Healthcare workers benefit from second dose of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine: Effects of partial and full vaccination on sick leave duration and symptoms

Importance: In addition to morbidity and mortality of individuals, COVID-19 can affect staffing among organizations. It is important to determine whether vaccination can mitigate this burden. Objective: This study examined the association between COVID-19 vaccination status and time until return to work among 952 healthcare workers (HCW) who tested positive for COVID-19. Design: Data were collected prospectively between December 2020 and July 2021. HCW who tested positive for COVID-19 completed an initial interview and were followed until they returned to work. Setting: An academic campus in Southern California consisting of two large hospitals and multiple outpatient clinics and other facilities. Participants: Clinical and nonclinical HCW who tested positive for COVID-19 during the study period (N=952, mean age=39.2 years, 69% female, 45% Hispanic, 14% white, 14% Asian/Pacific Islander, 5% African American, and 21% other race/ethnicity). Exposure: COVID-19 vaccination status (unvaccinated, partially vaccinated, or fully vaccinated) Main Outcome Measures: Days until return to work, presenting symptom Results: Return-to-work time for fully vaccinated HCWs (mean=10.9 days) was significantly shorter than that of partially vaccinated HCWs (15.5 days), which in turn was significantly shorter than that of unvaccinated HCWs (18.0 days). Fully vaccinated HCWs also showed milder symptom profiles compared to partially vaccinated and unvaccinated HCWs. Conclusions and Relevance: COVID-19 vaccination has the potential to prevent long absences from work and the adverse financial, staffing, and managerial consequences of these long absences.

Lie for Me: Developmental Trends in Acquiescing to a Blatantly False Statement

A pair of studies demonstrates that simply asking children to make a blatantly false accusation in the guise of helping others can result in both immediate and long-term false claims. In the pilot study, the initial willingness to make a blatantly false statement was associated with some children making false statements a week later despite being told that the first interviewer had made mistakes during the initial interview. On a positive note, the majority of participants accurately stated that they did not have first-hand knowledge of their accusation's accuracy. Across both studies, the rate of false accusation rates was high. The main experiment demonstrated that children who were young, possessed the lowest verbal intelligence or who were from the lowest SES homes made the most accusations. These findings illustrate not only the dangers of encouraging children to make false statements, but the ease and durability of making such false statements.

“Your Eyes Open and so do Your Ears”: Centering Knowledge of Families with Refugee Backgrounds during a Follow-up Interview

In an exploratory case study of partnerships between educators and refugee families recently resettled in the U.S, we conducted follow-up interviews with each of the ten participating families during year one. In this paper, we report on themes from these interviews highlighted in three family case studies. We used methodological approaches that enabled us to reenvision and interrogate the power structure inherent in research relationships between ‘researcher’ and ‘researched.” The purposes of the additional interview were to conduct a member check on the data we had gathered, understand what had changed since our initial interview with the family, and gather families’ feedback about our comportment and methods. The two-part question was, How might decolonizing methods from a postcolonial lens serve as guideposts for disrupting research methods with families with refugee backgrounds?, and How did partnering with transnational student researchers inform ways of representing the family narratives? The follow-up narratives suggest a complex understanding of building knowledge within the limitations of a conventional research paradigm.

Callahan’s thought field therapy in the management of emotions associated with stress

Taking into account that Thought Field therapy (TFT) is a non-invasive technique for managing emotions, and that it is characterized by being safe and fast, it was applied in a group of 14 people from the workforce of the Center of Childhood Integration and Connivance "Del Bosque", Texcoco, Mexico, who voluntarily expressed some feelings associated with stress before an initial interview, in order to evaluate their effectiveness. 36% of the participants reported presenting anxiety; 29% fear; 21% obsession, and 14% rejection. Once the TFT was completed, these emotions, in all the participants, went from a maximum rating of 10 Units of Discomfort Sensation (UDS) to a minimum of 0 UDS, so it could be established that the TFT technique was effective in managing stressful situations that were to be eradicated, with written opinions that expressed satisfaction on the part of the participants, who had no adverse reactions when the technique was applied to them.

Toward User-Driven Sound Recognizer Personalization with People Who Are d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing

Automated sound recognition tools can be a useful complement to d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people's typical communication and environmental awareness strategies. Pre-trained sound recognition models, however, may not meet the diverse needs of individual DHH users. While approaches from human-centered machine learning can enable non-expert users to build their own automated systems, end-user ML solutions that augment human sensory abilities present a unique challenge for users who have sensory disabilities: how can a DHH user, who has difficulty hearing a sound themselves, effectively record samples to train an ML system to recognize that sound? To better understand how DHH users can drive personalization of their own assistive sound recognition tools, we conducted a three-part study with 14 DHH participants: (1) an initial interview and demo of a personalizable sound recognizer, (2) a week-long field study of in situ recording, and (3) a follow-up interview and ideation session. Our results highlight a positive subjective experience when recording and interpreting training data in situ, but we uncover several key pitfalls unique to DHH users---such as inhibited judgement of representative samples due to limited audiological experience. We share implications of these results for the design of recording interfaces and human-the-the-loop systems that can support DHH users to build sound recognizers for their personal needs.

The dynamics of two-session interviews with suspected victims of abuse who are reluctant to make allegations

Supportive forensic interviews conducted in accordance with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Revised Protocol (RP) help many alleged victims describe abusive experiences. When children remain reluctant to make allegations, the RP guides interviewers to (a) focus on rapport building and nonsuggestive support in a first interview, and (b) plan a second interview to allow continued rapport building before exploring for possible abuse. We explored the dynamics of such two-session RP interviews. Of 204 children who remained reluctant in an initial interview, we focused on 104 who made allegations when re-interviewed a few days later. A structural equation model revealed that interviewer support during the first session predicted children's cooperation during the rapport-building phase of the second session, which, in turn, predicted more spontaneous allegations, which were associated with the interviewers’ enhanced use of open-ended questions. Together, these factors mediated the effects of support on children's free recall of forensically important information. This highlighted the importance of emphasizing rapport with reluctant children, confirming that some children may need more time to build rapport even with supportive interviewers.

Warming-up, Sociometric Selection, and Therapeutic Factors

The content of this chapter is focused on the importance of the warming-up process, the sociometric selection of a group topic and protagonist, and Yalom’s therapeutic factors as they relate to psychodrama groups. The warming-up process, often overlooked, is presented as integral to the success of any experiential structure. The role of the psychodrama director is described while presenting four sub-roles—therapist, analyst, group leader/sociometrist, and producer. The importance of contracting and the initial interview at the start of a psychodrama enactment are emphasized. Each of Yalom’s therapeutic factors is introduced while identifying their significance in psychodrama practice.