Emily Schindeler

Research priorities in suicide prevention: A qualitative study of stakeholders' views

Abstract The current study sought to inform priority setting in Australian suicide prevention research, by seeking stakeholders’ views on where future priorities might lie. Three group interviews were conducted with a total of 28 participants. Group interview participants stressed that priority should be given to evaluating the efficacy of specific interventions and examining the response of the health and community service systems. They felt that the epidemiological profile of suicidal individuals had been explored, at least with respect to rates and individual-level risk factors, and that the above evaluative activities should focus on groups identified as having particularly high levels of risk. Most saw limited value in continuing to explore individual-level risk factors ad infinitum, and felt that the time had come to move on to considering wider societal influences on suicide and individual-level protective factors. Many felt that evaluation efforts should employ mixed methods, should be multidisciplinary and should be relevant to the Australian context. They also argued that there was scope for increasing the utility of research findings by communicating them in a manner that would enable them to be utilised by policy-makers, planners and practitioners. Several called for a more cohesive framework for suicide prevention that could guide suicide prevention research. The current study provides some guidance with respect to the direction Australia’s suicide prevention research agenda should take. A priority-driven approach to suicide prevention research will ensure that the research endeavour provides the most useful information for those whose day-to-day work involves trying to prevent suicide.

Workplace violence: Extending the boundaries of criminology

There is a growing body of research concerned with the prevalence, antecedents and impacts of interpersonal workplace violence which causes significant psycho-social injuries. Contributions have been made by sociologists, psychologists, organizational behaviourists and management functionalists. However there has been a paucity of attention by criminological theorists or empiricists despite the well-documented costs for victims, bystanders, employers and the public purse. Drawing from key themes within existing literature, this article applies constructive criminology principles and normalization theory to extend the understanding of interpersonal violence within the workplace and challenges to prevention. This is not an argument for greater application of criminal law but rather an argument that such violence and consequent psycho-social injuries be recognized as a source of victimization and a matter of justice.

Research priorities in suicide prevention.

306 a mismatch between a current sound and the memory formed of a repetitious sequence. MMN can be conceptualized as occurring when a sound violates the context established by preceding events. Individuals with schizophrenia are known to show impairments in the ability to use context when processing the relevance of an event. In this study, we examined whether this impairment in using context would result in insensitivity to the effects of temporal context on MMN. Specifi cally, we explore how temporal context affects the MMN produced by healthy controls and individuals with schizophrenia. Method: Eighteen patients and ageand sex-matched controls were presented with two sound sequences over headphones, with attention directed toward a silent movie with subtitles. In the Fixed stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) sequence, MMN was measured to a 100-ms duration deviant among 50-ms standard tones at a regular 500-ms SOA. The same tones were used in the jittered SOA sequence, with irregular SOAs ranging from 250 to 750 ms. Results: In controls, the MMN elicited by duration deviants with jittered SOA was signifi cantly reduced compared with the same deviant occurring in a sequence with fi xed SOA. However, changing temporal context/regularity had no signifi cant impact on the MMN produced by the schizophrenia group. Conclusions: The results indicate that individuals with schizophrenia have diffi culty encoding and forming a model of the temporal context in which a sound occurs.

Manufacturing a crime wave: The gold coast saga

Crime waves make great headlines, and can be an ongoing source of stories for news media. In this article, we track the news media promotion of the spectre of a crime wave at Queenslands Gold Coast and the interplay between politics and policy responses to the media campaign. By analysing news media reports, government, local government and police-documented responses, we explore how the media framed this crime wave and the politically driven policy responses that were disproportionate to the reported (statistical) level of crime. Despite attempts by the Queensland Police Service to defuse the claims of an out-of-control crime problem, followed by its attempts at managing community responses, the local news media continued their campaign with significant consequences. Our findings are important for those charged with publicly managing responses to media-driven crime waves.

How Homelessness Compromises the Exercise of the Rights of Citizenship in Australia

This paper is drawn from an analysis of the impact of the Australian Government’s legal, policy and administrative frameworks on the ability of people who are homeless to access entitlements available to all Australian citizens. Despite a claim to legislative protections and anti discrimination statute, this examination reveals a history of exclusion in which the homeless have been denied equal access to such entitlements, dating from pre-federation through the twenty first century. It concludes by posing an alternative way of thinking that has the potential to reframe and redress the failure to protect and enable the exercise of such rights by those who are homeless.