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The purpose of this study is to explore how individuals with overweight and obesity living in the UK respond to the public health and media messaging surrounding COVID-19 and obesity.

Qualitative interview study with a think aloud protocol. A total of 10 participants self-reported to have overweight, obesity or as actively trying to lose weight were recruited through social media and were asked to think aloud whilst exposed to four sets of public health and media materials describing the link between COVID-19 and obesity. Interviews were conducted over zoom, recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Three primary themes were identified through thematic analysis: “flawed messaging”, “COVID-19 as a teachable moment” and “barriers to change”. Transcending these themes was the notion of balance. Whilst the messaging around COVID-19 and obesity was deemed problematic; for some, it was a teachable moment to facilitate change when their future self and physical health was prioritised. Yet, when focussing on their mental health in the present participants felt more overwhelmed by the barriers and were less likely to take the opportunity to change.

Findings hold implications for public health messaging, highlighting the need for balance between being educational and informative but also supportive, so as to achieve maximum efficacy.

This study offers a novel and useful insight into how the public health and media messaging concerning COVID-19 risk and obesity is perceived by those with overweight and obesity.

Peer support is increasingly being introduced into mainstream mental health services internationally. The distinctiveness of peer support, compared to other mental health support, has been linked to values underpinning peer support. Evidence suggests that there are challenges to maintaining those values in the context of highly standardised organisational environments. The purpose of this paper is to describe a “principles-based” approach to developing and evaluating a new peer worker role in mental health services.

A set of peer support values was generated through systematic review of research about one-to-one peer support, and a second set produced by a UK National Expert Panel of people sharing, leading or researching peer support from a lived experience perspective. Value sets were integrated by the research team – including researchers working from a lived experience perspective – to produce a principles framework for developing and evaluating new peer worker roles.

Five principles referred in detail to: relationships based on shared lived experience; reciprocity and mutuality; validating experiential knowledge; leadership, choice and control; discovering strengths and making connections. Supporting the diversity of lived experience that people bring to peer support applied across principles.

The principles framework underpinned development of a handbook for a new peer worker role, and informed a fidelity index designed to measure the extent to which peer support values are maintained in practice. Given the diversity of peer support, the authors caution against prescriptive frameworks that might “codify” peer support and note that lived experience should be central to shaping and leading evaluation of peer support.

This paper adds to the literature on peer support in mental health by describing a systematic approach to understanding how principles and values underpin peer worker roles in the context of mental health services. This paper informs an innovative, principles-based approach to developing a handbook and fidelity index for a randomised controlled trial. Lived experiences of mental distress brought to the research by members of the research team and the expert advisors shaped the way this research was undertaken.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) rapidly became the “new normal” with profound implications for everyone's daily life. In this paper, emerging psychologists from diverse cultural backgrounds discuss four main ways in which COVID-19 impacted diverse psychological populations.

This paper was written as a reflection on how COVID-19 has impacted diverse psychological populations using authors' academic and personal experiences.

First, the authors explore inaccessible populations with a focus on domestic violence victims living in rural areas. Second, the authors consider consequences of social isolation with a focus on remote workers. Third, the authors investigate the consequences of public (dis)trust in the pandemic with a focus on migrant worker communities. Finally, the authors discuss pandemic-relevant subcultures with a focus on “anti-vaxxers”.

The paper concludes with a discussion of negative implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on diverse psychological populations, both for the present and the future, and ends with an action plan of possible interventions to overcome these limitations.

Overall, the current paper provides a broad overview of how the pandemic has shaped and will continue to shape diverse psychological populations.

Limited research exists that assesses the transfer of leadership learning from an undergraduate leadership program into alumni work environments. This study explored alumni’ valuation of an undergraduate leadership program by gaining an understanding of what leadership learning and leadership behaviors transferred into work environments. The participants were alumni that graduated from the same university in the southeastern United States, and while enrolled completed a four-year, co-curricular leadership program. Eight participant alumni engaged in semi-structured interviews as well as completed the Leadership Practices Inventory. The findings indicated that specific leadership learning did effectively transfer to work environments, and program alumni were frequently engaged in the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership at work to some degree. When developing leadership programs, practitioners may consider incorporating similar programmatic attributes and leadership learning deemed valuable by program alumni.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for using citizen science – defined as a data collection method through which non-professionals engage in contributing to authentic scientific inquiry – within the expedition cruise industry to contribute significantly to the collection of environmental data from hard-to-access Arctic areas.

