Clinical Research Directory

Creative Drama on Gender Role Stress, Attitudes Toward Violence Against Women, and Aggression

This study aims to examine the effect of Creative Drama on gender role stress, attitudes toward violence against women, and aggression among men who experienced the February 6, 2023 earthquake in Türkiye (centered in Kahramanmaraş). A total of 75 men (25 experimental, 25 placebo, and 25 control) will participate in the study. The experimental group will take part in a creative drama program, the placebo group will watch films focusing on masculinity roles and violence for 10 weeks, and no intervention will be applied to the control group. Data will be collected using the Gender Role Stress Scale for Men, the Attitudes Toward Violence Against Women Scale, and the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire - Short Form, and will be analyzed by an independent statistician. The study aims to enhance the psychological well-being of men affected by the earthquake in Türkiye, reduce violence against women, and contribute to gender equality.

A Hospital-based Intervention for Youth Injured Through Violence

The firearm violence epidemic is a major public health problem, especially for youth. Every day in the US, approximately 100 people fall casualty to firearms through forms of violence, such as homicide, suicide, and unintentional or accidental injuries. Among youth, firearm violence remains the leading cause of death, and each year the rate of firearm-related mortality is increasing. Beyond the significant and devastating cost of human life, firearm violence is an enormous economic burden to the US, which totals an estimated $229 billion annually. In urban communities with high rates of firearm-related violence, firearm-related emergency department visits are extremely draining on the hospital system. At the national level, firearm-related injuries account for $2.8 billion annually in emergency department care each.

Evaluation of California's Armed and Prohibited Persons System

This study evaluates exposure to California's Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS) and risk of future violence and other important outcome events among individuals who legally purchased firearms in the past but have since become prohibited from owning them. The main hypothesis is that APPS will be associated with a significant reduction in risk for future violence among individuals who are directly affected.

Preventing Retaliatory Gun Violence in Violently Injured Adults

The purpose of this research study is to find out if a hospital-based violence intervention (Bridging the Gap) is effective for reducing violence. The researchers think that adults who receive Bridging the Gap will see greater improvements than those who do not receive the intervention. This study will allow them to learn more about the intervention's effectiveness. The study will also help them understand if the violence intervention affects other behaviors, such as firearm use, drug use, aggression, risky behaviors, and rates of violent re-injury.

Evaluation of Violence Prevention Strategies to Prevent and Reduce Community Levels of Youth Violence

The goal of this research study is to implement and evaluate a comprehensive community-level approach, Healthy Communities for Youth, that includes both a selective hospital-based prevention strategy, Emerging Leaders, and universal prevention strategies that increase Positive Youth Development opportunities through participatory action research, stakeholder education, community mobilization, and an overall focus on increasing community capacity for prevention. Key project aims are to evaluate the impact of Healthy Communities for Youth on community rates of youth violence using surveillance data and evaluate the impact of each violence prevention strategy on proximal outcomes including their impact on risk factors and protective processes related to multiple forms of youth violence.

The R-CITY Project: A Collaborative Intervention With Teachers and Youth

"R-CITY" refers to the Collaborative Intervention with Teachers and Youth to practice and apply the 4 "Rs" of social skills in the classroom - Recognizing, Responding, Relationships, and Resilience. R-CITY is a collaborative teacher- and youth-focused prevention intervention that offers student lessons to accompany the Second Step curriculum. The lessons are designed to create safe and positive learning environments for all. The R-CITY Project uses a school-level randomized controlled trial (RCT) design to test the integration of the Second Step program that the school district had been scaling up district wide with the R-CITY lessons. The purpose of the RCT is to determine the "value-added" of the Second Step program plus the new skill content compared to the Second Step alone in elementary and middle schools. Students in both conditions get access to the Second Step content, as an active control condition.

Cognitive Remediation in Forensic Mental Health Care

Forensic patients often display cognitive deficits, particularly in the domain of executive functions, that represent a challenge to forensic rehabilitation. One empirically-validated method to train executive functions is cognitive remediation, which consists of cognitive exercises combined with coaching. This trial investigates whether cognitive remediation can improve cognitive, functional, and clinical outcomes in forensic inpatients.

