Homophobic attitudes, irrational fears and negative attitudes against gay men and lesbians exist on the college campus (Lance, 2002; Rankin, 2003). Educators wishing to change these attitudes need to know what types of intervention would be effective. This investigation empirically assessed the degree of homophobia in a group of college students, and changes in the degree of homophobia following two levels of educational intervention that were rooted in educational theories and social contact theory. A 25-item scale developed by Hudson and Ricketts to measure the degree of negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians was used in English classes at a southeastern university. This study examined the relationship between different demographic groups and the degree of change obtained as a result of the interventions. Findings did not suggest that either interaction with gay men and lesbians in the form of a speaker panel or viewing a “coming out” episode of the Ellen show reduced homophobia to a significant extent. Results did demonstrate the Caribbeans and right wing authoritarians tend to be more homophobic. Post hoc analysis investigated factors that may have contaminated the interventions. Speaker Identification was a significant predictor of change in degree of homophobia.

No description available.

Yes / Hoarding is often described as a medical disorder, defined by a persistent difficulty in discarding possessions and associated high levels of emotional distress when forced to part with these. This article will discuss how having a different view of hoarding, seeing hoarding as a daily occupation which provides value, purpose, and meaning and with a relationship to self-identity and life purpose, could offer alternate interventions to support an individual who hoards. The article will consider the components of hoarding activity and how these relate to health and wellbeing and doing, being, belonging, and becoming as understood by occupational therapists. The article will consider what occupational therapy, a profession which considers a person’s daily occupations, the things that occupy their time and which give meaning to their existence, could offer as an alternative to current hoarding interventions. Proposals for occupational therapy interventions will be suggested which would support occupational choice, support engagement in activities which have more positive outcomes on a person’s health, and seek to address barriers which limit engagement and occupational performance in activities within the person’s home environment.

An intervention to improve adoption of dust control technology is designed, implemented and evaluated using three theoretical frameworks: the Health Belief Model (HBM), Diffusion of Innovation, and the Technology Acceptance Model. A quasi-experimental design (pretest-posttest, with control group) was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. An integrated conceptual model, employing key constructs from these frameworks, was developed to predict and describe "adoption readiness". Adoption readiness combines the attitudes and perceptions about a technology with the capacity to implement the technology. The primary hypothesis was that the key construct scores of the three theoretical models would improve post-intervention, particularly, "adoption readiness". Workers in the drywall finishing industry have been found to be at risk of developing respiratory disease and disability. Studies have shown that drywall finish workers have been subject to overexposure to dust concentrations that contain respiratory heath hazardous particles including silica, talc, mica, and calcite. Prevention through Design (PtD) solutions, which are effective at reducing dust levels, do exist for these operations. Some of these PtD solutions include using vacuum sanders, wet sanding methods, pole sanding and using low dust joint compound in lieu of using personal protective equipment (PPE) as a primary form of exposure protection. Previous studies have determined barriers to adoption of current PtD solutions for dust exposure reduction. Usability, productivity, quality of finish and cost were all identified as barriers to adoption. An intervention directed at those involved in the drywall industry is needed to increase the usage of engineered dust control. This dissertation project developed, implemented, and evaluated three interventions to address the barriers to adoption through education and marketing strategies. Development of the interventions included strategies to improve industry usage of dust control technologies. The interventions targeted workers, small companies, and large companies involved in drywall finishing. / Ph. D.

