IT-information och kommunikation är medel att förbättra hälsan hos personer med psykiska funktionshinder. Mitt arbete handlar om att utforma en webblösning för människor med psykiska funktionshinder. Jag har genomfört intervjuer och en workshop. Jag har intervjuat både brukare och personer som tar hand om dem. Jag har engagerat brukare i min designprocess. Under workshopen lät jag brukarna fritt avgöra vilken av mina designlösningar som var intressantast och mest användbar för deras behov. Jag beslöt att utforma en webbsida för brukarna för att engagera och uppmuntra dem till social samverkan, vilket har varit den centrala funktionen i slutkonceptet. Webbsidan innehåller flera funktioner: visar brukarnas humör och olika möjligheter att peppa varandra via musik, bilder, text samt skicka meddelanden.Effekterna av IT-kommunikation bland personer med psykiska funktionshinder borde undersökas ytterligare. / IT-Information and communication may provide a mean of improving health among people with psychological disabilities.My project is about creating a web-solution for people with psychological disabilities. I have carried through interviews and a workshop. I have interviewed both the users and the staff that take care of them. I have engaged the users in my design process. My goal was to identify the user’s needs and to create my design with that in mind. During the workshop I let the users freely decide upon which of my design suggestions that where most interesting and useful for their needs. I decided to create a website for the users to engage and encourage social intercourse, which has been the central function in my final design. The Website consists of several functions: it shows the users’ mood and there are several options to pep each other: by sending music, pictures, text and messages.The effects of IT-communication among people with psychological disabilities should be further explored.

The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) is an important part of the procedures envisaged in the government¿s Every Child Matters: Change for Children (ECM: CFC) programme. Implementation of CAF, in particular, raises many important questions, not least those arising from the inconsistencies apparent between government rhetoric around the development of multi-agency services provided to all children with `additional¿ needs and the actual experiences of children, young people, parents/carers and practitioners in `real world¿ situations. This paper explores the extent to which the actions of practitioners and the experiences of service users with regard to CAF mirror or differ from those which would be expected in view of the content of government guidance and policy documents.The data used is taken from an evaluation of CAF processes in two locations in northern England over a period of 6 months. It concludes that very small numbers of children and young people actually received the service; that, despite genuine enthusiasm from practitioners for them to be so, the processes observed could not yet be described as fully `child centred¿; that fathers were insufficiently involved; and that CAF was, in reality, another service `rationed¿ according to resources available and according to agencies¿ priorities.

yes / Purpose: This paper discusses the experiences of a group of ten user and carer researchers from mental health and learning disability services who worked together in a research and evaluation project between 2009 and 2012. The research project aimed to identify changes that took place as over 300 people moved from hostel accommodation into independent tenancies in flats and bungalows. These moves were part of a three year project involving a partnership between a local authority and a housing association. Design / approach: The paper describes the process of involving user and carers in the research process, identifying the challenges and benefits of involving users and carers. The ways in which people were trained and supported to take part and stay involved are outlined, as well as how the group felt they learnt new skills and increased their confidence. Findings: User involvement in research can mean different things with different levels of involvement, from consultation through to user-controlled research. The collaborative study had a range of benefits for the lives of the co-researchers, as well as contributing to the development of a new independent living service. A number of factors contribute to the success of user involvement in research and these are listed. Originality / value: This paper adds the voices of the co-researchers to the literature and provides ‘lessons learned’ for other researchers in this area.

