This study looked in detail at the parental experience of having a child sustain traumatic brain injury (TBI); beginning with the child sustaining the injury, through the acute and chronic stages of rehabilitation, to the child’s return home. Mother and father dyads were interviewed in their own homes using a semi-structured interview schedule. A narrative analysis highlighted important findings through the identification and construction of several plots and subplots within parent narratives. These include that parents themselves appear to undergo trauma as a consequence of their child sustaining TBI; that parents made - and wanted to make - a major contribution throughout their child’s rehabilitation, and that all parents went - and are continuing to go - through a number of transitions in this process. Given that fathers have historically been neglected from research into child health issues, the finding here that mothers and fathers made a substantial contribution throughout the rehabilitation process is timely and important. For most parents, this event led to profound and long-lasting changes in their lives and life stories where their previous, hitherto narratives were ‘shattered’. On the child’s return home, these changes appear neither recognised nor supported by services. There seemed little if anything in service provision and coordination to meet the needs of children and parents, which resulted in parents continually fighting for services. Clinical implications are discussed as well as directions for future research.

Hot mot anställda inom polisen är ett arbetsmiljöproblem som riskerar att leda till negativa konsekvenser, både för den som blir utsatt och för verksamheten. Att kartlägga fenomenet och utifrån detta ge de anställda förutsättningarna att kunna hantera utsattheten är därför viktigt. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka aspekter kring de allvarliga hot, och dess konsekvenser, som personal anställd vid Polismyndigheten i Västerbotten blivit utsatt för. En webbaserad enkät distribuerades till alla anställda inom verksamheten (n=616), och datamaterialet analyserades genom χ², oberoende t-test och envägs ANOVA. Resultatet visade att upp till var femte anställd hade blivit utsatt för allvarliga hot under det senaste året och att risken för att drabbas varierade mellan personalgrupper. De allvarliga hoten hade lett till negativa konsekvenser, både för de anställdas privatliv och för deras hälsa samt för yrkesutövningen. Respondenterna uttryckte en inacceptans mot hot i tjänsten och en frustration gentemot rättssystemets hantering av dessa ärenden. Utsattheten tolkades utifrån rutinaktivitetsteorins princip om brottsutsatthet i proportion till närvaro i högriskkontexter och de upplevda konsekvenserna analyserades utifrån theory of shattered assumptions och användandet av undvikande copingstrategier. Förebyggande arbete i form av utbildning, samt hjälp och stöd för den som utsatts är viktigt, och eventuell problematik kring hjälpsökande beteende inom polisorganisation belyses. De förvärvade kunskaperna utgör en del i underlaget som fordras för att det förebyggande arbetsmiljöarbetet ska bli framgångsrikt, och kan bidra till att utveckla arbetsmetoderna för att hantera allvarliga hot mot anställda.

Hot mot anställda inom polisen är ett arbetsmiljöproblem som riskerar att leda till negativa konsekvenser, både för den som blir utsatt och för verksamheten. Att kartlägga fenomenet och utifrån detta ge de anställda förutsättningarna att kunna hantera utsattheten är därför viktigt. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka aspekter kring de allvarliga hot, och dess konsekvenser, som personal anställd vid Polismyndigheten i Västerbotten blivit utsatt för. En webbaserad enkät distribuerades till alla anställda inom verksamheten och datamaterialet (n = 330) analyserades genom χ², oberoende t-test och envägs ANOVA. Resultatet visade att upp till var femte anställd hade blivit utsatt för allvarliga hot under det senaste året och att risken för att drabbas varierade mellan personalgrupper. De allvarliga hoten hade lett till negativa konsekvenser, både för de anställdas privatliv och för deras hälsa samt för yrkesutövningen. Respondenterna uttryckte en inacceptans mot hot i tjänsten och en frustration gentemot rättssystemets hantering av dessa ärenden. Utsattheten tolkades utifrån rutinaktivitetsteorins princip om brottsutsatthet i proportion till närvaro i högriskkontexter och de upplevda konsekvenserna analyserades utifrån theory of shattered assumptions och användandet av undvikande copingstrategier. Förebyggande arbete i form av utbildning, samt hjälp och stöd för den som utsatts är viktigt, och eventuell problematik kring hjälpsökande beteende inom polisorganisation belyses. De förvärvade kunskaperna utgör en del i underlaget som fordras för att det förebyggande arbetsmiljöarbetet ska bli framgångsrikt, och kan bidra till att utveckla arbetsmetoderna för att hantera allvarliga hot mot anställda.

Shattered assumptions theory posits that each individual has a core set of assumptions about the world and the self, often termed the assumptive world which includes: the world is a benevolent place, the world is meaningful, and the self is worthy. Experiencing a traumatic event is believed to lead individuals to question these assumptions in light of the new contradictory information that causes the assumptive world to shatter, leaving the individual to rebuild a more negative perception of the world and themselves. This rebuilding of a fragile new set of core beliefs is believed to be a cause of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Although shattered assumptions theory has been widely accepted in the field of trauma psychology, the shattering of the assumptive world has not been empirically supported due to measurement issues and poor research designs. The current study implemented a prospective design to assess a new measure of the individual’s assumptive world when there is an intervening trauma. In a college sample (N = 336), individuals who experienced a traumatic event over the course of the semester (n = 40) evidenced decreases in optimism in their assumptive worlds, in comparison to individuals who did not experience a traumatic event. The results suggest there is a limited shattering of the assumptive world for those who experienced a traumatic event. Applications, limitations and future directions are discussed.