Le volume de données disponible croît de manière très importante et ouvre d'importants défis pour les exploiter. Les domaines scientifiques du Web sémantique et des ontologies sont alors une réponse pour aider à traiter les données de manière efficace. Ainsi les ontologies sont actuellement devenues incontournables dans de nombreux domaines d'application pour représenter la connaissance experte.Le domaine que nous considérons dans nos travaux est celui des Interventions Non Médicamenteuses (INM) nommées Non-Pharmacological Interventions (NPIs) en anglais. Elles sont de plus en plus étudiées sur le plan scientifique. Elles sont liées à divers secteurs : psychologie, thérapies manuelles, nutrition, activités sportives adaptées, solutions e-santé, etc.Avec l'augmentation de leur usage, il devient de plus en plus nécessaire d'évaluer leur efficacité de manière scientifique, dans une démarche pilotée par des spécialistes et expliquée de manière claire et accessible aux utilisateurs. Pour ce faire, il est essentiel de disposer d'une classification évolutive et consensuelle effectuée au niveau international pour les spécialistes. Dans ce domaine, le développement d'une ontologie est crucial pour faciliter les recherches bibliographiques et mettre en place des bonnes pratiques.Dans nos travaux, nous nous sommes intéressés à deux enjeux majeurs liés à la construction d'une telle ontologie, d'une part comment effectuer la collecte du vocabulaire et d'autre part comment aider à la compréhension par visualisation.La construction manuelle de l'ontologie est en effet fastidieuse et longue. En particulier, la collecte des termes liés au domaine des INM nécessite beaucoup d'efforts et de temps tant le champ du vocabulaire est large. Ainsi le terme INM lui-même est parfois remplacé par d'autres (médecines alternatives, médecines douces, etc). Une méthode automatique ou semi-automatique est alors vue comme une aide importante pour la construction de la représentation de la connaissance.De plus, les ontologies sont parfois considérées comme difficiles à prendre en main pour les personnes non spécialistes de modélisation, en raison de leur complexité, de leur taille ou des propriétés et relations qu'elles incluent. Ainsi, un outil de visualisation doit être proposé pour les experts des INM. L'outil aura deux buts, d'une part visualiser l'ontologie existante, d'autre part proposer des modifications relatives à la structuration de l'ontologie qui doit se construire de manière collaborative.Des contributions sont proposées dans cette thèse sur ces deux sujets (construction du vocabulaire et visualisation). Deux approches sont présentées pour la construction, l'une reposant sur la connaissance experte et l'autre sur un corpus. Une mesure de similarité est introduite et évaluée. Pour la visualisation, notre proposition repose sur l'utilisation de cartes conceptuelles. Il s'agit alors de ré-écrire l'ontologie sous ce nouveau format et de proposer des outils permettant de distinguer les différents éléments et liens entre les éléments. Un outil a été implémenté, permettant de transformer les ontologies décrites en OWL pour les visualiser. / The explosion of data on the Internet leads to challenges in working with them. Semantic Web and ontology are required to address those problems. Nowadays, ontology plays more and more an important role as a means in domain knowledge representation.In recent years, Non-Pharmacological Interventions (NPIs) have attracted a lot of attention in the health care community. NPIs can no longer stop at a professional discipline to describe them (psychotherapy, manual therapy, dietary supplement, adapted physical activity, e-health solution, etc.). It requires access to a more concrete level of description where each NPI can be evaluated by science, monitored by professionals and explained to the patient. To do this, an international and evolutionary classification based on the results of science is necessary. Thus, developing an ontology for NPIs is crucial. This ontology will facilitate bibliographic research, usage statistics and the identification of good practices.Constructing this ontology manually is time consuming and thus an expensive process. Particularly, the step of collecting the NPI terminology requires much more time than the rest, because of heterogeneous and big resources in the context of NPIs. An automatic or semi-automatic method is thus essential to support NPI experts in this task.Besides, ontologies are often complex with lots of classes, properties and relationships. They are not easy to understand by domain experts. Therefore, a simple and friendly visualization of the ontology for NPI experts needs to be considered. The visualization does not only help NPI experts to easily understand the ontology but also provides support for the NPI ontology development process.In this thesis, we propose methodologies to address the aforementioned challenges. The first contribution concerns the semi-automatic process for collecting NPI terms. Two approaches, knowledge-based and corpus-based, are presented to retrieve candidate NPI terms. A new similarity measure for NPI is proposed and evaluated. The second contribution is a new method for ontology visualization based on MindMap. This work aims at providing a simple and friendly tool to visualize an ontology which is used by domain experts. We propose a MindMap-based notation for ontology visualization by transforming ontology components to MindMap elements. A web-based tool is then implemented to convert OWL ontologies to FreeMind documents which can be imported by existing Mind-Mapping applications to make visualizations.

This study compared the differential influence of reframing, self-control, and neutral counselor interventions on high and low trait-anxious subjects' self -descriptions as measured by the Adjective Check List. Reframing was predicted to be superior to self-control and neutral interventions in eliciting more favorable self-descriptions. An interaction was also predicted between counselor intervention and trait anxiety such that, in the reframing condition, low trait-anxious subjects would describe themselves more positively than high trait-anxious subjects.

