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This study aims to examine what patients say is helpful in psychodynamic psychotherapy by analyzing responses to an open-ended question at two time points: three months into treatment and termination.

Participants in this naturalistic study were a diverse group of patients seeking treatment at a psychodynamic psychotherapy training clinic (within a public hospital system). The authors used thematic analysis to categorize patient responses to an open-ended question about what is helpful in their treatment.

The authors found that a majority of patients found their psychotherapy helpful, and patient responses broke down into 16 categories. Themes that emerged from categories were what patients experience or feel, what therapists/therapy provides and what patients do in therapy. The most frequently endorsed category at both three months and termination was embedded within other categories, “mention of an other,” which captured when patients specifically mentioned another person (i.e. the therapist) in their response. The next most frequently endorsed categories were “talking/someone to talk with,” “feeling better/experiencing well-being/improved functioning” and “having regularity/structure” (at three months) and “having attention directed at experience,” “having regularity/structure” and “experiencing the professional role of the therapist” (at termination).

Findings shed light on factors contributing to helpful psychotherapy from patients’ perspectives in their own words. While previous research has shown that the therapy relationship is an important factor in effective therapy, the findings of this study highlight this ingredient in a personal, spontaneous way.

The purpose of this paper is to present the views of people living with dementia in extra care housing (ECH). This is a model of housing with care and support aiming to support older people, including those with dementia, to live independently. Previous research identifies benefits but is predominantly derived from third-party accounts, with the voices of those living with dementia in ECH significantly absent.

This study adopted a qualitative approach conducting 100 interviews across 8 ECH schemes in England. Over half of the interviews were conducted with people living with dementia and their families with the remainder involving staff and commissioners.

Findings suggest there are a range of benefits including owning your own home, having a safe, age friendly location with flexible support, social interaction and continuing to live as a couple. Challenges included availability of staff, flexible resourcing, loneliness and the advancing symptoms of dementia.

Despite efforts to create an inclusive, diverse sample, the participants were all White British. Participants involved were identified by gatekeepers, which may present some bias in the selection.

Whilst ECH offers benefits to people living with dementia, addressing the challenges is essential for effective dementia care. Improving staff training, promoting person-centred care and fostering an inclusive community are critical for enhancing residents’ well-being and quality of life.

This paper explored the lived experiences of residents and family members, providing new insight into the advantages and disadvantages of ECH for people living with dementia.

The hygiene factor is always imperative when customers consider a certain restaurant, and the information contained in customer reviews can be an efficient approach to gauge a restaurant's hygiene during gaps in the official inspection. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether information obtained from online reviews could predict the upcoming hygiene rating, specifically, evaluating the impact of both qualitative and quantitative content of reviews on the restaurant hygiene rating.

The quantitative research method with big data analytic techniques was applied in this study. In total, 127,656 pieces of data collected from 1,710 restaurants in four major cities in the USA were used in the analysis. Both quantitative factors (i.e. reviewer's numerical rating, days to review, readability, useful/funny/cool) and qualitative factors (i.e. eight emotional dimensions of textual reviews) were analyzed from the online customer reviews and considered in predicting the restaurant's hygiene rating.

Six out of eight emotional dimensions including anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and trust were identified as having significant influences on the restaurant hygiene ratings. While three quantitative variables including days to review, readability and usefulness were identified with significant impacts on the dependent variable of restaurant hygiene rating.

This study opens an avenue for innovative research that establishes a connection between customers' reviews and restaurants' inspection systems. The results allow restaurants to predict an impending hygiene inspection rating upon dynamic assessment of review content and aid in adjusting hygiene measures accordingly.

This study aims to examine whether and how voluntary accounting disclosures can repair individual donors’ trust in a charity after negative events.

The authors adopt a qualitative research approach and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with active Australian individual donors, with a hypothetical vignette design. Hypothetical negative events and corresponding accounting disclosures are presented to participants during interviews.

Three types of individual donors are identified based on their decision-making patterns after negative events and primary trust relations with a charity-reasoned donor (giving-decision based on their analysis of the situation, competence-based trust), generalist donors (giving-decision based on trust in the charitable sector, institution-based trust) and emotional donors (giving-decision based on feelings and emotions about the charity, integrity-based trust). The research suggests that accounting disclosures can repair trust damage for reasoned donors and support institution-based trust for generalist donors, but do not seem able to repair trust damage for emotional donors and can potentially damage trust further.

Overall, the findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with individual donors after negative events is not likely to be very effective in repairing trust. Instead, charities may need to adapt disclosures to their different types of individual donors.

While prior accounting studies have largely focussed on how charity managers themselves grapple with accountability or how negative events impact charitable donations, the authors demonstrate how accounting disclosures can play different roles in the trust-repairing process for different types of individual donors.

Clinical staff working in mental health services experience high levels of work-related stress, burnout and poor well-being. Increased levels of stress, burnout, depression and anxiety and poorer mental well-being among health-care workers are associated with more sick days, absenteeism, lower work satisfaction, increased staff turnover and reduced quality of patient care. Virtual reality (VR) relaxation is a technique whereby experiences of pleasant and calming environments are accessed through a head-mounted display to promote relaxation. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design of a study that assesses the feasibility and acceptability of implementing a multi-session VR relaxation intervention amongst mental health professionals, to improve their relaxation levels and mental well-being.

The study follows a pre–post-test design. Mental health staff will be recruited for five weeks of VR relaxation. The authors will measure the feasibility and acceptability of the VR relaxation intervention as primary outcomes, alongside secondary outcomes evaluating the benefits of VR relaxation for mental well-being.

