Search results

Team formulation, used to understand patient problems and plan care, is a growing practice in adult mental health and learning disability services. The purpose of this paper is to explore definitions applied to team formulation (as distinct to therapy formulation), its underpinning theories, and the inter-relationship between the team and the process of formulation.

A database search (main search term of team formulation) of peer-reviewed studies was conducted using PRISMA guidelines. A main and second reviewer conducted quality appraisals and thematic analysis. Data were analysed by convergent qualitative synthesis design using thematic analysis to transform evidence from quantitative and qualitative studies into qualitative findings.

Initial searching produced 4,532 papers, 10 of which were eligible for inclusion. Team formulation has no distinct definition. Theories underpinning the practice of therapy formulation emanating from general psychological theory underpin team formulation. Seven studies applied psychological theories to the examination of team formulation. No studies examined the impact of the team on the formulation. Six themes were generated regarding the impact of team formulation on the team; “increased knowledge and understanding”, “altered perceptions, leading to altered relationships, feelings and behaviours”, “space to reflect”, “useful when stuck or challenged”, “perceived increase in effectiveness” and “improved team working”.

Limited evidence and variable quality compromised the availability of review evidence.

This is the first review to examine team formulation through the context of the team. The authors argue that a conceptual framework to encompass team inputs, processes and outputs in team formulation practice should guide future research.

Positive behavioural support has been considered as a valuable alternative to residential care for children and adolescents with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges. While recent evidence suggests it has a positive impact on behaviour and carer ability to cope, there is little evidence of its economic costs or benefits. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

An exploratory cross-sectional study was conducted to evaluate the cost of providing positive behavioural support to ten children and adolescents with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges living in the community in Ealing, West London. Comparison was also made with the cost estimate of possible alternative support packages for children and adolescents with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges in the UK, as obtained through a Delphi exercise.

Total cost of services per child was £1,454 per week for young people supported short-term, and £1,402 supported long-term. Children and adolescents were making use of a range of social care, education and health services. Over the full sample, half of the total cost was accounted for by education services. The Delphi exercise estimated the weekly cost of residential-based care as more expensive than the cost of community-based care for children and adolescents with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges. At the end of the ITSBS, all ten children and adolescents initially at risk of imminent residential placement were living in the community with less service-intensive and less expensive support. This suggests that avoiding residential-based care could reduce costs in the long term.

Positive behavioural support has potential to support people with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges in the community, leading to potential cost advantages. However, this is a small study and more robust research is needed.

This paper aims to propose an approach for the analysis of user interest based on tweets, which can be used in the design of user recommendation systems. The extract topics are seen positively by the user.

The proposed approach is based on the combination of sentiment extraction and classification analysis of tweet to extract the topic of interest. The proposed hybrid method is original. The topic extraction phase uses a method based on semantic distance in the WordNet taxonomy. Sentiment extraction uses NLPcore.

The algorithm has been extensively tested using real tweets generated by 1,000 users. The results are quite encouraging and outperform state-of-the-art results and confirm the suitability of the approach combining sentiment and categorization for the topic of interest extraction.

The hybrid method combining sentiment extraction and classification for user positive topics represents a novel contribution with many potential applications.

The functionality of positive topic extraction is very useful as a component in the design of a recommender system based on user profiling from Twitter user behaviors.

The application of the proposed method in short-text social network can be massive and beyond the applications in tweets.

There are few works that have considered both sentiment analysis and classification to find out users’ interest. The algorithm has been extensively tested using real tweets generated by 1,000 users. The results are quite encouraging and outperform state-of-the-art results.

The present paper aims at exploring effective business model adaptations in response to unexpected events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors test the effect of two major business model adaptations, namely changes in the value proposition and changes in the target market, on a sample of 96 family SMEs.

Results show that only changes in the value proposition had a positive and significant impact on performance, helping family SMEs to better confront COVID-19. However, this effect is reduced in the case of target market change.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate how business model adaptations in family SMEs affect performance in crisis situations.

This study aims to understand the impact of rational and emotional appeals on children’s attitude towards two public service announcements (PSAs) that promoted eating fruits and vegetables.

A mixed-methods study was conducted with children aged 8 to 11. A convergent parallel design was selected that comprised a questionnaire for the quantitative approach and a semi-structured focus group for the qualitative approach.

The results from the quantitative and qualitative phases converged, showing that both components (i.e. emotional and rational) play a significant role in children’s preference towards an advertisement, but the emotional component appeared to be the preeminent.

Future studies should use other social subjects and children of different age brackets from various countries to test whether they continue to prefer emotional appeals in advertising.

An understanding of which elements children prefer in PSAs will enable advertising campaigns and social marketing strategies with targeted approaches that respect children’s tastes to be planned.

A properly designed social advertisement could have important effects on disseminating useful information, changing or preventing unhealthy habits and adopting good practices in children.

Few studies have examined the effectiveness of PSAs, especially those targeted at children. This paper contributes to extend concepts from the commercial field of advertising directed to children to the field of social advertising. To date, this field has received little attention.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and experiment a framework for analysing the tweets to find the basis of popularity of a person and extract the reasons supporting the popularity. Although the problem of analysing tweets to detect popular events and trends has recently attracted extensive research efforts, not much emphasis has been given to find out the reasons behind the popularity of a person based on tweets.

