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The benefits of including a psychosocial group programme alongside a medical inpatient detoxification and stabilisation regime has been recognised within addiction research; however, a “gold standard” psychosocial intervention has not been established. This small-scale study aimed to evaluate the psychosocial group (“Straight Ahead”) currently running at a substance use inpatient unit based in the UK.

A mixed-methods questionnaire design aimed to capture service user perspectives of the group programme via a questionnaire and assess whether an individual’s recovery capital and emotion regulation scores improved during their stay.

Thirty-four service users participated in the evaluation. Results indicate the group significantly increased individuals’ recovery capital scores; however, it did not significantly improve emotion regulation. The three themes from the qualitative results focused on the importance of shared experiences, learning of new skills and the group as a positive experience. Service users provided suggestions for improvements, and these informed the provision of service-specific recommendations for the team and project commissioner.

The evaluation provides tentative support for the use of the Straight Ahead programme and provides an insight into what service users find helpful when attending a psychosocial group during an inpatient detoxification admission.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how NHS Sutton Clinical Commissioning Group (Sutton CCG) is working with nursing homes, residential homes and other health and social care organisations in Sutton to improve the quality of provision for residents in nursing and residential homes “care homes”.

The paper explains how Sutton CCG engaged with care homes initially to seek their views on whether they wanted support and what support they would value. It describes what arrangements Sutton CCG put in place for managers and staff in local care homes to provide support face-to-face. The paper outlines the key areas for improvement that Sutton CCG and the care homes are focusing on. It includes examples of work carried out jointly by the care homes and Sutton CCG to improve the quality of care for residents. It goes on to describe joint-working arrangements between the CCG, London Borough of Sutton and other health and social care organisations to ensure the overall quality of care homes in Sutton.

The paper outlines feedback from care home managers and staff who were invited to share their views about what support they wanted from Sutton CCG. It includes early feedback from care homes about the support put in place and the areas where they have found it most useful.

In the UK many older people live in care homes. Britain has an ageing population so the need for residential and nursing homes and the numbers of people living in care homes is only likely to increase. Our ageing population also places additional demands on the NHS, with residents in care homes often spending time in A&E and lengthy spells in hospital. This paper highlights how CCGs and other health and social care organisations can work with care homes to improve the health and wellbeing of older residents in care homes and reduce pressures on other health services.

Sutton CCG has put in place new arrangements for working with care homes that aim to support carers to improve the lives of their older residents. The paper shares practical examples of support that the CCG has provided which has successfully improved care and decision making in care homes; early indications show this has reduced 999 calls and conveyances to hospital. Sutton CCG, London Borough of Sutton and other statutory organisations with responsibility for care homes in Sutton have also set up a joint intelligence group to gain an overall picture of the quality of the borough’s care homes.

This paper aims to explore the content of Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs) from older adult care homes to understand how safety is understood and might be measured in practice.

SARs relevant to older adult care homes from 2015 onwards were identified via the Social Care Institute of Excellence SARs library. Using thematic analysis, initial inductive coding was mapped to a health-derived safety framework, the Safety Measurement and Monitoring Framework (SMMF).

The content of the SARs reflected the dimensions of the SMMF but gaining a deeper understanding of safety in older adult care homes requires additional understanding of how this unique context interacts with these dimensions to create and prevent risks and harms. This review identified the importance of external factors in care home safety.

This study provides an insight into the scope of safety issues within care homes using the SARs content, and in doing so improves understanding of how it might be measured. The measurement of safety in care homes needs to acknowledge that there are factors external to care homes that a home may have little knowledge of and no ability to control.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel approach to the analysis of individual and co‐constructed change management narratives, utilizing a framework derived from the theory of complex responsive processes.

The research project explored change management through the analysis of narratives arising from participation in group conversation. This comprised a six‐month intervention with a group of six leaders from the Church of England. An action research method was employed that required the leaders to bring a case study from their work that required a change management intervention. The focus of the research study was not to “solve the problem” but to practice a particular method of conversation. Transcripts of the conversations were analyzed for change or continuity in the organizing narratives. The analytical framework employed comprises three paired categories of organizing narrative themes, namely Legitimate/Shadow; Formal/Informal; and Conscious/Unconscious.

The analysis focuses on both the interactions between these organizing themes and upon the iterations, over time, in the narratives. Following the theory of complex responsive processes, the practice of change management and its consequences are understood not as cause‐effect but rather as participation in emergent narratives. It is suggested that such narratives do not merely contribute to change management within an organization but that from the perspective of complex responsive processes theory such conversational life is change management.

The action inquiry method employed and the approach to data analysis from the perspective of complex responsive processes theory, together constitute a novel approach to researching and understanding change management.

The purpose of this study was to explore the differences in motivation for sport consumption within a diverse sample of college students with underrepresented identities.

Data were collected from 2,833 students at universities in a mid-major Division I FBS athletic conference through a survey. Two MANOVAs were conducted to examine group differences. While the first MANOVA compared a dominant group (White and non-LGBTQ+) to an underrepresented group (non-white race and/or LGBTQ+), the second MANOVA explored differences in five specific marginalized groups (Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, LGBTQ+, intersectional marginalized identities).

The results indicated that the dominant group scored significantly higher than the combined underrepresented group in four of the eight sport consumption motives examined. However, the comparison of individual underrepresented groups showed significant differences for all eight consumption motives between at least two underrepresented groups.

