Stirling Online Research Repository (RIOXX)
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Embodied practice in a disembodied time: How the COVID‐19 pandemic shaped direct work with children and young people
Full text linkThe COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions imposed in the UK had a significant impact on social work practice with children and young people. As has been widely reported, practitioners were deprived of multisensory information in their assessments and of opportunities to connect with children. In this article, we consider data from Scotland, created through interviews with practitioners during May 2021, a time of tentative optimism between periods of widespread lockdown. The Scottish policy context offers particular tensions and contrasts through which to understand how practice was impacted by physical distancing measures. Just prior to the beginning of pandemic restrictions, in February 2020, the report of Scotland's Independent Care Review, The Promise, was published and emphasized the importance of love, nurture, and care for children. The Promise encouraged professionals to ‘bring their whole selves to work’ and to relate to families in ways that are natural, and not constrained by ideas of professionalism. The following month, the country was in a national lockdown with strict restrictions on the contact workers could have with families. Drawing on data from practitioners working in this context, we aim to explore how social workers reconceptualized direct work with children during this period
Distance mis-estimations can be reduced with specific shadow locations
Full text linkShadows in physical space are copious, yet the impact of specific shadow placement and their abundance is yet to be determined in virtual environments. This experiment aimed to identify whether a target’s shadow was used as a distance indicator in the presence of binocular distance cues. Six lighting conditions were created and presented in virtual reality for participants to perform a perceptual matching task. The task was repeated in a cluttered and sparse environment, where the number of cast shadows (and their placement) varied. Performance in this task was measured by the directional bias of distance estimates and variability of responses. No significant difference was found between the sparse and cluttered environments, however due to the large amount of variance, one explanation is that some participants utilised the clutter objects as anchors to aid them, while others found them distracting. Under-setting of distances was found in all conditions and environments, as predicted. Having an ambient light source produced the most variable and inaccurate estimates of distance, whereas lighting positioned above the target reduced the mis-estimation of distances perceived
Left-Tail Risk and UK Stock Return Predictability: Underreaction, Overreaction, and Arbitrage Difficulties
Full text linkRecent studies challenge the standard model risk-return trade-off by showing inverse predictive power of firm-specific left-tail risk for future returns (i.e., left-tail momentum). In this work, we investigate the pricing of left-tail risk in UK stocks. Both the portfolio construction approach and Fama-MacBeth regressions reveal the underperformance of stocks with high left-tail risk. We examine alternative channels behind this pricing anomaly, namely, investor underreaction behaviour, continuous overreaction behaviour, and limits to arbitrage. Our findings suggest that the observed underperformance associated with high left-tail risk is largely a manifestation of investor underreaction to bad performance. However, the results also show that the predictable underperformance of high left-tail risk stocks is manifest in past winners. The empirical investigation reveals that, in addition to underreaction, limits to arbitrage interacts with investor high attention levels to explain part of the anomaly. The empirical findings provided here suggest several important implications for practitioners in the equity market
Tobacco, e-cigarette and alcohol content in popular UK soap operas: a content analysis to explore changes in social norms and scene location
Full text linkBackground: Exposure to tobacco and alcohol on-screen promotes use and despite regulations and policies to limit impact, these behaviours remain common. We report a longitudinal analysis of tobacco, e-cigarette and alcohol content in three popular UK television soap operas, to examine changing social norms between 2002 and 2022. Methods: We used one-minute interval coding to measure content in programmes in two one-week periods in three years (2002, 2012 and 2022). Change in the probability of actual and implied use of tobacco, e-cigarette and alcohol over time was examined using logistic regression. Results: We coded 2505 intervals from 78 episodes. Tobacco content occurred in 22% of episodes and significantly decreased from 2002 to 2022 (OR 0.15 95% CI 0.06–0.40). Tobacco use changed over time with decreasing use indoors and increasing use outdoors. No e-cigarette use was identified. Alcohol content was found in 88% of episodes and while it also significantly decreased over time (OR 0.78 95% CI 0.61–0.99) it featured in 20% of broadcast minutes in 2022. Alcohol use in homes increased over time. Conclusion: While tobacco imagery is increasingly rare in these three UK soap operas, alcohol content has remained common. Tightening the UK Ofcom regulations would help to reduce young people’s exposure to these harmful behaviours and their potential influence on social norms now and in the future
Looking beyond the neonatal: what does administrative data tell us about the preschool health and developmental outcomes of children exposed to opioids in utero?
