and participant observation was conducted over the course of the year.

There is sometimes a fissure and binary of “Us” and “Them” on the ward. In other words, staff can sometimes perceive peer support workers to be “one of us” (a member of staff) or “one of them” (a service user). For service users, the opposite is sometimes true: “one of us” (a service user) or “one of them” (a member of staff). Peer support workers must bridge this gap and strive to be “one of us” with both these groups, which is no easy task. A good ward manager or peer team leader can smooth over interprofessional differences and support the peer worker in their efforts of care towards the recovery of people with mental health problems.

Little has been written on this topic in a mental health inpatient setting as most papers address community peer support work, which is very different from peer support in hospital. This paper addresses one of the first peer support pilot projects in hospital of its kind in NHS England so is quite innovative and perhaps even unique.

The purpose of this service user paper and narrative is to highlight that peer support is not a continuous, easy or uniform process but given to disruption, fragmentation, breakdowns in relationships and hurdles. This is illustrated in a summary of the case of “Christopher”.

A reflective journal was kept, and participant observation was conducted for just under a year on the ward where Christopher was under Section.

Peer support can be given to fissure, breakages in relationships and discontinuity. This can negatively impact the mental health of peer support workers. With this in mind, it is vitally important to ensure that the people who take up this role are appropriately trained, supported and supervised. There needs to be a focus on “restorative” supervision and supervision by someone with experience of the peer support role as well as buddying between peer workers.

There is an abundance of literature and research on peer support in the community but little in the inpatient setting, making this paper novel and a contribution to understanding peer support on mental health wards.

Supervision is an essential component of the helping professions. It provides a gatekeeping role into the quality and effectiveness of care, while also having a safeguarding and reporting function. Moreover, practitioners' use of effective supervision is associated with various personal and organisational outcomes. Supervision is generally provided by a more senior member of the same or very similar profession. However, peer support is still a developing profession and does not, generally speaking, have peer supervisors. Although other professions can and do supervise peer workers effectively, there are various concerns that for many, the peer role gets diluted when those without lived experience are supervising peers.

Implementing any evidence-based practice into complex systems is hugely difficult. Implementing peer support is very much at an early stage in most systems around the world. This chapter examines the implementation of peer work into health and social care systems by drawing on an ecological perspective. The wider sociocultural context is considered, while the organisational context and how this shapes both the peer and service delivered is further explored. Some tips are provided across the ecology of factors that the research describes as being important to implementation.

Lived experience has increasingly been incorporated into service delivery across health and social care settings. One of the methods used to do this is through the provision of peer support work. While many people will have lived experience of an issue, condition and may even work in services, peers are markedly different insofar as they are employed specifically because they are using this lived experience to explicitly inform their way of providing an intervention. As we will see throughout this book, peers are not a homogenous group; however, they do use some of the same processes to engage and offer support to people with a variety of health and social vulnerabilities. This chapter contextualises these issues before delving into further chapters authored and co-authored by those with lived experience across multiple areas of peer support work.

The purpose of this paper is to form propositions about the relationship between top management team (TMT) heterogeneity and peer effects in investment decision-making and explore the mediating role of social learning processes.

To investigate the correlations between TMT heterogeneity and investment peer effects, we considered the TMT heterogeneity category, team process and contextual factors. With a sample of 8,467 firm-year observations from Chinese listed companies, we used the mean linear model and instrumental variable method to empirically examine their relationships. To identify the mediating role of social learning processes, we introduced a social learning model to find out the contextual factors influencing corporate social learning demands from three aspects and subsequently used comparative statics analysis to explore the variations in the main effect under these contextual factors.

For task-oriented heterogeneity (e.g. functional background, education and tenure heterogeneity), the opposite effects of information elaboration and social categorization processes make it a nonlinear multiplex correlation with investment peer effects. For relation-oriented heterogeneity (e.g. age and gender heterogeneity), the sole effect of social categorization processes leads to a negative linear correlation. Further, we identify the mediating role of social learning processes. In summary, we established a connection from the TMT heterogeneity, to information elaboration theory or social categorization theory, to social learning processes and ultimately to investment peer effects.

The results of this study provide a comprehensive perspective to predict the decision-making outcomes of team heterogeneity and contribute to heterogeneity research and practice.