In this paper, the authors introduce a framework to find out the reasons behind the popularity of a person based on the analysis of events and the evaluation of a Web-based semantic set similarity measure applied to tweets. The methodology uses the semantic similarity measure to group similar tweets in events. Although the tweets cannot contain identical hashtags, they can refer to a unique topic with equivalent or related terminology. A special data structure maintains event information, related keywords and statistics to extract the reasons supporting popularity.

An implementation of the algorithms has been experimented on a data set of 218,490 tweets from five different countries for popularity detection and reasons extraction. The experimental results are quite encouraging and consistent in determining the reasons behind popularity. The use of Web-based semantic similarity measure is based on statistics extracted from search engines, it allows to dynamically adapt the similarity values to the variation on the correlation of words depending on current social trends.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the proposed method for finding the reason of popularity in short messages is original. The semantic set similarity presented in the paper is an original asymmetric variant of a similarity scheme developed in the context of semantic image recognition.

While empowerment for sustainability is considered a major objective within sustainability-oriented educational programs and policies, little is known about the actual process of empowering students for sustainability through higher education. This study aims to explore this field, by introducing the EYE (Educating Yourself in Empowerment) for Sustainability learning tool and by analyzing the effects of its application within a higher education context, including a reflection about key aspects contributing to students’ empowerment for sustainability.

The effects of the EYE tool are analyzed by means of questionnaires. Through a qualitative codification process and quantitative analysis, the authors have reflected on the effects of the EYE tool and on the empowerment process as perceived by the students exposed to the EYE at Wageningen University.

Results suggest that the EYE is a comprehensive and adaptive tool, conducive to empowerment for sustainability. Adopting, only partly, an instrumental approach to education and, largely, an emancipatory one appears to be a possible and successful combination. A key aspect contributing to students’ empowerment for sustainability is the development and execution of a real-life project of own choice. Learning about the diverse worldviews underlying the search for sustainability appears to be an eye opener for the students. Empowerment does not seem to require long-term training. Rather, it emerges and is experienced by university students within a few weeks.

This paper introduces a novel tool and discusses insights deriving from the application of this tool. The value of the paper lies in its potential to support educators in reflecting upon and designing their educational strategy for empowering students for sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a reliable and valid field survey research instrument to assess national cultural cognitive templates of preferred leader behaviour dimensions to facilitate education, development, and training of managerial leaders operating across diverse organisations.

The study consists of focus group evaluations of the validity and the translations to local languages of a survey instrument assessing leader behaviour preferences in business organisations.

The studies find that the survey instrument and its translations are valid and reliable for assessing preferred leader behaviour across national cultures. The length of the survey is problematic, and a new project is underway to produce a shorter version with equivalent reliability and validity.

As the research project is long term, at this point, a relatively long survey is available for research, with a shorter version planned for the future.

Practical implications include producing and validating a field survey research instrument that is reliable and valid across cultures and languages, and can be employed to improve the understanding, development, and education of managers and leaders of international business organisations.

Management and leadership processes are employed in all aspects of life, and can be better understood and improved through this research project.

The majority of cross-cultural research is leader-centric studies of implicit leader characteristics; this project expands the scope of studies further into follower-centric studies of observed leader behaviour.

This paper aims to explore the interplay between international experiences and male and female top managers' career paths, taking into consideration gender differences. Furthermore, the research investigates the specific job and personal demands and resources related to the different types of international work experiences.

This study provides an in-depth subjective reconstruction of the international professional experience of 37 male and female top managers employed in Italy, using semi-structured interviews.

Participants highlighted the benefits of their international assignments (IAs) in terms of the development of managerial, soft and cross-cultural skills. Family issues and cultural differences were frequently cited as challenges by the top managers interviewed. Culture shock and perceived difficulty in managing multicultural teams were reported by both women and men. Men reported experiencing long periods of separation from their family more often than women and cited the support of their partner as a valuable resource. In addition to the support of a partner, women also indicated that certain job resources and welfare policies played a crucial role. Moreover, women appear to be more interested in work-family management issues, thus suggesting that the traditional division of roles between men and women continues to persist in Italy.

This study provides an insight into the extrinsic factors linked to career success, as well as the challenges and the resources associated with different forms of global work other than traditional expatriation. It takes into consideration a specific country, Italy, where a traditional family paradigm persists, providing an insight into better understanding the link between IA experiences and gender roles in global mobility. Managerial implications are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to detail the impact and efficacy of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service ((HMPPS) Therapeutic Communities (TCs) (both democratic and hierarchical). This paper outlines recent developments in the TC literature, to provide readers with an up-to-date overview of the outcomes of prison-based TC treatment, while highlighting the strengths and challenges of this treatment approach. Trends within the research are discussed, and the authors draw attention to any gaps in the current knowledge.

This paper uses a narrative literature review approach to review the most current literature around the effectiveness of prison-based TCs in HMPPS. Academic literature published predominantly from 2010 onwards is discussed because of limited literature review publications on this topic post-2010. To obtain literature, searches of relevant databases were conducted, and/or clinical leads at prison sites were contacted for relevant publications.

There is a body of research which demonstrates that TCs are an effective form of treatment for people with an offending history and personality difficulties. Evidence indicates that Democratic TC treatment plays a part in reducing reoffending rates, as well as improving psychological features. Further research is needed in a number of areas, specifically with female offenders and individuals who undertake treatment in hierarchical TCs in the UK. It is also suggested that TC treatment aftercare may help to further the positive outcomes identified.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no up-to-date review of the impact and efficacy of HMPPS TC treatment. This paper reflects on available research within the current context of TC treatment and provides an original overview of the current UK TC practice. It has value in recommending areas for further research and consideration.