Depuis la découverte des médicaments, leur consommation est en constante augmentation. Cependant, leur utilisation n’est pas dépourvue de risques ; ainsi, la sécurité du médicament occupe un intérêt particulier dans les systèmes de soins et l’iatrogénie médicamenteuse représente un problème majeur de santé publique. La sécurisation du circuit du médicament impliquant les différents professionnels de santé et le patient favorise la réduction de cette iatrogénie. Plusieurs travaux de recherche ont démontré que les problèmes iatrogènes survenaient en majorité au cours de la prescription. Ainsi, l’implication du pharmacien dans la politique des soins et son intervention lors de l’analyse des prescriptions constituent des éléments clés dans la prévention des événements iatrogènes médicamenteux. Par conséquent, nous nous sommes intéressés au thème des bonnes pratiques d’interventions pharmaceutiques, leur codification, leur documentation, leur impact et leur diffusion. D’abord, nous avons mené un état des lieux sur les observatoires documentant des interventions pharmaceutiques. Cette revue systématique de la littérature a mis en lumière la rareté des observatoires documentant des pratiques de pharmacie clinique (i.e. : pratiques d’interventions) par rapport à ceux s’intéressant uniquement à la détection des problèmes iatrogènes. Ensuite, nous avons étudié les données de l’observatoire Act-IP© afin d’analyser une masse importante d’interventions pharmaceutiques pour caractériser les pratiques d’analyse pharmaceutique en France. Cette analyse a révélé une variabilité des pratiques entre les disciplines. De plus, elle a révélé que le problème de surdosage est le plus identifié par les pharmaciens cliniciens. Un nombre faible de médicaments était à l’origine de tous les problèmes pharmacothérapeutiques identifiés. Concernant la pertinence de l’intervention pharmaceutique, nous avons identifié que le type de l’intervention, la classe médicamenteuse impliquée et l’intégration du pharmacien dans les unités de soins peuvent influencer l’acceptation de l’intervention par le prescripteur. Puis, nous avons mené l’étude DACLI-DIP visant à tester un modèle de diffusion de ces pratiques bien structurées et bien développées en France, dans un autre contexte en l’appliquant à la pratique hospitalière au Liban. Après la mise en œuvre, la formation des pharmaciens libanais et le contrôle-qualité de la documentation, les interventions pharmaceutiques menées ont été codifiées et documentées selon la même méthode que dans l’observatoire Act-IP©. L’analyse des données collectées a révélé un profil de problèmes et d’interventions en cohérence avec ceux d’autres travaux internationaux. Elle a montré que les interventions pharmaceutiques ont un impact clinique significatif positif et un impact organisationnel favorable. L’analyse a mis en évidence que les problèmes de « non-conformité aux référentiels/CI » à impact clinique modéré conduisaient aux interventions pharmaceutiques les plus acceptées par les prescripteurs. Au vu de ces résultats, il apparaît que le déploiement de l’outil Act-IP© associé à une standardisation des pratiques de codification et de documentation des interventions pharmaceutiques, est un moyen de promouvoir les activités de pharmacie clinique et leur impact bénéfique sur le système de soins. Pour les études futures, le modèle testé dans le contexte libanais pourrait servir de modèle de diffusion des services pharmaceutiques dans d’autres pays n’ayant pas encore développé les activités de pharmacie clinique. / Since the discovery of drugs, their consumption is constantly increasing. However, their use is not without risks; thus, patient safety is the main goal of each therapeutic strategy in the system of health care, and iatrogenic problems are a major public health problem. Securing the circuit of the drug involving different health care professionals and the patient promotes the reduction of these iatrogenic problems. Several studies have shown that the majority of iatrogenic problems occur during prescribing. Thus, the involvement of the pharmacist in the care policy and its intervention during medication review are key elements in the prevention of iatrogenic drug events. As a result, we focused on the good pharmacists’ interventions’ practices, their coding, their documentation, their impact and their diffusion. First, we conducted a state of knowledge on observatories documenting pharmacists’ interventions. This systematic review has highlighted the scarcity of observatories documenting clinical pharmacy practices (i.e. interventions’ practices) compared to those focusing solely on the detection of iatrogenic problems. Next, we studied data from the Act-IP© observatory in order to analyze a big data of pharmacists’ interventions to characterize the pharmaceutical analysis practices in France. This analysis revealed a variability of practices across ward specialties. In addition, it revealed that the problem of overdose is the most identified by clinical pharmacists. It highlights also that problems and interventions in daily routine practices concern few drugs. Regarding the relevance of the pharmacist’s intervention, we have identified several factors that may affect the acceptance of the intervention by the prescriber such as the drug class involved, the intervention’s type and the integration of the pharmacist in the care units. Then, we conducted the study DACLI-DIP to test a model of diffusion of these well-structured and well-developed practices in France, in another context by applying it to the hospital practices in Lebanon. After the implementation, the training of Lebanese pharmacists and the quality control of the documentation, pharmacists’ interventions carried out were codified and documented according to the same method as in the Act-IP© observatory. The analysis of the collected data revealed a profile of problems and interventions in coherence with those of other international works. It has shown that pharmacists’ interventions have a significant positive clinical impact and a favorable organizational impact. The analysis revealed that the problems of “non-conformity to guidelines/CI” with moderate clinical impact led to the most accepted pharmacists’ interventions by the prescribers. In view of these results, it appears that the deployment of the Act-IP© tool associated with a standardization of codification’s practices and documentation of pharmacists’ interventions, is a way to promote clinical pharmacy activities and their beneficial impact on the system of care. For future studies, the model tested in the Lebanese context could help as a model for the diffusion of pharmaceutical services in other countries that have not yet developed clinical pharmacy activities.