This study is the first attempt to compare group differences in motivation for sport consumption between specific racially marginalized groups, LGBTQ + community members, and intersectional racial and LGBTQ + identities within college athletics.

Due to their pervasiveness in American society, cultural gender beliefs often organize workplaces and justify what jobs are suitable for men and for women (Ridgeway, 2009, 2011). When an occupation experiences feminization, jobs and occupations once considered “men’s work” must be “retyped” to justify and accommodate the movement of women into the occupation (Lincoln, 2010; Reskin & Roos, 1990). Using the case of funeral directing, this chapter explores the “retyping” of funeral directing, a formerly male-dominated, currently feminizing occupation by examining shifting gender narratives about funeral work in trade journals published between 1995 and 2013. Findings indicate multiple gender narratives involved in explaining the movement of women into funeral directing and the implications for gender inequality in feminizing occupations. Some narratives (old boy and gender essential) explain women’s entry and justify sex segregation by drawing on stereotypical gender differences in physical strength and emotional labor between men and women. While other narratives (gender blind and gender progressive) reject and challenge essentialism by impugning the notion that gender stereotypes are a reliable indicator of skill.

This study aims to investigate the response by a multi-campus private higher education provider to a major crisis. This study examined what elements of complex adaptive systems (CAS) were activated and/or developed within the organization during the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, through a retrospective analysis of organizational responses.

A retrospective qualitative approach has been used. The theory of CAS has been used as the theoretical lens to explore the organizational context, responses and behaviours during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 senior leaders across the major functions of the organization spread over multiple campuses.

Findings point to coverage of the main CAS characteristics in the organizational responses to the pandemic, however, in varying degrees. There was strong evidence for the application of guiding principles, for self-organizing, for micro-diversity coupled with independent actors and new generative relationships, all brought about by the chaos the pandemic generated. This study concludes that the global pandemic presented this organization with the impetus for rapid and agile responses to what ultimately has become a constructive crisis, paving the way for key elements of CAS theory to be enacted. This study recommend embedding the conscious creation of an adaptive space within ongoing strategic organizational transformation initiatives.

There is scant literature on CAS as applied to crises from organizations in the higher education sector and notably from outside of the health/medical fields. As a result, this study offers a novel and original approach to applying CAS theory during a major crisis. In addition to the findings above, this study also found an emergent characteristic, that of agility, which could be further tested as a potential theoretical addition to CAS theory.

A long-standing question is how group perception, which is the perception of a whole group, becomes an exaggerated perception of the individuals who comprise the group. The question receives scant attention within computer-mediated communication (CMC), which is increasingly a communication mode for groups and a research tool to study groups. I address this gap by examining bias in group perception when rating copresence, which is the sense of being together, with the group.

I model bias as occurring when perceivers differentially weigh ratings of individual group members on a variable while rating the whole group on the same variable. I analyzed how the degree of bias in participants’ ratings of copresence with a status-differentiated group varied by the availability of visual cues during CMC in an experiment. I also examined how the group’s status hierarchy impacted bias.

Bias increase as the availability of visual cues decreased and ratings of middle status members were weighed more in group perception than ratings of other members.

Middle status was based on possessing inconsistent statuses. Inconsistency, and not status position, may have rendered these members more salient than others.

Interventions that target group perception may benefit from targeting the group’s middle status members. Researchers and practitioners can minimize bias in group perception through increasing the availability of visual cues in CMC.

The findings illustrate the underpinnings of copresence with an entire group. This is important because copresence shapes several group processes during CMC.

The paradigmatic shift in gender theory, which focuses attention away from the individual and toward structural accounts, has undoubtedly advanced the amount and quality of research on gender as a macro-level phenomenon. However, social psychological accounts of gender have been less frequent among gender scholars in sociology, perhaps due to the perception that studying individuals might reinvigorate sex role and socialization accounts. This concern is especially understandable since sociology as a field has yet to fully incorporate current theories of gender (Stacey & Thorne, 1985; Ferree & Hall, 1996). For example, Ferree and Hall (1996) have shown that many introductory sociology textbooks still present gender as simply the product of socialization, even while examining other bases of inequality, such as race and class, at a structural level. Rather than rehearsing past debates, we argue that social psychological perspectives make a unique contribution to bridging the multiple levels of the gender system, and are especially well suited to helping us understand the ways that gender is achieved through interaction. Understanding gender as an interactive process sheds light on how structural conditions constrain individual choices as well as how structural patterns of gender inequality are generated and recreated. Discovering mechanisms at the micro level, which play an active role in the persistence of inequality, is especially fruitful because they suggest ways by which gender inequality might be lessened.

Drawing on interviews with men and women gun carriers, this paper considers the intersection of femininity and guns. It argues that two sets of expectations shape the normative relationship between women and guns: First, armed women are a blind spot in feminist discourse, which tends to reproduce the “pacifist presumption” that women are nonviolent caretakers and peacemakers. Second, contemporary pro-gun discourse often bases women’s gun carry within their duties and obligations as mothers in a form of “martial maternalism.” Inflected with a post-feminist appropriation of rights and equality, this pro-gun discourse reproduces gender binaries through a discourse of gender inclusivity. Following previous analyses that emphasize the contradictory politics of gender in conservative spaces, my analysis emphasizes how the gendered politics of guns is sustained by multiple, though not necessarily shared, understandings of women’s guns by men and women within American gun culture.