There are distinctions noted in mental healthcare service uptake based on immigration status among racialized immigrants in Canada. Research focused on understanding mental healthcare disparities in accessing care within this broad population group often attends to individual-level drivers, which detracts from how systemic factors play a role in producing disparities. Through a three project study, this dissertation aims to explore how access to mental healthcare services among this broad population is influenced by different factors. First, a scoping review aimed to identify barriers and facilitators encountered by racialized immigrants when accessing mental healthcare services across Canada. Second, a qualitative descriptive study explored 16 racialized immigrants’ experiences of accessing mental health services in Ontario, Canada. Third, a qualitative descriptive study centred on the perspectives of both 16 service users and 10 mental healthcare service providers to explore how the immigration and mental healthcare systems coalesce together and play a role in shaping access to services. The findings from all three studies demonstrate how individual and systemic-level factors produce certain inequities for racialized immigrants when accessing mental healthcare services in Ontario. Improving access to mental healthcare services for this broad population group requires attention to how service delivery exists and is shaped by macro-level factors. By highlighting legal status as a starting point for interrogation related to understanding disparities in access, a more nuanced understanding can be gained to pinpoint drivers contributing to the issue. There also needs to be an emphasis on situating how the existing mental healthcare infrastructure plays a role, specifically how access is mediated through one’s legal status. Racialized immigrants are not a monolithic group and therefore, development of equitable policies, programs, and service delivery related to mental health should account this complexity rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Racialized immigrants in Canada experience barriers when accessing mental healthcare services. While there is research that documents these barriers, there is a lack of focus on understanding how this large population’s experiences can be shaped by their legal status. The goal of this dissertation was to understand factors that influence racialized immigrants’ access to mental healthcare services in Ontario, Canada. To explore this issue, this was done through a scoping review and interviews with 16 service users and 10 mental healthcare providers. The findings point to gaps in mental healthcare services that are driven by both system and individual level factors. Meaning changes to improve services must start at the top, specifically changes to policies that limit access to care. However, it is important to not use a blanket approach in developing solutions for this broad population because it will limit how services can be adapted to their unique needs.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the organization that provides the technical support for the Internet. ICANN is a nonprofit organization based in California and is under contract to the United States Department of Commerce. It has come under attack from many sides because it is contracted through the U.S. government and it is a private entity. One of the main components of the controversy surrounding ICANN is whether it can represent a global society as a private entity and whether that private entity can represent Internet users. I focus my study on ICANN's Board of Directors. I evaluated the Board on the dimensions of descriptive, substantive, and formal representation (Pitkin 1967). Evaluation of ICANN's descriptive representation focused on the Board members' sex, educational backgrounds, and nationalities and compared the geographic representation on the Board to the global distribution of Internet users. The assessment of substantive representation looked at the Board members' votes to determine if patterns could be viewed based on members' descriptive characteristics. Finally, the evaluation of ICANN's formal representation examined its Bylaws, its 2006 contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporations Code. The analysis found that the descriptive representativeness was low. The ICANN Board does not mirror Internet users: few women have served on the Board, those with technical educational backgrounds dominated, and the regions were not represented proportionate to their use of the Internet. Analysis of substantive representativeness was inconclusive and further investigation is needed. The formal representation analysis suggests that the ICANN Board has been formally representative. / Master of Arts

Essay #1: Reconstructing Online Behavior through Effort Minimization Data from online interactions increasingly informs our understanding of fundamental patterns of human behavior as well as commercial and social enterprises. However, this data is often limited to traces of users' interactions with digital objects (e.g. votes, likes, shares) and does not include potentially relevant data on what people actually observe online. Estimating what users see could therefore enhance understanding and prediction in a variety of problems. We propose a method to reconstruct online behavior based on data available in many practical settings. The method infers a user's most likely browsing trajectory assuming that people minimize effort exertion in online browsing. We apply this method to data from a social news website to distinguish between items not observed by a user and those observed but not liked. This distinction allows us to obtain significant improvements in prediction and inference in comparison with multiple alternatives across a collaborative filtering and a regression validation problem. Essay #2: Measuring Individual differences: A Big Data Approach The amount of behavioral and attitudinal data we generate every day has grown significantly. This era of Big Data has enormous potential to help psychologists and social scientists understand human behavior. Online interactions may not always signify a deep illustration of individuals' beliefs, yet large-scale data on individuals interacting with a variety of contents on specific topics can approximate individuals' attitudes toward those topics. We propose a novel automated method to measure individuals' attitudes empirically and implicitly using their digital footprints on social media platforms. The method evaluates content orientation and individuals' attitudes on dimensions (i.e. subjects) to explain individual-content ratings in social media, optimizing a pre-defined cost function. By applying this method to data from a social news website, we observed a significant test-retest correlation and substantial agreement in inter-rater reliability testing. Essay #3: Social Media and User Activity: An Opinion-Based Study An increasing fraction of social communications is conducted online, where physical constraints no longer structure interactions. This has significantly widened the circle of people with whom one can interact and has increased exposure to diverse opinions. Yet individuals may act and respond differently when faced with opinions far removed from their own, and in an online community such actions could activate important mechanisms in the system that form the future of the outlet. Studying such mechanisms can help us understand the social behaviors of communities in general and individuals in particular. It can also assist social media outlets with their platform design. We propose models that capture the changes in individuals' activities in social media caused by interacting with a variety of opinions. Estimating the parameters of the models using data available from a social news website (Balatarin) as a case study, we extracted mechanisms affecting the communities on this platform. We studied the effect of these mechanisms on the future formation and the lifecycle of the platform using an agent-based simulation model. Having examined the effect of biased communities on the social media, the results imply that individuals increase their online activity as a result of interacting with contents closely aligned to their own opinion. / Ph. D.

No / The importance of a collaborative approach between the project team, end-users, and stakeholders in managing complex decisions and risks in project environments has long been emphasized. The Porter model emphasizes the need to focus on client needs and competitive advantage. However, a lack of resources and capability development may hinder the project team's ability to provide appropriate services. Supervisors, team members, and end-users can play a supportive role in easing complexity in risk management and decision-making. It is important to understand standards as performance measures for decision-making and the need for detailed knowledge of the project brief. The value of group decision support systems and low-intensity involvements in decision-making would give rise to involving end-users in critical decision-making, the importance of focusing on organizational culture and strategic planning, and the need for a change of mindset to align individual perceptions with the norm. It is also important to gather and analyze information before making a decision. While some project teams see end-users as a threat to their judgment, the research emphasizes the duty to respond to end-users' needs and highlights the value they add to risk assessment.

Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) is now a commonly used spectrum sharing paradigm to mitigate the spectrum shortage problem. DSA technology allows unlicensed secondary users to access the unused frequency bands without interfering with the incumbent users. The key technical challenges in DSA systems lie in spectrum allocation problems and spectrum user's security issues. This thesis mainly focuses on spectrum monitoring technology in spectrum allocation and incumbent users' (IU) privacy issue. Spectrum monitoring is a powerful tool in DSA to help commercial users to access the unused bands. We proposed a crowdsourcing-based unknown IU pattern monitoring scheme that leverages the power of masses of portable mobile devices to reduce the cost of the spectrum monitoring and demonstrate the ability of our system to capture not only the existing spectrum access patterns but also the unknown patterns where no historical spectrum information exist. Due to the energy limit of the battery-based system, we then leverage solar energy harvesting and develop an energy management scheme to support our spectrum monitoring system. We also provide best privacy-protection strategies for both static and mobile IUs in terms of hiding their true location under the detection of Environmental Sensing Capabilities system. In this thesis, the heuristic approach for our mathematical formulations and simulation results are described in detail. The simulation results show our spectrum monitoring system can obtain a high spectrum monitoring coverage and low energy consumption. Our IU privacy scheme provides great protection for IU's location privacy. / Master of Science / Spectrum relates to the radio frequencies allocated to the federal users and commercial users for communication over the airwaves. It is a sovereign asset that is overseen by the government in each country to manage the radio spectrum and issue spectrum licenses. In addition, spectrum bands are utilized for various purposes because different bands have different characteristics. However, the overly crowded US frequency allocation chart shows the scarcity of usable radio frequencies. The actual spectrum usage measurements reflect that multiple prized spectrum bands lay idle at most time and location, which indicates that the spectrum shortage is caused by the spectrum management policies rather than the physical scarcity of available frequencies. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) was proposed as a new paradigm of spectrum sharing that allows commercial users to access the abundant white spaces in the licensed spectrum bands to mitigate the spectrum shortage problem and increase spectrum utilization. In DSA, two of the key technical challenges lie in how to dynamically allocate the spectrum and how to protect spectrum users’ security. This thesis focuses on the development of two types of mechanisms for addressing the above two challenges: (1) developing efficient spectrum monitoring schemes to help secondary users (SU) to accurately and dynamically access the white space in spectrum allocation and (2) developing privacy preservation schemes for incumbent users (IU) to protect their location privacy. Specifically, we proposed an unknown IU pattern monitoring scheme that leverages the power of masses of portable mobile devices to reduce the cost of common spectrum monitoring systems. We demonstrate that our system can track not only the existing IU spectrum access patterns but also the unknown patterns where no historical spectrum information exists. We then leverage the solar energy harvesting and design energy management scheme to support our spectrum monitoring system. Finally, we provide a strategy for both static and mobile IUs to hide their true location under the monitoring of Environmental Sensing Capabilities systems.

No / Through qualitative in-depth interviews, we collected the views of persons with Parkinson¿s disease (pwPD) and their close relatives in care homes to establish their collective views of the effectiveness of care. We also reviewed the corresponding care plans. Drawing on these two forms of data collection, we compared similarities and differences between the qualitative interview data and the care plan analysis to elaborate on the experience of residential care for pwPD. Close relatives of care home residents can be a fruitful source of information for care home staff, throughout the care planning process, especially in relation to the specific needs of a pwPD. Although health and social policy advocate active collaboration between people with long-term conditions, their families, and their formal carers, there is limited evidence of such collaboration in the data examined here. There is an apparent shortfall in the knowledge and understanding of PD among care home staff. There are important pragmatic (e.g. drug administration) as well as psycho-social reasons for flexibility in routine care provision to meet the dynamic needs of pwPD. The findings here support the need for further, larger scale research into the quality of care for pwPD who are care home residents.

Yes / The qualitative study presented in this paper explored the perspectives of serviceusers, family members and staff about the impact of travel issues on the lives of mental health in-patients and carers. This topic was chosen because it was prioritised by members of Xplore, a service-user and carer research group, and has received little research attention. Travel problems were a significant issue for many service-users and carers, bound-up with mental health issues and the recovery experience. Travel facilitation through the funding of taxis and the provision of guides was greatly appreciated. A few service-users and carers positively valued distancing from their previous home environment. The meaning of travel issues could only be understood in the context of individuals’ wider lives and relationships. The significance of the findings is discussed in relation to the social model of disability. / This work was supported by a grant from The West Yorkshire Mental Health Research and Development Consortium.