Sociodemographic and Clinical Characteristics Associated with Improvements in Quality of Life for Participants with Opioid Use Disorder

Background: The Houston Emergency Opioid Engagement System was established to create an access pathway into long-term recovery for individuals with opioid use disorder. The program determines effectiveness across multiple dimensions, one of which is by measuring the participant’s reported quality of life (QoL) at the beginning of the program and at successive intervals. Methods: A visual analog scale was used to measure the change in QoL among participants after joining the program. We then identified sociodemographic and clinical characteristics associated with changes in QoL. Results: 71% of the participants (n = 494) experienced an increase in their QoL scores, with an average improvement of 15.8 ± 29 points out of a hundred. We identified 10 factors associated with a significant change in QoL. Participants who relapsed during treatment experienced minor increases in QoL, and participants who attended professional counseling experienced the largest increases in QoL compared with those who did not. Conclusions: Insight into significant factors associated with increases in QoL may inform programs on areas of focus. The inclusion of counseling and other services that address factors such as psychological distress were found to increase participants’ QoL and success in recovery.

The Appraisals Used by Indonesian and Filipino Teachers in Casual Conversation

The Appraisal system is a comprehensive framework that prominently accommodates word classification. These words reflect the feelings and attitudes of the speakers that might implicitly be influenced by culture and norms. To find out the differences and similarities, transcribed conversations of Indonesian and Filipino teachers in Maria Regina School were analyzed. A qualitative method is applied to interpret the findings. The manifestation of attitude, judgment, and graduation are classified accordingly based on Martin and White (2005). The finding of this research is then supported and related to the values and culture that ground the way teachers express appraisal in conversation. The result indicates that teachers are dominant in the engagement system, especially entertain items. These items reflect kinship and open discussion among teachers through questions and the use of modals. In the attitude systems, Filipino teachers are more dominant in positive security that reflect confidence and togetherness while positive happiness items are found in Indonesian teachers where they express their fascination and contentment. Indonesian teachers tend to express judgment of normality while Judgement of capability was expressed more by Filipino teachers. In the graduation system, teachers mostly use force intensification to express the degree of intensity, repetition, and quality. The significance of the research is, the readers will learn to be more considerate in expressing their feeling and emotion in casual talk, especially with people who have different backgrounds of culture.

A randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated engagement support system to facilitate patient use of digital diabetes prevention programs: a study protocol (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Digital diabetes prevention programs (dDPP) are effective behavior change tools to prevent disease progression in patients at risk for diabetes. Currently these programs are poorly integrated into existing health information technology (HIT) infrastructure and clinical workflows, resulting in barriers to provider-level knowledge, interaction, and support of patients who use dDPP. Tools that can facilitate patient-provider interaction around dDPP may contribute to improved patient engagement and adherence to these programs, as well as improved health outcomes. OBJECTIVE This study aims to utilize a rigorous, user-centered design methodology to develop a theory-driven system that supports patient engagement with dDPP and their primary care providers with their care. METHODS This study will be conducted in three phases. In phase 1, we will utilize systematic user-centered design, Agile software development, and qualitative research methods to identify “key user” (patients, providers, clinical staff, digital health technologists, content experts) requirements, constraints, and prioritization of high-impact features to design, develop, and refine a viable intervention prototype for the engagement system. In phase 2, we will conduct a single-arm feasibility pilot of the engagement system among patients with prediabetes and their primary care providers. In phase 3, we will conduct a two-arm randomized controlled trial utilizing the engagement system. Primary outcomes will be weight, BMI, and A1c at 6 and 12 months. Secondary outcomes will be patient engagement (utilization, activity) in dDPP. Mediator variables (self-efficacy, digital health literacy, patient-provider relationship) will be measured. RESULTS The project was initiated in 2018, and enrollment and data analysis are underway. First results are expected to be submitted for publication in early 2021. CONCLUSIONS Our findings will provide guidance for the design and development of technology to integrate dDPP platforms into existing clinical workflows. This will facilitate patient engagement in digital behavior change interventions and provider engagement in patients’ use of dDPP. Integrated clinical tools that can facilitate patient-provider interaction around dDPP may contribute to improved patient adherence to these programs, as well as improved health outcomes, by addressing barriers faced by both patients and providers. Further evaluation with pilot testing and a clinical trial will assess the effectiveness and implementation of these tools.

