Social science & medicine
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2004
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialDrug name confusion: evaluating the effectiveness of capital ("Tall Man") letters using eye movement data.
Medication errors commonly involve confusion between drug names that look or sound alike. One possible method of reducing these errors is to print sections of the names in "Tall Man" (capital) letters, in order to emphasise differences between similar products. This paper reports an eye-tracking experiment that evaluates this strategy. ⋯ The target pack was replaced by a similar distractor in the array. Participants made fewer errors when the appearance of the names had been altered, that is, they were less likely to incorrectly identify a distractor as the target drug. This result was reflected in the eye movement data.
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2004
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialShort-term effects of moving from public housing in poor to middle-class neighborhoods on low-income, minority adults' outcomes.
This study reports results from a quasi-experimental residential mobility study in Yonkers, NY, in which low-income minority families residing in public and private housing in high-poverty neighborhoods were randomly assigned via lottery to relocate to publicly funded attached rowhouses in seven middle-class neighborhoods. One hundred seventy-three Black and Latino families who moved and 142 demographically similar families who remained in the original high-poverty neighborhoods were interviewed approximately 2 years after movers relocated; no baseline data were available. ⋯ No program effects were found on adults' symptoms of depression and anxiety. These early program effects inform housing policy initiatives for low-income families.
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2003
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialThe continuum of patient satisfaction--from satisfied to very satisfied.
In a move towards a more informed understanding of the concept of satisfaction, this paper aims to explore how 30 dermatology patients describe what it meant to them to be either satisfied or very satisfied with their healthcare. This was undertaken using in-depth interviews and the findings suggest that participants clearly differentiated between being satisfied or very satisfied with healthcare. ⋯ This observation of a 'continuum of satisfaction' has specific and important implications for the future analysis and presentation of patient satisfaction surveys. It is suggested that attention to the differences between the two constructs provides a useful means to highlighting areas of patient concern and that researchers reporting the results of patient satisfaction surveys should cease to collapse them.
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Social science & medicine · May 1979
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialAn experimental evaluation of crisis intervention.