No description available.

Since the recession has hit Greece, individuals have not only experienced financial loss but they have seen their whole life overhauled by the crisis. The purpose of this study is to explore how young Greeks who have recently graduated, or who are about to graduate, perceive their lives and futures at this time of severe economic crisis. More particularly, I tried to focus on their feelings (such as worries and hopes) about how the recession has impacted their lives and their feelings regarding their futures. Research has shown that during periods of recession, young individuals are affected the most and for that reason I chose this population as the target group of my research. Coming from the perspective of developmental and life-span theories that in order to achieve healthy psychological development, individuals need to go through particular tasks during their life span; I was particularly interested to see how the recession has psychologically affected young individuals who, even though they have recently ended two of the main markers that identify their transition to adulthood (education and gaining a professional qualification) due to the recession they were unable to move to the stages which are employment and financial in-dependence. I wanted to listen to these individuals’ stories and see how they perceive their lives and futures and what their feelings are during the period of recession. In a narrative framework, following an unstructured interview and asking the participants one main question, ‘What are your thoughts and feelings about your life and your future during the period of recession?’, the participants were allowed to express their stories and what they considered as important, creating in that way unique narratives that represented their own processes. The main themes that were identified from the stories are: ‘Their career choice and their hopes for employment prospects’, ‘Broken dreams and collecting the pieces’, ‘Impact of recession on the individual’, ‘Impact of recession on other aspects of their life’ and ‘Participants’ feelings about their future’. Presenting and exploring the participants’ stories I attempted to gain a better understanding and awareness of how the recession has impacted them psychologically, investigating their psychological needs finding ways to support them. The realisation of the significant losses that were described by the participants drove the researcher to turn to bereavement counselling theory trying to identify ways to psychologically support individuals who experience similar losses and clinical interventions were suggested.

No description available.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(エネルギー科学) / 甲第22089号 / エネ博第397号 / 新制||エネ||76(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院エネルギー科学研究科エネルギー応用科学専攻 / (主査)教授 宅田 裕彦, 教授 馬渕 守, 教授 藤本 仁 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Energy Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

We prove that there exist three distinct, comprehensive classes of (formal) contexts with polynomially many concepts. Namely: contexts which are nowhere dense, of bounded breadth or highly convex. Already present in G. Birkhoff's classic monograph is the notion of breadth of a lattice; it equals the number of atoms of a largest boolean suborder. Even though it is natural to define the breadth of a context as being that of its concept lattice, this idea had not been exploited before. We do this and establish many equivalences. Amongst them, it is shown that the breadth of a context equals the size of its largest minimal generator, its largest contranominal-scale subcontext, as well as the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of both its system of extents and of intents. The polynomiality of the aforementioned classes is proven via upper bounds (also known as majorants) for the number of maximal bipartite cliques in bipartite graphs. These are results obtained by various authors in the last decades. The fact that they yield statements about formal contexts is a reward for investigating how two established fields interact, specifically Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and graph theory. We improve considerably the breadth bound. Such improvement is twofold: besides giving a much tighter expression, we prove that it limits the number of minimal generators. This is strictly more general than upper bounding the quantity of concepts. Indeed, it automatically implies a bound on these, as well as on the number of proper premises. A corollary is that this improved result is a bound for the number of implications in the canonical basis too. With respect to the quantity of concepts, this sharper majorant is shown to be best possible. Such fact is established by constructing contexts whose concept lattices exhibit exactly that many elements. These structures are termed, respectively, extremal contexts and extremal lattices. The usual procedure of taking the standard context allows one to work interchangeably with either one of these two extremal structures. Extremal lattices are equivalently defined as finite lattices which have as many elements as possible, under the condition that they obey two upper limits: one for its number of join-irreducibles, other for its breadth. Subsequently, these structures are characterized in two ways. Our first characterization is done using the lattice perspective. Initially, we construct extremal lattices by the iterated operation of finding smaller, extremal subsemilattices and duplicating their elements. Then, it is shown that every extremal lattice must be obtained through a recursive application of this construction principle. A byproduct of this contribution is that extremal lattices are always meet-distributive. Despite the fact that this approach is revealing, the vicinity of its findings contains unanswered combinatorial questions which are relevant. Most notably, the number of meet-irreducibles of extremal lattices escapes from control when this construction is conducted. Aiming to get a grip on the number of meet-irreducibles, we succeed at proving an alternative characterization of these structures. This second approach is based on implication logic, and exposes an interesting link between number of proper premises, pseudo-extents and concepts. A guiding idea in this scenario is to use implications to construct lattices. It turns out that constructing extremal structures with this method is simpler, in the sense that a recursive application of the construction principle is not needed. Moreover, we obtain with ease a general, explicit formula for the Whitney numbers of extremal lattices. This reveals that they are unimodal, too. Like the first, this second construction method is shown to be characteristic. A particular case of the construction is able to force - with precision - a high number of (in the sense of "exponentially many'') meet-irreducibles. Such occasional explosion of meet-irreducibles motivates a generalization of the notion of extremal lattices. This is done by means of considering a more refined partition of the class of all finite lattices. In this finer-grained setting, each extremal class consists of lattices with bounded breadth, number of join irreducibles and meet-irreducibles as well. The generalized problem of finding the maximum number of concepts reveals itself to be challenging. Instead of attempting to classify these structures completely, we pose questions inspired by Turán's seminal result in extremal combinatorics. Most prominently: do extremal lattices (in this more general sense) have the maximum permitted breadth? We show a general statement in this setting: for every choice of limits (breadth, number of join-irreducibles and meet-irreducibles), we produce some extremal lattice with the maximum permitted breadth. The tools which underpin all the intuitions in this scenario are hypergraphs and exact set covers. In a rather unexpected, but interesting turn of events, we obtain for free a simple and interesting theorem about the general existence of "rich'' subcontexts. Precisely: every context contains an object/attribute pair which, after removed, results in a context with at least half the original number of concepts.

