Substance Abuse Policies in Long-Term Care Facilities: A Survey with Implications for Education of Long-Term Care Providers

The aging of the Baby Boom presents long-term care with many new challenges. Among these are the historically high levels of drug use by this cohort. This study surveyed administrators of licensed skilled nursing facilities in the Commonwealth of Kentucky regarding their perception of current drug use by residents, facility policies and procedures currently in place regarding illicit drug use, and their attitudes toward use of illicit drugs by residents. The results of interviews with 40 administrators or their designees revealed that they have experienced little problem with use or abuse of illegal drugs by residents. Fewer than one-third of the facilities had formal policies in place regarding illegal drug use. Only 10% had any experience with requests for medical marijuana, but almost one in five had a policy on the matter and nearly one-third stated they would support medical marijuana use by some of their residents if the matter arose. These authors recommend the following: (a) that the issue of illicit drug use needs to be addressed now before the situation becomes critical, (b) that administrators and staff need to be educated about recreational drug use and appropriate responses to drug abuse, (c) that screening instruments for drug abuse in this population should be developed and implemented, and (d) that policies regarding medical marijuana need to be adopted by all such facilities.     

The impact of the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK for doctoral and early career researchers

Higher Education - Doctoral researchers and early career researchers (ECRs) are crucial to producing scientific advancements and represent the future of academic leadership. Their research...     

A Cultural-historical Critique of How Engineering Knowledge is Constructed Through Research in Play-based Settings: What Counts as Evidence and What is Invisible?

Research in Science Education - It is reported that engineering for play-based settings is a new body of knowledge under debate and contradictory. Many studies show how play-based settings are full...     

The application of workflow management to digital heritage resources

Recent years have witnessed a noticeable proliferation in Digital Library Systems (DLSs) and their specialized form represented in Digital Heritage Resources (DHRs). DHRs usually manage a complex and varied mix of digital heritage objects of different types and formats. They tend to be complex in nature and usually involve complex, simultaneous and intersecting workflows. As a result, DHRs impose implementation challenges on any solutions that aim to manage their workflows. Thus, despite the proliferation of DHRs, it is a noteworthy trend that there is a general lack of workflow management solutions that can be utilized in such systems. As a research area that is rarely covered, this paper therefore presents the design and development of a novel Workflow Management System (WfMS) built to integrate with DHRs specifically, and DLSs in general. In this context, an experimental WfMS aimed to test the validity of workflow management integration with DHRs. The devised WfMS was built as a workflow management solution that can adequately address the specific hurdles imposed by DHR implementations. Additionally, a novel DHR implementation framework called DISPLAYS (Digital Library Services for Playing with Antiquity and Shared Heritage) is presented as a test bed for the proposed WfMS.     

Empowering Marginalized Youth: A Self‐Transformative Intervention for Promoting Positive Youth Development

This article reports the results of a positive youth development (PYD) intervention for adolescents in alternative high schools (209 African American and Hispanic American adolescents, aged 14–18; 118 females and 91 males). The intervention was guided by a self‐transformative model of PYD (Eichas, Meca, Montgomery, & Kurtines, 2014). This model proposes that the actions youth take to define themselves function as active ingredients in positive development over the life course. Consistent with the self‐transformative model, results provided support for direct or mediated intervention effects on the self‐transformative processes of self‐construction and self‐discovery, life goal development, identity synthesis, and internalizing problems. The findings illustrate the utility of using a self‐transformative approach to PYD in work with marginalized youth populations.     

SCHOOL RACIAL CLIMATE AND THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF SCHOOL ENGAGEMENT

This investigation utilized an integrative model of development for ethnic minority children and a process model of engagement to explore whether three dimensions of school engagement (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive) mediated relationships between school racial climate, academic performance, and educational aspirations. A total of 139 African American students were recruited from a high school in the southeastern United States. Findings revealed an indirect association between perceptions of racial fairness and academic achievement indicators through behavioral and cognitive engagement. Behavioral and cognitive engagement also mediated relationships between youths’ perceived peer discrimination and academic achievement indicators. No significant indirect associations between teacher discrimination and academic achievement through school engagement dimensions were found. Study limitations, future directions, and implications are discussed.     

Regulating research: The problem of theorizing community on LambdaMOO

This article considers ongoing attempts to regulate or even ban researchon LambdaMOO. Industry, private individuals, and research institutionshave supported MOOs, or multi-user object-oriented worlds. The earlyresearch on MOOs by Pavel Curtis, who was one of the key designers,suggests that these systems are part of a research project and have beenresearched since they were originally designed. However, a group ofMOOers have grown increasingly uncomfortable about the quotation ofcertain texts on web sites and academic journals and the potentiallypanoptic effect of research. Some of these practices have breachedcommunity conventions. Yet, such things as testing, invisibly watching,freely quoting characters, and ignoring certain rules have always beenaspects of the system. The dispute over research ethics and theparticipation of varied researchers within this setting indicate thatdiverse values are represented among MOOers and different expectationsexist about how the MOO might be a community. The term ``community' andthe presumption that online characters are people may have alsoincorrectly informed the research debate by making it seem that onlinesettings provide immediate access onto spaces, bodies, and individuals.Many MOOers may believe that research threatens individuals andcommunity. However, critical histories and analysis are needed in orderto explain the system to new users and encourage alternative forms ofdevelopment. Such work can only be produced if online systems are opento research and critique.