Residential outdoor education has had a significant formal and informal presence within the education system of the United Kingdom since the 1950s. However, there is little empirical research into the experiences of participants, particularly from a long-term perspective. The present study investigates the meanings, values, and impacts that participants attribute to a five-day residential experience at Ardentinny Outdoor Education Centre, near Dunoon, Scotland. Participants attended the Centre as school pupils between 13 and 16 years of age. Ardentinny Outdoor Education Centre operated as an educational facility under the auspices of the local authority between 1973 and 1996. Participants were contacted between 2007 and 2008, hence a minimum of 11 years after the Centre closed. Semi-structured questionnaires (n = 110) and interviews (n = 14) were used to generate data regarding participants’ experiences. These were analysed using a hermeneutic approach. Supplementary data were generated from archival documents and interviews (n = 29) with various stakeholders in Ardentinny Outdoor Education Centre, ranging from local authority education officers to Centre managers and instructional staff. These supplementary data contribute towards a nuanced interpretive account of participants’ experiences that has both breadth and depth. The data suggest that participants’ experiences at Ardentinny Outdoor Education Centre represented highly significant events in their school career. Principal findings relate to themes of achievement, independence and responsibility, and the development of more adult relationships. Seventy-two percent of questionnaire respondents claimed that their experience at Ardentinny Outdoor Education Centre continued to influence their adult lives. This influence was manifested in a variety of ways ranging from a love of the outdoor environment, to choices regarding use of leisure time, to employment choices. Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990b) theory of social practice, particularly the concepts of field and habitus, provides a framework to interpret participants’ expressions of the nature of their experiences and the impact those experiences did or did not have on their lives. From this perspective Ardentinny Outdoor Education Centre presented participants with a safe and authentic experience that differed sufficiently from their previous life experiences to allow for the opportunity to develop new understandings of self and the social world. These new understandings were expressed in different ways and at different times over participants’ subsequent life course.

The purposes of this secondary study were to explore the case detection phenomena of elder abuse by determining the congruence between nurses' assessments of abuse and elders' self-reports of abuse; to identify factors that may account for differences between abusive situations and nonabusive situations; then to describe differences between abused elders correctly identified and abused elders incorrectly identified by nurses. Both quantitative and qualitative data were used. The theory of attribution directed this research. The conceptual framework consisted of four concepts: structural factors, relationship factors, elder factors, and caregiver factors. A descriptive-comparison design was used to address the research questions. The sample included 48 elder-caregiver dyads, of whom 24 were self-reported abused elders and 24 self-reported nonabused elders. Descriptive analysis was used, including chi-square and t-tests. Results indicated that the nurses' assessments of elder abuse and elders' self reports of abuse were congruent in only one-fifth (N = 5) of the abused cases (N = 24). The findings confirmed allegations that nurses have difficulty identifying elder abuse unless outright battering is observed. Five variables were significant between abused and nonabused elders, and 10 variables were significant between abused elders correctly identified by nurses and abused elders incorrectly identified by nurses.

No description available.

No description available.

The documentation of Recreation Therapy and Leisure Opportunities in Long-term Care The Recreation Therapy discipline at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (SHSC) has undergone a series of research initiatives to ensure a patient focused philosophy is integrated into their practice. The purpose of the study is the development of documentation procedures that will enable the recreation therapy practitioners to engage in authentic and professional documentation of the residents??? experiences in recreation therapy and leisure opportunities based on a patient focused philosophy. This research project followed an action research methodology and was guided by a hermeneutic framework adapted from Karkainen and Eriksson (2004). The recreation therapists at SHSC were involved in all aspects of the project as co-research participants. This project employed a variety data collection techniques including focus groups, a hermeneutic dialogue, self-reflective activities and active application sessions. The information collected through the various data collection phases in this project led to the creation of a new documentation framework and associated sample documentation, which allow for a more patient focused documentation process. A series of quality indicators were also developed in this project to help authentically express the experiences in leisure and recreation of the residents living at SHSC. This research project has added to the growing base of knowledge focused on the integration of a patient focused care philosophy into the recreation therapy practice at SHSC.