Being Safe, Healthy, And Positively Empowered (BSHAPE) Intervention Study

The purpose of the study is to evaluate a trauma informed digital multicomponent intervention design to improve health and safety outcomes for women with lifetime exposures to violence and co-occurring PTSD and/or depression symptoms

Using Re-inforcement Learning to Automatically Adapt a Remote Therapy Intervention (RTI) for Reducing Adolescent Violence Involvement

This study will use a randomized control trial (RCT) design to administer two versions of a multisession remote behavioral intervention for youth seeking Emergency Department care for a violent injury with the goal to reduce their violence involvement and associated negative behaviors and consequences. The study examines two versions of the remote therapy intervention - a standard RTI (S-RTI) and an Artificial Intelligence RTI (AI-RTI). The application of a just-in-time adaptive strategy to address youth violence is an important and novel direction for this research, particularly given the need to understand best practices for delivering behavioral interventions among lower-income populations.

Evaluation of the Effect of the BOAT® Structured Prevention Program on Violence in Middle Schools

Violence has major consequences for the health and development of children and teenagers, even though it is commonplace, particularly in secondary schools. The team at the Centre Ressources pour les Intervenants auprès d'Auteurs de Violences Sexuelles Languedoc-Roussillon (CRIAVS-LR, CHU Montpellier) has created a BOite A ouTils to prevent sexual and gender-based violence: the BOAT, for professionals working with children and teenagers aged between 5 and 18. Structured around 5 themes and 4 age groups, the BOAT is very easy to use. The 134 intervention sheets have been validated and designed to target a risk factor (to be reduced) or a protective factor (to be developed) so that children do not become perpetrators or victims of violence.

Addressing Root Causes for Gun Violence Prevention (ARC-GVP)

The goal of this study is to help build the evidence base for a locally-relevant youth firearm violence prevention program in Washington D.C., a city experiencing disparities in youth firearm violence outcomes. The main question it aims to answer is: How is youth participation in the summer youth employment program, the True Reasons I Grabbed the Gun Evolved from Risk (The T.R.I.G.G.E.R Project), which is designed to address root causes of gun violence, associated with individual youth behavioral outcomes, including pro-social involvement, aggression, and firearm-related attitudes and behaviors?

The Mother in Norway Study

The Norwegian government is implementing the Nurse Family Partnership program (NFP) to combat child abuse and social inequality. This study will examine NFP with an individually randomized controlled parallel-group trial. The study will enroll 700 mothers over three years, with half receiving NFP services and the other half receiving standard care. The primary outcome is violence towards mothers and their children, assessed through questionnaires and observation tests. The study will also evaluate the program's effects on various health-related outcomes using administrative data. Cost-effectiveness analyses will be conducted to compare NFP to existing services and improve its delivery efficiency.

A Virtual Reality Brief Violence Intervention: Preventing Gun Violence Among Violently Injured Adults

The overall aim of the proposed project is to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of Brief Violence Intervention-Virtual Reality (BVI-VR) for reducing firearm-related violence, re-injury, and mortality among victims of violence. Outcome measures of firearm-related violence will come from multiple sources, including criminal background checks, hospital data, state-level data, semi-structured clinical assessments, and self-report assessments. In addition, the study aims to understand the impact of BVI-VR on psychosocial mediators resulting in a reduction of firearm-related violence. This will include self-report surveys, neurocognitive assessments, and clinical assessments. The economic efficiency of BVI-VR as a firearm-related violence intervention will also evaluated. To achieve these aims, a randomized control trial (RCT) in a large sample of violently injured adults (18+ years) from VCU Health will be conducted.

More Effective Violence Risk Management - eDASA+APP FI

The main goal of this study is to evaluate if the Finnish version of eDASA+APP (electronic Dynamic Appraisal of Situational Aggression + Aggression Prevention Protocol), a clinical decision support system (CDSS), has an impact on reducing workplace violence, use of coercive measures and increasing nurses' job satisfaction in adult psychiatric inpatient care.

The Community Youth Development Study: A Test of Communities That Care

The Community Youth Development Study is an experimental test of the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention planning system. It has been designed to find out if communities that were trained to use the CTC system improved public health by reducing rates of adolescent drug use, delinquency, violence, and risky sexual behavior when compared to communities that did not use this approach. The primary purpose of the current continuation study is to investigate whether CTC has long-term effects on substance use, antisocial behavior, and violence, as well as secondary effects on educational attainment, mental health, and sexual risk behavior in young adults at ages 26 and 28. The continuation study also examines (a) how the interaction of social, normative, and legal marijuana contexts creates variation in the permissiveness of individuals' marijuana environments from late childhood to young adulthood and (b) whether, when, and for whom permissive marijuana environments increase marijuana and ATOD use and misuse from age 11 to 28 and interfere with the adoption of adult roles.

