Temple University

About: Temple University is a education organization based out in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 32154 authors who have published 64375 publications receiving 2219828 citations.

Child/Adolescent Anxiety Multimodal Study (CAMS): rationale, design, and methods

Abstract: Objective: To present the design, methods, and rationale of the Child/Adolescent Anxiety Multimodal Study (CAMS), a recently completed federally-funded, multi-site, randomized placebo-controlled trial that examined the relative efficacy of cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT), sertraline (SRT), and their combination (COMB) against pill placebo (PBO) for the treatment of separation anxiety disorder (SAD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and social phobia (SoP) in children and adolescents. Methods: Following a brief review of the acute outcomes of the CAMS trial, as well as the psychosocial and pharmacologic treatment literature for pediatric anxiety disorders, the design and methods of the CAMS trial are described. Results: CAMS was a six-year, six-site, randomized controlled trial. Four hundred eighty-eight (N = 488) children and adolescents (ages 7-17 years) with DSM-IV-TR diagnoses of SAD, GAD, or SoP were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: CBT, SRT, COMB, or PBO. Assessments of anxiety symptoms, safety, and functional outcomes, as well as putative mediators and moderators of treatment response were completed in a multimeasure, multi-informant fashion. Manual-based therapies, trained clinicians and independent evaluators were used to ensure treatment and assessment fidelity. A multi-layered administrative structure with representation from all sites facilitated cross-site coordination of the entire trial, study protocols and quality assurance. Conclusions: CAMS offers a model for clinical trials methods applicable to psychosocial and psychopharmacological comparative treatment trials by using state-of-the-art methods and rigorous cross-site quality controls. CAMS also provided a large-scale examination of the relative and combined efficacy and safety of the best evidenced-based psychosocial (CBT) and pharmacologic (SSRI) treatments to date for the most commonly occurring pediatric anxiety disorders. Primary and secondary results of CAMS will hold important implications for informing practice-relevant decisions regarding the initial treatment of youth with anxiety disorders. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00052078.

Modeling Participation in an Online Travel Community

Abstract: This study contributes to the understanding of online travel communities by extending and empirically testing a conceptual framework of online travel community member needs. Specifically, the relationships between member needs and their level of participation in an online travel community are examined; in addition, the effects of duration of membership on the level of participation and the role of demographic differences in terms of member needs and participation are explored. The results show that social and hedonic needs have positive effects on level of participation while functional need has a negative effect. Membership status had an influence on level of participation and demographic characteristics were found to play important roles in terms of member needs and participation in online communities. Implications of these findings are discussed as they provide important guidelines for the development of online travel communities.

Space-time patterns of risk: A cross national assessment of residential burglary victimization

Abstract: Using epidemiological techniques for testing disease contagion, it has recently been found that in the wake of a residential burglary, the risk to nearby homes is tem- porarily elevated. This paper demonstrates the ubiquity of this phenomenon by analyzing space-time patterns of burglary in 10 areas, located in five different countries. While the precise patterns vary, for all areas, houses within 200 m of a burgled home were at an elevated risk of burglary for a period of at least two weeks. For three of the five countries, differences in these patterns may partly be explained by simple differences in target density. The findings inform theories of crime concentration and offender targeting strategies, and have implications for crime forecasting and crime reduction more generally.

Ab initio theory and modeling of water

Abstract: Water is of the utmost importance for life and technology. However, a genuinely predictive ab initio model of water has eluded scientists. We demonstrate that a fully ab initio approach, relying on the strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) density functional, provides such a description of water. SCAN accurately describes the balance among covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, and van der Waals interactions that dictates the structure and dynamics of liquid water. Notably, SCAN captures the density difference between water and ice Ih at ambient conditions, as well as many important structural, electronic, and dynamic properties of liquid water. These successful predictions of the versatile SCAN functional open the gates to study complex processes in aqueous phase chemistry and the interactions of water with other materials in an efficient, accurate, and predictive, ab initio manner.

The ecology of empowerment: Predicting participation in community organizations

Abstract: The community empowerment model of grassroots organizing is briefly described. A particular ecological framework of physical, economic, and social environmental predictors of citizen participation in grassroots community or ganizations is presented. Individual and block-level (contextual) survey and observational data from New York City, Baltimore, and Salt Lake City were used to predict residents' participation in such organizations, cross-sectionally and after a one-year time lag. Longitudinal data from one city were used to predict the viability of block associations seven years later. Crime and fear were unrelated to participation. Defensible space, territoriality, and physical incivilities were sometimes negatively and sometimes positively related to participation. Income, home ownership, minority status, and residential stability were positively, but inconsistently, related to participation. Community-focused social cognitions (organizational efficacy, civic responsibility, community attachments) and behaviors (neighboring, volunteer work through churches and other community organizations) were consistently and positively predictive of participation at both the individual and block levels. The model explained up to 28% of the variance in individual participation and up to 52% of the variance in block-level participation. Implications for theory, research, and community organizing are discussed.