Yes / This briefing paper reports on research exploring detailed case studies of HIV/AIDS livelihoods-oriented interventions operating in Uganda, Lesotho and South Africa. The interventions were analysed through an audit of sustainable livelihood `principles¿. This revealed general lessons both about the practical opportunities and challenges for employing sustainable livelihoods approaches to the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of development interventions and also about the changing format of development interventions. / Department for International Development

This thesis challenges the restrictive definition of ‘gay’ used in legal discourse, argues for the adoption of a broader definition that is inclusive of more gay individuals, and demonstrates that the adoption of a broader definition would help frame gay rights debates in a way that is more acceptable to both progressives and conservatives. Current legal arguments for gay rights use ‘gay’ to refer almost solely to individuals that have exclusively—largely immutable—same-sex erotic desires. However, ‘gay’ should be understood to include a more diverse group of individuals. Thus, the current restrictive use of the term ‘gay’ either captures too many people or too few. Too many people, for conservatives, because gay rights are extended to many gay individuals that are not included in the restrictive definition. Too few people, for progressives, because the restrictive use of the term ‘gay’ doesn’t capture the entire gay community.

This thesis considers Liberian youth and the concept of Sport for Development and Peace (SDP). Since the early 2000s the notion of SDP has been strongly advocated, accepted and inserted into UN led policies and intervention strategies for uniting societies divided by violent conflict. Whilst little has been done to monitor and evaluate such programmes the notion has grown at an unprecedented pace and has been adopted by the development and humanitarian industry with real vigour. In many ways football has become the face of development in post-conflict societies. However, this fashionable intervention remains a development assumption rather than a tested method of programming. Liberia is a post-conflict society with a large youth population, an active large UN peacekeeping force and a long footballing heritage with a plethora of local NGO’s using SDP initiatives. My intention in this thesis is to question the assumptions of SDP advocates as they are applied in Liberia, in order to provide a better understanding of the social effects of football for Liberia’s youth population. I pursue this goal through an ethnography of one Liberian youth football team, Zatti FC, the community from which the players are drawn and the Catholic youth centre where they play. This thesis is significant as, despite its popularity, SDP has rarely been subjected to academic scrutiny, especially using the detailed qualitative methods I apply here. I will argue that, in this context, SDP is highly counter-productive for the purpose of youth development and the re-building of a peaceful Liberian society because football constitutes and reinforces the marginal status of youth. Seductive images rather than rational argument are central to SDP’s implementation and growth. Aiming to engage and integrate youth in post-conflict Liberia, SDP actively confirms youth status in a competitive and exclusionary age-based hierarchy.