Search results

A region’s transforming care partnership identified that autistic adults without an intellectual disability (ID) may be falling through gaps in services when presenting with a significant emotional and/or behavioural need in the absence of a mental health diagnosis. The region’s intensive support teams (ISTs) for adults with ID therefore piloted a short-term “behavioural support service” for this population. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate this pilot.

This study represents a mixed-methods service evaluation over a four year pilot period. The quantitative component examined referral rates and demographic data of accepted and declined referrals; and length of referral episodes and Health of The Nation Outcomes Scores (HoNOS) for accepted referrals. The qualitative component used thematic analysis to identify key themes relating to reasons for referral, clinical/therapeutic needs, and the models of support that most informed assessments and interventions at individual and systems levels.

The ISTs accepted 30 referrals and declined 53. Most accepted referrals were male (83%), and under 24 years old (57%). Average HoNOS scores were above the thresholds generally associated with hospital admission. Key qualitative themes were: transitional support; sexual risks/vulnerabilities; physical aggression; domestic violence; and attachment, trauma and personality difficulties. Support mostly followed psychotherapeutic modalities couched in trauma, attachment and second- and third-wave cognitive behavioural therapies. Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) did not emerge as a model of preference for service users or professionals.

This project represents one of the first of this type for autistic adults without an ID in the UK. It provides recommendations for future service development and research, with implications for Transforming Care policy and guidance.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of the challenges and implications entailed by deploying mobile clinics in conflict zones to reach populations affected by violence and cut off from health-care services.

This research combines an integrated literature review and an instrumental case study. The literature review comprises two targeted reviews to provide insights: one on conflict zones and one on mobile clinics. The case study describes the process and challenges faced throughout a mobile clinic deployment during and after the Iraq War. The data was gathered using mixed methods over a two-year period (2017–2018).

Armed conflicts directly impact the populations’ health and access to health care. Mobile clinic deployments are often used and recommended to provide health-care access to vulnerable populations cut off from health-care services. However, there is a dearth of peer-reviewed literature documenting decision support tools for mobile clinic deployments.

This study highlights the gaps in the literature and provides direction for future research to support the development of valuable insights and decision support tools for practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to explore the support needs surrounding intimate relationships and sexuality of autistic adults accessing funded social care in England.

Semi-structured interviews with 15 autistic adults who were accessing funded social care examined their support needs surrounding intimate relationships and sexuality, with subsequent data analysis using reflexive thematic analysis.

Four themes were generated: Help at hand, but not too close for comfort, No “cookie-cutter rules”: personalised, inclusive approaches, Playing it safe, not leaving it too late, and Autism-informed education and support.

The authors produced an online learning module for social care staff in England on best practice in supporting autistic adults without learning disabilities with relationships and sexuality.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, there has been no other UK-based research published to date on the social care support needs of autistic adults without learning disabilities surrounding relationships, gender and sexuality.

This chapter examines the concepts of race and racism, critically reviewing their historical and contemporary applications in everyday life as well as in academic and policy debates. Racism has been extensively researched, with various theories and conceptualisations developed across social science. However, there is a great deal of disagreement regarding its nature, contemporary significance and empirical validation. This chapter examines these and attempts to synthesise some of the common definitions of racism provided in the literature. It explores related concepts and underlying themes pertaining to expressions of race and racism. Furthermore, it unpacks current knowledge about racial issues and discusses recent advances in the conceptual understanding of various forms of racism. It also elucidates the social, political and analytical applications of racism as a concept and the significance of racism in contemporary societies. The chapter concludes by highlighting how racism is a dynamic phenomenon, continuously evolving with the social, political and technological transformations in contemporary societies.

Recent high-profile ethical scandals in start-up organizations have made people wonder whether entrepreneurship may cultivate a work environment with less emphasis on ethics. This study examined a psychological process about how an organization’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) can affect its treatment of probationary employees, a vulnerable yet understudied group of workers.

The authors recruited 241 participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk. They answered an online survey about their experiences as probationary employees.

This study found that job feedback and meaning moderated the relationship between EO and ethical climate, such that this relationship was statistically significant and positive only among participants who reported high levels of feedback and job meaning. Ethical climate, in turn, was found to be related to a reduction in workplace incivility experienced by probationary employees. The indirect effect of EO on incivility via ethical climate was contingent on job feedback and meaning.

This study extends the discussion on the entrepreneurial context, adds to EO literature with findings on its indirect effect on nonfinancial performance and reinforces institutional theory through job characteristics’ moderating roles. However, a methodological limitation is conducting a cross-sectional single-source survey due to limited access to firms and probationary employees, considering the hidden population involved.

This study found no evidence of probationary employee exploitation in high EO organizations. Job seekers should embrace probationary work at start-ups. Entrepreneurial leaders should balance being proactive, innovative and caring toward employees.

It is debatable whether entrepreneurship leads to unethical organizational conduct. By studying a vulnerable group of employees, the authors discovered that EO, when paired with favorable job design factors, can create a more ethical workplace where temporary talents are treated with dignity and respect.

As host to over one million Syrian refugees, Lebanon continues to experience challenges addressing the needs of refugee families. This research examined the experiences of Syrian families with the refugee support system in Lebanon. The purpose of this study was to better understand the strengths and gaps in existing mechanisms of support for these Syrian families, including informal support from family, neighbors and community and more formalized support provided through entities such as nongovernmental organizations and United Nations agencies.

Data were collected from 46 families displaced by the war and living in Lebanon (N = 351 individuals within 46 families). Collaborative family interviews were conducted with parents, children and often extended family.

The data identified both strengths and gaps in the refugee support system in Lebanon. Gaps in the refugee support system included inadequate housing, a lack of financial and economic support, challenges with a lack of psychosocial support for pregnant women and support for disabled youth. Despite these challenges, families and community workers reported informal community support as a strong mediator of the challenges in Lebanon. Furthermore, the data find that organizations working with Syrian families are utilizing informal community support through capacity building, to create more effective and sustainable support services.

This study provides an overview of strengths and gaps in supports identified by refugees themselves. The research will inform the development and improvement of better support systems in Lebanon and in other refugee–hosting contexts.

Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.

Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.