Abstract It is estimated that by 2038 over a million Canadians will be diagnosed with some form of dementia with nearly 443.000 living in long-term care facilities. Non-professional health care workers such as health care aides provide most of the direct care to these residents. The interaction skills of health care aides have a significant impact on the function, communication skills and wellbeing of residents with dementia. The purpose of this study using Strauss and Corbin’s mode of grounded theory was to develop a mid-range theory to describe and explain how health care aides perceive and understand residents with dementia and how this perception impacts the way they interact with these residents. The sample for this study was made up of 24 health care aides who worked with residents with dementia in personal care homes in Winnipeg. Data from audiotaped individual and group interviews were analyzed using grounded theory methodology: open, axial and selective coding. The central category was “The Resident being perceived as a Respected Person”. The resulting theory shows that when health care aides perceive the resident as a respected person with whom they have a relationship and as a care recipient with challenging behaviors, the health care aides use communication enhancement strategies and modify their caregiving to meet the resident’s unique physical and emotional needs and challenging behaviors. The interactions of these health care aides in this study were consistent with the principles of person-centered care and the literature about communication and dementia. The facilitators of this perception of the resident were primarily the personal characteristics of the health care aide and the inhibitors were the time constraints, workload, and lack of support of peers and supervisors. This theory has implications for the training and supervision of health care aides and the organizational structures in which they work. Key words: Health care aides; dementia; communication; long term care; personhood / May 2017

To study potential hyperactivity and hyperconnectivity based on the latent resource hypothesis, this study assessed functional connectivity in survivors of childhood brain tumors compared to their healthy peers during an attention task using psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analyses and evaluated for a relationship with performance. Twenty-three survivors and 23 healthy controls completed a letter n-back task in the scanner. An empirically-based seed was placed in the parietal lobe, a theoretical seed was placed in the hippocampus, and a control seed was placed in the occipital lobe. Differences in both performance and functional connectivity networks from each seed emerged between groups, with some findings supporting the latent resource hypothesis and other networks showing compensatory function in survivors. Attention networks, phonological networks, and executive function networks were all found to differ between controls and survivors.

A growing body of research is examining effective treatment(s) for individuals with comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol dependence (AD). However, treatments for this comorbid population have been inadequately studied in the longer term. This study represents a long-term follow-up assessment of a randomized controlled trial that compared combined therapy (prolonged exposure + naltrexone) with monotherapies (prolonged exposure or naltrexone) for patients with PTSD and AD (see Foa, Yusko, McLean et al., 2013). Attempts were made to contact 120 participants 5-10 years after the original trial to assess the maintenance of treatment gains. Nineteen individuals were located and agreed to participate. A series of mixed ANCOVAs were conducted with PTSD symptom severity and percentage of days drinking and heavy drinking as the dependent variables. Findings revealed that reductions in PTSD symptoms and drinking behaviors generally were maintained 5-10 years after treatment. There was some relapse in heavy drinking days, and combination treatment was most effective for long-term PTSD outcomes. Challenges of conducting follow-up research with this population, implications and limitations of the present findings, and directions for future research are discussed.

Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Laszlo Kulcsar / This study provided an exploratory qualitative analysis of printed brochures to evaluate the conceptualization of successful aging. Data was collected from a sample of 39 printed brochures derived from Kansas Department on Aging Directory (KDAD) of Adult Care Homes 2009. Content analysis methodology was employed to investigate how these brochures reflect the core elements of successful aging as constructed in the gerontological literature (Rowe and Kahn’s and Baltes and Baltes), as well as compare across the ‘traditional’ and ‘culture-change’ models. Other variables of ‘licensure classification’, ‘residency cost’ and ‘gender’ were explored. An overall perspective indicated several brochures met the core elements of successful aging delineated by the literature. In most cases, these elements showed no significance difference for brochures representing facilities by model types, licensure classifications, residency cost and by the demographic of gender.

In this thesis, basic concepts of populational models are studied from a theoretical point of view, especially the long term behaviours. All models are at least time dependent with additional age structure, spatial structure. The last model which is an extension of the von Foerster equation, is dependent on all o f these structures and have a long-term solution for large values of time. Modeling population is a frequent subject in modern biology. It is hard to create a model that appears as realistic as possible. First one might consider that a population size is governed by the current size of the population, along with rates of how each individual contributes (give birth), so that the population increases. and how frequent an individual dies, causing the population to decrease in size. However these sort of models can only describe the size of population in a shorter span of time.