A contrastive study of engagement resources between English spoken and written texts

Engagement can be used to describe and explain the various styles or strategies of intersubjective positioning that have been observed operating recurrently within different discourse domains. Based on the engagement system of appraisal framework, this study offers a contrastive analysis of dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion between English spoken and written texts. Thirty TV interviews and 30 news reports, each with a length of 1500–2000 words, were compared in terms of the distribution pattern and the quantitative use of engagement resources. The findings show that the English spoken and written texts are generally different in the distribution pattern of engagement resources. More specifically, in the spoken texts the contractive devices are much more prominent than the expansive devices while in the written texts the expansive devices are used slightly more frequently than the contractive devices. As for the quantitative use, most of the frequencies of dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion in the spoken texts are significantly different from those in the written texts, except endorsement and distance. This study may provide a new perspective for the contrastive study of spoken and written languages. The findings may also provide some pedagogical implications, especially for the teaching and learning of oral and written English.

An Analysis of Engagement Resources in Courtroom Closing Arguments: A Case Study of Jodi Arias Case

Closing arguments are the last chance for prosecutors and defense lawyers to persuade a judge or jury during the trial, and they play an important role in the court trial, and engagement resources can help enhance the objectivity and persuasiveness of closing arguments. Therefore, this paper adopts engagement system to make a comparative analysis in the closing arguments of the prosecutor and the defense lawyer in Jodi Arias case and to explore the effects of engagement resources in arguments. The study found that dialogic contraction resources help compress the rebuttal space of the opposed views and that dialogic expansion resources help enhance the persuasiveness and objectivity of the arguments. Lawyers on both sides often use dialogic contraction resources, while the defense lawyer uses disclamation resources more frequently and the prosecutor uses proclamation resources more frequently.

Live (Life) Streaming: Virtual Interaction, Virtual Proximity, and Streaming Everyday Life during the COVID- 19 Pandemic

This paper proposes to examine the digital event of live streaming as an entanglement of digital engagement, virtual proximity, and virtual embodiment as a possible posthuman concern, foregrounded by the ongoing COVID- 19 pandemic. The transition witnessed in the medium of communication between humans has significantly deconstructed our understanding of the ‘normal’, consequently introducing a new phase of lost corporeality, digitally. Unforeseen excessive employment of the virtual engagement system of live (life) streaming is a testament to the current human extremity. In the light of this transition, the paper attempts to explore the possibility of witnessing some semblance of reality by altering the praxis of normalcy in the practice of the COVID appropriate ‘new normal’ through the virtual medium of a live stream. Since the ontology of human exceptionalism has come under direct attack due to the current pandemic, a reassessment of the human/ technology interphase and its consequent posthuman predicament is urgent. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concept of life beyond the self and N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of embodied virtuality, this paper analyses the technical feature of live streaming as the ‘digital’ becoming of human beings in the contemporary COVID- 19 world, further complicating the modes of construction of embodiment through live (life) streaming.

Engagement under revision: How Iranian scholars negotiate the arguability of their texts

Non-native English speaking (NNES) scholars face great hardship when they attempt to publish in English. Upon submitting their manuscripts to English-language journals, these scholars usually receive comments from the reviewers criticizing the rhetorical structures they adopt. One of these criticisms is concerned with how they manage the relationship between the author and the potential addressee; that is, the scholars’ expression of their attitude and the way they adjust the certainty of their claims and establish a relationship with their readers. This study attempted to examine how the acceptably revised manuscripts written by Iranian scholars differ from the originally submitted versions regarding the changes happening to the Engagement system of the texts. Findings showed Iranian scholars’ inadequate knowledge of the interpersonal weightings of the lexico-grammatical structures they used —hence giving undue credit to other researchers in the field— was mitigated by giving more space to the feature of distance citations, thereby failing to achieve a typically sound and rigorous argumentation.