We prove that there exist three distinct, comprehensive classes of (formal) contexts with polynomially many concepts. Namely: contexts which are nowhere dense, of bounded breadth or highly convex. Already present in G. Birkhoff's classic monograph is the notion of breadth of a lattice; it equals the number of atoms of a largest boolean suborder. Even though it is natural to define the breadth of a context as being that of its concept lattice, this idea had not been exploited before. We do this and establish many equivalences. Amongst them, it is shown that the breadth of a context equals the size of its largest minimal generator, its largest contranominal-scale subcontext, as well as the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of both its system of extents and of intents. The polynomiality of the aforementioned classes is proven via upper bounds (also known as majorants) for the number of maximal bipartite cliques in bipartite graphs. These are results obtained by various authors in the last decades. The fact that they yield statements about formal contexts is a reward for investigating how two established fields interact, specifically Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and graph theory. We improve considerably the breadth bound. Such improvement is twofold: besides giving a much tighter expression, we prove that it limits the number of minimal generators. This is strictly more general than upper bounding the quantity of concepts. Indeed, it automatically implies a bound on these, as well as on the number of proper premises. A corollary is that this improved result is a bound for the number of implications in the canonical basis too. With respect to the quantity of concepts, this sharper majorant is shown to be best possible. Such fact is established by constructing contexts whose concept lattices exhibit exactly that many elements. These structures are termed, respectively, extremal contexts and extremal lattices. The usual procedure of taking the standard context allows one to work interchangeably with either one of these two extremal structures. Extremal lattices are equivalently defined as finite lattices which have as many elements as possible, under the condition that they obey two upper limits: one for its number of join-irreducibles, other for its breadth. Subsequently, these structures are characterized in two ways. Our first characterization is done using the lattice perspective. Initially, we construct extremal lattices by the iterated operation of finding smaller, extremal subsemilattices and duplicating their elements. Then, it is shown that every extremal lattice must be obtained through a recursive application of this construction principle. A byproduct of this contribution is that extremal lattices are always meet-distributive. Despite the fact that this approach is revealing, the vicinity of its findings contains unanswered combinatorial questions which are relevant. Most notably, the number of meet-irreducibles of extremal lattices escapes from control when this construction is conducted. Aiming to get a grip on the number of meet-irreducibles, we succeed at proving an alternative characterization of these structures. This second approach is based on implication logic, and exposes an interesting link between number of proper premises, pseudo-extents and concepts. A guiding idea in this scenario is to use implications to construct lattices. It turns out that constructing extremal structures with this method is simpler, in the sense that a recursive application of the construction principle is not needed. Moreover, we obtain with ease a general, explicit formula for the Whitney numbers of extremal lattices. This reveals that they are unimodal, too. Like the first, this second construction method is shown to be characteristic. A particular case of the construction is able to force - with precision - a high number of (in the sense of "exponentially many'') meet-irreducibles. Such occasional explosion of meet-irreducibles motivates a generalization of the notion of extremal lattices. This is done by means of considering a more refined partition of the class of all finite lattices. In this finer-grained setting, each extremal class consists of lattices with bounded breadth, number of join irreducibles and meet-irreducibles as well. The generalized problem of finding the maximum number of concepts reveals itself to be challenging. Instead of attempting to classify these structures completely, we pose questions inspired by Turán's seminal result in extremal combinatorics. Most prominently: do extremal lattices (in this more general sense) have the maximum permitted breadth? We show a general statement in this setting: for every choice of limits (breadth, number of join-irreducibles and meet-irreducibles), we produce some extremal lattice with the maximum permitted breadth. The tools which underpin all the intuitions in this scenario are hypergraphs and exact set covers. In a rather unexpected, but interesting turn of events, we obtain for free a simple and interesting theorem about the general existence of "rich'' subcontexts. Precisely: every context contains an object/attribute pair which, after removed, results in a context with at least half the original number of concepts.