Domestic violence in veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder who seek couples therapy

Domestic violence rates among veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are higher than those of the general population. Individuals who have been diagnosed with PTSD who seek couples therapy with their partners constitute an understudied population. Self-report measures of domestic violence, relationship satisfaction, and intimacy were administered at intake to 179 couples seeking relationship therapy at a Veterans Affairs clinic. Couples in which the veteran was diagnosed with combat-related PTSD were compared with two other groups based on the veteran's primary diagnosis (depression, adjustment disorder/V-code). Both the PTSD- and depression-diagnosed veterans perpetrated more violence than did those with adjustment/V-code diagnoses. Domestic violence rates among depressed and PTSD-diagnosed veterans were much higher than those found in previous research. Implications for assessment and treatment are discussed.     

Theme-Based Book Review: Competence

Public Organization Review - This theme-based book review considers three recent titles related to competence, from practitioner and scholarly perspectives: Administrative Competence: Reimagining...     

Empowerment or Limitation? A Critical Exploration of American State Women-Owned Business Programs

Public Organization Review - Governments have a history of intervention in the market to aid small, minority, and women-owned businesses. This research explores women-owned business development...     

Theme-based Book Review: public policy problems,and solutions?

This theme-based book review considers three recent titles related to public policy problems, processes, and solutions, from scholarly and practitioner perspectives: The Political Formulation of Policy Solutions, edited by Philippe Zittoun, Frank Fischer, and Nikalaos Zahariadis; A Guidebook for City and County Managers: Meeting Today’s Challenges, by James M. Bourey; and Solving Public Problems: A Practical Guide to Fix Our Government and Change Our World, by Beth Simone Noveck.

     

Avoiding Covid-19 risk information in the United States: The role of attitudes,norms, affect,social dominance orientations,and perceived trustworthiness of scientists

This study seeks guidance from the planned risk information avoidance model to explore drivers of risk information avoidance in the context of COVID-19. Data were collected early during the pandemic. Among our most notable results is that participants who are more oriented toward social dominance and are more skeptical of scientists’ credibility have (1) more supportive attitudes toward risk information avoidance and (2) feel social pressure to avoid risk information. The findings of this study highlight how the role of skepticism in science and intergroup ideologies, such as social dominance, can have important implications for how people learn about health-related information, even in times of heightened crisis.     

Adaptively leveraging external data with robust meta-analytical-predictive prior using empirical Bayes

The robust meta-analytical-predictive (rMAP) prior is a popular method to robustly leverage external data. However, a mixture coefficient would need to be pre-specified based on the anticipated level of prior-data conflict. This can be very challenging at the study design stage. We propose a novel empirical Bayes robust MAP (EB-rMAP) prior to address this practical need and adaptively leverage external/historical data. Built on Box's prior predictive p-value, the EB-rMAP prior framework balances between model parsimony and flexibility through a tuning parameter. The proposed framework can be applied to binomial, normal, and time-to-event endpoints. Implementation of the EB-rMAP prior is also computationally efficient. Simulation results demonstrate that the EB-rMAP prior is robust in the presence of prior-data conflict while preserving statistical power. The proposed EB-rMAP prior is then applied to a clinical dataset that comprises 10 oncology clinical trials, including the prospective study.