Peer groups have been established as one of the best tools for leadership learning for family business leaders. However, these groups remain underutilized because business leaders disengage and voluntarily create turnover from these groups. This study explores the perceptions of family business leaders concerning the usefulness, growth opportunities, and equity within peer learning groups to determine what factors impact retention in these groups.

Two surveys were administered to 321 family business owners and leaders through three large family business centers in different regions of the United States. Leaders were grouped into those who left versus those who remained in a peer learning group. Data were collected about their learning experiences and why they remained or voluntarily left a group.

Lack of equity was found to be the main determinant of turnover in peer learning groups. Peer learning groups need to consist of business owners along the same trajectory, career stage, and in similar stages of growing a family business in order to equally contribute to the group’s learning. Business leaders who are in peer learning groups they report as being equal also report that their groups are more helpful, trustworthy and create better-quality learning experiences.

Peer groups are important for peer-to-peer learning and continued education for family business leaders. Having a group of peers whom have dealt with similar issues can help business leaders overcome problems successfully. However, little research exists that examines what factors make these peer groups successful.

This study aims to investigate the causal complexity of ECF investors’ peer effect through two different paths of structural social influence.

Using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach, we employ 157 samples from a Chinese ECF source to explore how peer-effect are caused by both informational and normative mechanisms.

The findings suggests that there are multiple configurations could lead to ECF investors’ high level peer-effect through both informational and normative mechanisms, and the informational mechanism' role depends on the normative mechanism, while the normative mechanism could lead to peer-effect independently.

The findings enrich the literature on ECF investors’ behaviors by revealing the diverse configurations resulting in investors’ peer-effect and shedding new light on investigating the decision-making driven by information asymmetry and relationship settings for individuals at a disadvantage.

This is the first study that investigates the multiple-driven of ECF investors’ decision-making and the importance of mutual norms in individuals' decision-making by complex network analysis approach and qualitative comparative analysis from the perspective of complexity. The results reveal the complexity of investors’ decision-making in ECF.

This study aims to examine the relationship between teacher ideals and attitudes toward peers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among teacher college students, and the effect of knowledge of ASD identification on this relationship.

This study used a quantitative approach and included 341 teacher college students. A vignette was used to assess social and professional attitudes toward peers with ASD. The participants were divided into identification and nonidentification groups based on how accurately they identified the peer depicted in the vignette as having ASD. A teacher ideals questionnaire consisting of two subscales indicating different ideal teachers − a dedicated/engaging teacher (e.g. a teacher who can work with enthusiasm) and a skillful teacher (e.g. a teacher who is knowledgeable) − was developed and administered to evaluate the participants’ teacher ideals and self-perceptions of a teacher.

In the nonidentification group, ideals of a skillful teacher were significantly correlated with social attitudes toward peers with ASD. The identification group exhibited no significant correlations between ideals and social attitudes. Furthermore, the self-perceptions of being a dedicated/engaging teacher was significantly correlated with professional attitudes toward peers with ASD in the identification group.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the relationship between teacher ideals and attitudes toward peers with ASD. Teacher ideals were related to negative social attitudes toward peers with ASD. While knowledge of ASD identification weakens this relationship, it may drive the relationship between self-perceptions of a teacher and professional attitudes toward peers with ASD. Therefore, ASD education is important for reducing the stigma toward ASD in teacher education.

This paper aims to build on Part 1 which generated a theory representing the experiences of charity peer leaders facilitating well-being interventions (Burns, 2024). This study (Part 2) examines the process of peers [1] becoming peer leaders using the generated theory.

Following the Medical Research Council Process Evaluation Framework (Moore et al, 2015), the methods for this study were as follows: discussion and informal questions with all project staff (skilled group facilitators and peer leaders) at the start of the Refugee projectx; in-depth, self-report questionnaire with the skilled group facilitators; researcher observations of the peer leaders learning to lead and leading the groups; and group interview with peer leaders.

When analysed in line with the theory, the data showed the following: being empathic and validating someone’s story helps the person feel like their journey counts and is of worth; the “dance” of rapport and relationship is a vital ingredient for a successful group; the process of sharing stories and giving hope bring rewards; hope can be gained, given and given again without diminishing hope within the giver.

The theory that emerged in this study is unique to Part 1 and therefore Part 2 is also original, to the best of the author’s knowledge. The demonstration of the use of the theory in practise could support mental health peer work in offsetting statutory health-care costs.