The authors review trends in Arctic expedition cruise tourism and current needs in Arctic research and monitoring, and clarify where the expedition cruise tourism industry could have the most impact by providing data to the scientific community. The authors also compare the regulatory context in the Antarctic to that in the Arctic and discuss how these differences could affect the widespread use of citizen science. At last, the authors describe some general principles for designing citizen science programs to be successful on board, and highlight several existing programs that are being recognized for their contributions to a greater scientific understanding of the Arctic.

The authors find that citizen science data from the expedition cruise industry are underutilized as a tool for monitoring Arctic change. Numerous examples illustrate how citizen science programs on-board expedition ships can successfully collect robust scientific data and contribute to enhancing the knowledge and stewardship capacity of cruise passengers. Inclusion of citizen science data from the expedition cruise industry should be considered a critical part of international Arctic observing networks and systems.

Active participation in Arctic citizen science by tourists on expedition cruise ships has many potential benefits beyond the collection of high quality data, from increasing passengers’ knowledge and understanding of the Arctic while on board, to affecting their attitudes and behaviors after they return home.

The potential for tourism to contribute to Arctic observing systems has been discussed previously in the scientific literature; the authors narrow the focus to citizen science programs in the expedition cruise industry, and provide concrete examples, in the hope that this will streamline acceptance and implementation of these ideas by researchers and tourism practitioners.

Managers must make numerous strategic decisions in order to initiate and implement a business model innovation (BMI). This paper examines how managers perceive the management team interacts when making BMI decisions. The paper also investigates how group biases and board members’ risk willingness affect this process.

Empirical data were collected through 26 in-depth interviews with German managing directors from 13 companies in four industries (mobility, manufacturing, healthcare and energy) to explore three research questions: (1) What group effects are prevalent in BMI group decision-making? (2) What are the key characteristics of BMI group decisions? And (3) what are the potential relationships between BMI group decision-making and managers' risk willingness? A thematic analysis based on Gioia's guidelines was conducted to identify themes in the comprehensive dataset.

First, the results show four typical group biases in BMI group decisions: Groupthink, social influence, hidden profile and group polarization. Findings show that the hidden profile paradigm and groupthink theory are essential in the context of BMI decisions. Second, we developed a BMI decision matrix, including the following key characteristics of BMI group decision-making managerial cohesion, conflict readiness and information- and emotion-based decision behavior. Third, in contrast to previous literature, we found that individual risk aversion can improve the quality of BMI decisions.

This paper provides managers with an opportunity to become aware of group biases that may impede their strategic BMI decisions. Specifically, it points out that managers should consider the key cognitive constraints due to their interactions when making BMI decisions. This work also highlights the importance of risk-averse decision-makers on boards.

This qualitative study contributes to the literature on decision-making by revealing key cognitive group biases in strategic decision-making. This study also enriches the behavioral science research stream of the BMI literature by attributing a critical influence on the quality of BMI decisions to managers' group interactions. In addition, this article provides new perspectives on managers' risk aversion in strategic decision-making.

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 understand how women with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder approach medication decision making in pregnancy.

The study was co-produced by university academics and charity-based researchers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted by three peer researchers who have used anti-psychotic medication and were of child bearing age. Participants were women with children under five, who had taken anti-psychotic medication in the 12 months before pregnancy. In total, 12 women were recruited through social media and snowball techniques. Data were analyzed following a three-stage process.

The accounts highlighted decisional uncertainty, with medication decisions situated among multiple sources of influence from self and others. Women retained strong feelings of personal ownership for their decisions, whilst also seeking out clinical opinion and accepting they had constrained choices. Two styles of decision making emerged: shared and independent. Shared decision making involved open discussion, active permission seeking, negotiation and coercion. Independent women-led decision making was not always congruent with medical opinion, increasing pressure on women and impacting pregnancy experiences. A common sense self-regulation model explaining management of health threats resonated with women’s accounts.

Women should be helped to manage decisional conflict and the emotional impact of decision making including long term feelings of guilt. Women experienced interactions with clinicians as lacking opportunities for enhanced support except in specialist perinatal services. This is an area that should be considered in staff training, supervision, appraisal and organization review.

This paper uses data collected in a co-produced research study including peer researchers.