The study aims to recruit 20–25 health-care professionals working in both inpatient and specialist community mental health settings.

Research indicates the potential of VR relaxation as a low-intensity intervention to promote relaxation and reduce stress in the workplace. If VR relaxation is shown to be feasible and acceptable, when delivered across multiple sessions, there would be scope for large-scale work to investigate its effectiveness as an approach to enable health-care professionals to de-stress, relax and optimise their mental well-being. In turn, this may consequently reduce turnover and improve stress-related sick leave across health-care services.

The importance of multi-agency information sharing is recognised as central to tackling crime and disorder in an intelligence-driven environment. However, whilst technology can facilitate and enhance this process, barriers to effective agency information exchange are consistently reported. This paper aims to categorise how information sharing takes place in a law enforcement operational setting and whether there is scope to improve the process.

There were two stages to the method; firstly, a select group of practitioners with intelligence-related experience (n = 28) were interviewed to identify the most common approaches to operational information sharing. This generated a categorisation model, which was tested with a larger group of practitioners (n = 73). A mixed-methods approach was adopted.

The research found consensus surrounding four different approaches to information sharing, labelled as: (1) inform and request, (2) meet and share, (3) customised database and (4) integrated systems. These are used at various levels of frequency, dependent on the operational context.

This research provides original evidence-based research to show law enforcement practitioners vary in the way they share information. By demystifying and categorising the process, it provides understanding for practitioners, policymakers and researchers, allowing barriers to be more readily tackled in a much more cost-effective manner.

The authors aim to contribute to the understanding of the enduring underrepresentation of women in the IT industry by analysing media discourse triggered by a campaign intended to encourage women to join the IT industry.

Internet media coverage of the Little Miss Geek campaign in the UK was analysed as qualitative data to reveal systematic and coherent patterns contributing to the social construction of the role of women with respect to the IT industry and IT employment.

While ostensibly supporting women's empowerment, the discourse framed women's participation in the IT industry as difficult to achieve, focused on women's presumed “feminine” essential features (thus, effectively implying that they are less suitable for IT employment than men), and tasked women with overcoming the barrier via individual efforts (thus, implicitly blaming them for the imbalance). In these ways, the discourse worked against the broader aims of the campaign.

Campaigns and organisations that promote women's participation should work to establish new frames, rather than allowing the discourse to be shaped by the established frames.

The authors interpret the framing in the discourse using Bourdieu's perspective on symbolic power: the symbolic power behind the existing patriarchal order expressed itself via framing, thus contributing to the maintenance of that order. By demonstrating the relevance of Bourdieu's symbolic power, the authors offer a novel understanding of how underrepresentation of women in the IT sector is produced and maintained.

This preliminary investigation aims to examine the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients and staff within a high secure service.

To discern the connection between COVID-19-related distress and multiple factors, the study involved 31 patients and 34 staff who completed assessments evaluating coping strategies, resilience, emotional reactivity, ward atmosphere and work-related aspects.

Results demonstrated that around a third of staff (31.2%) experienced COVID-19-related distress levels that met the clinical cut-off for possible post-traumatic stress disorder. Emotional reactivity, staff shortages, secondary traumatic stress and coping strategies were all positively correlated with COVID-19-related-distress. Resilience was negatively associated with distress, thus acting as a potential mitigating factor. In comparison, the prevalence of distress among patients was low (3.2%).

The authors postulate that increased staff burdens during the pandemic may have led to long-term distress, while their efforts to maintain minimal service disruption potentially shielded patients from psychological impacts, possibly lead to staff “problem-focused coping burnout”. This highlights the need for in-depth research on the enduring impacts of pandemics, focusing on mechanisms that intensify or alleviate distress. Future studies should focus on identifying effective coping strategies for crisis situations, such as staff shortages, and strategies for post-crisis staff support.

The authors postulate that the added burdens on staff during the pandemic might have contributed to their distress. Nonetheless, staff might have inadvertently safeguarded patients from the pandemic’s psychological ramifications by providing a “service of little disruption”, potentially leading to “problem-focused coping burnout”. These findings underscore the imperative for further research capturing the enduring impacts of pandemics, particularly scrutinising factors that illuminate the mechanisms through which distress is either intensified or alleviated across different groups. An avenue worth exploring is identifying effective coping styles for pandemics.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between sustainability reporting (SR) and firm value considering the moderating effect of audit committee (AC) quality and auditor tenure on this association.

The data for the study comprise 41,500 firm-year observations worldwide between 2007 and 2018 drawing on ten main sectors. The authors run a country-industry-year fixed effect regression and address endogeneity concerns with further methodologies.

First, the authors find that SR is significantly and positively associated with both firm value and industry-adjusted firm value. Further tests revealed that the baseline findings hold for SR assurance and the Global Reporting Initiative framework as well. Second, the moderation analysis outlined the significant moderating role that the AC assumes. More specifically, AC independence and expertise were found to strengthen the value relevance of SR. Third, the market also appreciates the moderation of auditor tenure in SR.

Investors appreciate greater corporate transparency which means that sustainability reports are likely to reduce information asymmetry and thereby agency conflicts. In addition, the moderation analyses imply that shareholders consider AC quality while they attach value to corporate sustainability reports. Hence, the structure of the auditing function appears to perform an implicit assurance role in the value relevance of sustainability reports. In line with these implications, corporations can review and re-design their auditing function and decide whether or not they will attest to sustainability reports given that AC independence and expertise and auditor tenure predict this decision.

The study highlights the audit function’s growing role beyond financial reporting and suggests implications for ACs and auditors in ensuring shareholders about the credibility of SR.