A Randomized Controlled Trial of ACT-P Versus T4C for Community Reentry

The purpose of the proposed study is to determine the efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for prisons (ACT-P) and Thinking for a Change (T4C) as reentry programs in a randomized controlled trial (RCT).

Requests for Voluntary Termination and Medical Termination of Pregnancy for Maternal, Psychological or Social Reasons At the Women's Center ( La Maison Des Femmes) in Saint-Denis :

In France, Article L2213-1 of the Public Health Code (law of July 4, 2001) clearly establishes that "voluntary termination of pregnancy may be performed at any time if two doctors, who are part of a multidisciplinary team, certify-after this team has provided its advisory opinion-that continuing the pregnancy seriously endangers the woman's health." Consequently, when a request for termination of pregnancy is made within the first sixteen weeks of amenorrhea, patients exercise complete autonomy in their decision-making. This process is unequivocally recognized as voluntary termination of pregnancy (VTP). If an abortion is performed after the pregnancy has ended, the patient's request must undergo a multidisciplinary assessment. This procedure is known as medical termination of pregnancy for maternal indications. There are generally two categories of indications for this procedure: Organic reasons such as progressive cancer or severe heart disease. Psychosocial reasons: which include psychological and social factors. In the case of medical terminations of pregnancy for psychological or social reasons, the National College of French Gynaecologists and Obstetricians (CNGOF) recommends that these requests be formally documented within the centers where patients receive care. However, there is considerable variability in how these practices are implemented across different locations. Furthermore, the existing literature reveals a significant lack of epidemiological and clinical data on the subject, highlighting the need for more comprehensive research in this area. Opened in 2016, the Maison des Femmes (Women's Center) in Saint-Denis houses a family planning center and a multi-professional support service for patients who have experienced violence. It provides care for many women who have sought a termination of pregnancy but have exceeded the legal time limit for abortion. A study conducted in 2021-2022, as part of a medical thesis, revealed a significantly high prevalence of violence experienced by women seeking a pregnancy termination for non-medical reasons at Delafontaine Hospital. The findings indicated that 65% of these patients had suffered from violence. To strengthen our epidemiological findings, we propose a study comparing this group of women with another group who had an abortion during the same timeframe.

An Evidence-based Family Support Program for Parents and Children in Palestine: a Theory-based Intervention

Few evidence-based programs exist to support children and families affected by sociopolitical conflict, despite documented evidence of their heightened risk for emotional and behavioral adjustment problems associated with exposure to conflict and violence at multiple levels of the social ecology (e.g., political, community, and family). Thus, a critical need exists for an evidence-based program to ameliorate the impact of political violence on the overall well-being of children and families. The current study will conduct a rigorous evaluation of a theoretically-driven, family-based intervention program in Palestine, including both the West Bank and Gaza. Firmly grounded in the cultural context of Palestine but with broad implications for individuals exposed to sociopolitical violence, the long-term goal of this project is to provide a family-focused intervention program (Promoting Positive Family Futures; PPFF) that may facilitate individuals' sense of safety and support in the context of chronic adversity. The objective is to evaluate this intervention program in the context of a randomized clinical trial (RCT) in the West Bank and Gaza (N=300). The central hypothesis is that the program will have direct positive effects on family conflict, parent psychopathology and parental security in the family as well as on adolescent emotional security in the family, with cascading effects on adolescent adjustment. Consistent with family systems theory, we further hypothesize that treatment effects on parents will mediate on the effects of the treatment on adolescent adjustment. The rationale is that bolstering resilience in family systems is a key approach to promoting positive functioning in families exposed to chronic violence. The hypothesis will be evaluated with three specific aims: 1) evaluate the efficacy of an evidence-based family support program; 2) examine process models of treatment change, and 3) examine interrelations between parent and child functioning. To achieve these aims, the study will be an RCT employing a longitudinal design (N=300) with multi-method assessments at baseline (T1), post-test (T2), 6-month follow-up (T3) and 12-month follow-up (T4). Families included in the study will be evenly divided between the West Bank (n=150) and Gaza Strip (n=150). Families will be randomized into the intervention condition (PPFF) or treatment as usual (TAU). Each territory will have an implementing partner, and implementing partners and investigators will work together to ensure the study procedures are implemented in parallel across sites. Data collection will be conducted by trained research staff from a third-party survey and policy research organization. The proposal seeks to shift current research and clinical paradigms in these contexts by employing novel theoretical concepts, approaches, and methodologies. The contribution will be significant by 1) further developing new directions for empirically-based interventions in these high-risk contexts, and 2) advancing a relatively brief, cost-effective program that can be readily implemented to help children and families exposed to continuing conflict in Palestine, with the potential to be brought to scale in other contexts.