Full text linkBackground The world is facing an opioid epidemic. Children of women who use opioids in pregnancy are difficult to follow-up over long periods using traditional research methods due to the complexity of their lives. Resultingly, we have little robust evidence on their longer-term outcomes. Objective This study aimed to explore the impact of illicit and prescription opioid exposure in pregnancy on preschool health and developmental outcomes. Approach Data identified 6,408 children (born 2009-2019 in Scotland) exposed to opioids through illicit use and/or medication assisted treatment (MAT), alongside a matched control group (n.19,089). Regression models will examine associations between opioid exposure and key outcomes up to age 5, including the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, accidents and injuries, and chronic health conditions such as asthma, controlling for other risk factors (e.g. alcohol use in pregnancy, gestation). Results Early results indicated differences in neonatal outcomes, with poorer outcomes for the illicit opioid/MAT cohort in terms of being born early, having lower birthweight, length and head circumference, and being more likely to be removed from their mother prior hospital discharge. Modelling of preschool outcomes is underway and will be finished in June 2024. Conclusions Having proven that we can identify these children in administrative data, this paper will present cutting-edge data on the impact of exposure to illicit and prescription opioids on preschool outcomes. This will provide robust evidence on these impacts, and highlight where additional support might be required for these children from birth to starting school
Conservatism Negatively Predicts Creativity: A Study Across 28 Countries
Full text linkPrevious studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can be shaped by both environmental and ecological factors, we hypothesized that parasite stress can also affect creativity and thus, its potential effects should be controlled for. The results of multilevel analyses showed that, as expected, conservatism was a significant predictor of lower creativity, adjusting for economic status, age, sex, education level, subjective susceptibility to disease, and country-level parasite stress. In addition, most of the variability in creativity was due to individual rather than country-level variance. Our study provides evidence for a weak but significant negative link between conservatism and creativity at the individual level (β = −0.08, p < .001) and no such effect when country-level conservatism was considered. We present our hypotheses considering previous findings on the behavioral immune system in humans
Interacting impacts of hydrological changes and air temperature warming on lake temperatures highlight the potential for adaptive management
Full text linkGlobally, climate warming is increasing air temperatures and changing river flows, but few studies have explicitly considered the consequences for lake temperatures of these dual effects, or the potential to manage lake inflows to mitigate climate warming impacts. Using a one-dimensional model, we tested the sensitivity of lake temperatures to the separate and interacting effects of changes in air temperature and inflow on a small, short-residence time (annual average ≈ 20 days), temperate lake. Reducing inflow by 70% increased summer lake surface temperatures 1.0–1.2 °C and water column stability by 11–19%, equivalent to the effect of 1.2 °C air temperature warming. Conversely, similar increases in inflow could result in lake summer cooling, sufficient to mitigate 0.75 °C air temperature rise, increasing to more than 1.1 °C if inflow temperature does not rise. We discuss how altering lake inflow volume and temperature could be added to the suite of adaptation measures for lakes
A New Algorithm Using Support Vector Machines to Detect and Monitor Bloom-Forming Pseudo-nitzschia from OLCI Data