Intervention to Prevent Peer Violence & Depressive Symptoms Among At-Risk Adolescents

The purpose of this investigation is to test the efficacy of "iDOVE2" (a brief emergency department introductory session and longitudinal automated text-message depression prevention program for high-risk teens), and to determine the most potent and parsimonious combination of intervention components for preventing peer violence and depressive symptoms among at-risk youth.

A Randomized Controlled Trial of Miles de Manos (Thousands of Hands)

Violence is one of the leading causes of death for young people and has widespread costs for individuals, families and communities. This study will test the effectiveness of Miles de Manos (Thousands of Hands), a group-based violence prevention program for elementary school students in Honduras. Miles de Manos (Thousands of Hands) has three components: parents/caregiver groups, teacher groups, and groups that combine parents/caregivers and teachers together. The study will examine the program's impact on parent and teacher's behaviors as well as student behavior problems.

Evaluation of Thriving, Substance Use, Mental Health, and Repeat Injury Among Participants in the THRIVE Program

The goal of this observational study is to determine the impact of a hospital-based violence intervention program on a person's capacity to thrive and recurrent intentional injury. The aims of this study are: 1. To evaluate the impact of the HVIP on building personal capacity of youth who have experienced non-fatal violent injuries to thrive using: * Established measure changes in positive psychology and clinical metrics * A qualitative interview using thematic content analysis 2. Plot the methodology proposed to measure the impact of THRIVE on subsequent injuries using administrative data sources Participants will complete surveys, participate in a semi-structured interview, and have their rate of recurrent intentional injury tracked over time. Researchers will compare the rates of intentional reinjury between participants in the THRIVE program and those who present at other hospitals with similar injuries to see if there is a difference in the rate of recurrent intentional injury a 1, 5, and 10 years.

Preventing Physical and Emotional Violence by Teachers in Public Schools in Pakistan

Violence has severe and long-lasting negative consequences for children and adolescents' well-being and psychosocial functioning, thereby also hampering communities and societies' economic growth. Studies show high prevalence rates of violence by teachers against children in Pakistan. In addition to legal and structural factors (e. g. stressful working conditions for teachers), attitudes favoring violence against children as an effective and acceptable discipline method and the lack of access to alternative non-violent strategies are likely to contribute to teachers' ongoing use of violence against children. Notwithstanding, there are currently very few school-level interventions to reduce violence by teachers that a) have been scientifically evaluated and b) that focus both on changing attitudes towards violence and on equipping teachers with non-violent discipline strategies. Thus, the present study tests the effectiveness of the preventative intervention Interaction Competencies with Children - for Teachers (ICC-T) in secondary schools in Pakistan. Previous studies have provided initial evidence on the feasibility to implement teacher violence interventions in secondary schools in Pakistan. This study aims to provide first evidence for the effectiveness of ICC-T to reduce violence and to improve children's functioning (i.e. mental health, well-being, academic performance) in Pakistan.

Dundrum Forensic Redevelopment Evaluation Study: D-FOREST Study.

The DUNDRUM Forensic Redevelopment Evaluation study (D-FOREST study) is a multi-site comprehensive evaluation of a complete National Forensic Mental Health Service. The study will have a prospective, observational, longitudinal design which will permit the evaluation of benefit over time for individual patients, groups of patients and the evaluation of the benefit in terms of service based outcomes of the redevelopment of a complete National Forensic Mental Health Service e.g. effects on waiting list times, length of stay. The study will systematically evaluate multiple domains of recovery in a complete National Forensic Service, including patients' physical health, mental health, offending behaviours and social and occupational functioning.