Full text linkPseudo-nitzschia spp. blooms are a recurrent problem in many coastal areas globally, imposing some significant threats to the health of humans, ecosystems and the economy. Monitoring programmes have been established, where feasible, to mitigate the impacts caused by Pseudo-nitzschia spp. and other harmful algae blooms. The detection of such blooms from satellite data could really provide timely information on emerging risks but the development of taxa-specific algorithms from available multispectral data is still challenged by coupled optical properties with other taxa and water constituents, availability of ground data and generalisation capabilities of algorithms. Here, we developed a new set of algorithms (PNOI) for the detection and monitoring of Pseudo-nitzschia spp. blooms over the Galician coast (NW Iberian Peninsula) from Sentinel-3 OLCI reflectances using a support vector machine (SVM). Our algorithm was trained and tested with reflectance data from 260 OLCI images and 4607 Pseudo-nitzschia spp. match up data points, of which 2171 were of high quality. The performance of the no bloom/bloom model in the independent test set was robust, showing values of 0.80, 0.72 and 0.79 for the area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity and specificity, respectively. Similar results were obtained by our below detection limit/presence model. We also present different model thresholds based on optimisation of true skill statistic (TSS) and F1-score. PNOI outperforms linear models, while its relationship with in situ chlorophyll-a concentrations is weak, demonstrating a poor correlation with the phytoplankton abundance. We showcase the importance of the PNOI algorithm and OLCI sensor for monitoring the bloom evolution between the weekly ground sampling and during periods of ground data absence, such as due to COVID-19
Health and social care integration: fixing a fixed service ecosystem for value co-creation
Full text linkIn response to increasingly complex needs and tightening fiscal constraints, integration has led to changes in governance arrangements and joint service delivery. Applying a service ecosystem a holistic view is presented to discuss the interconnectedness between the domains of the health and social care ecosystem, including their unique and shared contexts and the various actors and institutions involved. However, our analysis also exposes important power dimensions regarding how the service ecosystem is framed and the actors acknowledged as involved in value co-creation. In response, three interdependent types of integration (structural, institutional, and relational) are proposed
Multimorbidity and adverse outcomes following emergency department attendance: population based cohort study
Full text linkObjectives: To describe the effect of multimorbidity on adverse patient centred outcomes in people attending emergency department. Design: Population based cohort study. Setting: Emergency departments in NHS Lothian in Scotland, from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2019. Participants: Adults (≥18 years) attending emergency departments. Data sources: Linked data from emergency departments, hospital discharges, and cancer registries, and national mortality data. Main outcome measures: Multimorbidity was defined as at least two conditions from the Elixhauser comorbidity index. Multivariable logistic or linear regression was used to assess associations of multimorbidity with 30 day mortality (primary outcome), hospital admission, re-attendance at the emergency department within seven days, and time spent in emergency department (secondary outcomes). Primary analysis was stratified by age (<65 v ≥65 years). Results: 451 291 people had 1 273 937 attendances to emergency departments during the study period. 43 504 (9.6%) had multimorbidity, and people with multimorbidity were older (median 73 v 43 years), more likely to arrive by emergency ambulance (57.8% v 23.7%), and more likely to be triaged as very urgent (23.5% v 9.2%) than people who do not have multimorbidity. After adjusting for other prognostic covariates, multimorbidity, compared with no multimorbidity, was associated with higher 30 day mortality (8.2% v 1.2%, adjusted odds ratio 1.81 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.72 to 1.91)), higher rate of hospital admission (60.1% v 20.5%, 1.81 (1.76 to 1.86)), higher reattendance to an emergency department within seven days (7.8% v 3.5%, 1.41 (1.32 to 1.50)), and longer time spent in the department (adjusted coefficient 0.27 h (95% CI 0.26 to 0.27)). The size of associations between multimorbidity and all outcomes were larger in younger patients: for example, the adjusted odds ratio of 30 day mortality was 3.03 (95% CI 2.68 to 3.42) in people younger than 65 years versus 1.61 (95% CI 1.53 to 1.71) in those 65 years or older. Conclusions: Almost one in ten patients presenting to emergency department had multimorbidity using Elixhauser index conditions. Multimorbidity was strongly associated with adverse outcomes and these associations were stronger in younger people. The increasing prevalence of multimorbidity in the population is likely to exacerbate strain on emergency departments unless practice and policy evolve to meet the growing demand
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