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In Adult Social Care, UK local authorities have statutory responsibilities for assessing needs and delivering services to ensure adults’ wellbeing. Administrative data collected during this process may help local authorities’ compliance with these duties. We developed and internally validated predictive models for older people (>- 60 years) receiving social care for whether they remained at home or were admitted to care homes, two years after index assessments, using administrative data from one English City authority. We enquired whether the right data, to predict older people’s vulnerability to adverse outcome (care home) or evidence their strengths (remaining at home), were present in local authority systems, and if accurate datasets for large numbers of older people could be constructed to allow robust modelling. Logistic regression models were created with binary outcome (remaining at home/entering care homes). Sample size calculations determined the maximum number of candidate predictors we could consider for model development. 20,218 older people in the data cohort indicated we could consider a maximum of 46 candidate predictor parameters. In our final analyses we considered 31 candidate predictor parameters, in the areas of: age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation, housing tenure, abilities in activities of daily living, access to carer, Primary Support Reason, diagnosis of dementia. We used all data for model development and internal validation using cross-validation. Models were robust as to assumptions, with no evidence of overfitting and good predictive accuracy. Circumstances predicting strongly that older people would not remain at home were that they were: from other (non-white) ethnic groups, privately rented tenants or other (unstable) tenancies, not able to eat or keep their home habitable without difficulty, with their Primary Support Reason for personal care, mental health, or support with cognition. With public involvement partners, we created a prototype index for local authority use to inform professional decisions and/or local planning.

Background setting Domestic violence (DV) perpetrated against male victims has received little attention in the literature, since men are generally the perpetrators rather than victims of DV. This study examines the characteristics of adult male victims and female Persons of Interest (POIs) suspected and/or charged with perpetrating a DV offence in an intimate relationship. Methods We analyzed the results from a text mining study on half a million (492,393) police-attended DV events from 2005 to 2016 in New South Wales (Australia). 7.3% (13,896) events involving an adult male victim and a female POI in an intimate relationship were included. Results Over three-quarters (77.5%; 10,775) of DV events had at least one abuse type recorded, with the most common being “unspecified assault” (57.3%), followed by verbal abuse (34.1%), and punching (29.1%). Half of events (51.2%; 7,128) had an injury recorded by the police, with “cut/abrasion(s)” the most common (41.6%), followed by “red mark/sign” (25.4%), and “bruising” (15.8%). A total of 2,196 (15.8%) DV events had a mention of a mental illness for the POIs and 570 (4.1%) for the victims. Mood disorders had the most mentions for both POIs (37.0%) and victims (32.8%). Among victims, anxiety related disorders saw the largest increase (14.0%) in mentions from 2005 to 2016, followed by depression (8.0%). Conclusion Our findings represent population level data insights from DV events involving an adult male victim in an intimate relationship with a female POI. Our findings align with existing studies suggesting that female POIs are more likely than male POIs to use objects/weapons, employ verbal abuse, and perform minor acts of physical violence. Female POIs had 4 times the number of mental illness mentions than male victims indicating that mental illness could be a risk factor for DV, while the increase in anxiety disorders and depression for male victims corresponds with research that associates mental illnesses and DV victimhood. This study highlights the need for a greater awareness and support for male victims of DV.

Background setting Domestic violence (DV) is a major public health problem and a violation of human rights. To date, research on DV has predominantly focused on women as victims and men as perpetrators. Male DV victims particularly in non-intimate relationships have received little attention in the literature. This study represents the first attempt to report on DV among male victims in non-intimate relationships using population-level data. Methods This is a population-level retrospective observational study using data extracted from a large sample of police-attended narratives in New South Wales (NSW) from 2005 to 2016 using rule-based text mining. Results From 18,611 DV events involving non-intimate relationships, most of the Persons of Interest (POIs)—individuals suspected or charged with a DV offence—were male (78%) and members of the victims’ family (26.8%, cousins, uncles and aunts). A total of 42 different types of abuse were identified in 74.3% (n = 13,832) events, the most prevalent being physical abuse with assault (unspecified) accounting for half of the cases (53.9%, n = 7462) and punching for more than one third of cases (35.4%). Almost half of DV events (46.3%, n = 8616) recorded injury type to the victim, the most common being cut(s) (43.6%, n = 3754), followed by swelling (19.9%, n = 1716), and bruising (19.5%, n = 1679). A total of 2,903 (15.6%) events had a mental illness mentions for the POIs and 857 (4.6%) for the victims, with 23 different mental illnesses recorded. Schizophrenia and dementia were the most common mental illnesses among POIs (13.6%) and victims (13.0%), respectively. Conclusions This study provides new insights and empirical evidence on abuse types, perpetrator-victim relationships, victim injuries and mental illness on DV events involving adult male victims in non-intimate relationships. The findings form an important evidence base to trigger further research in the future.

This thesis aims to trace one feature - interpersonal suspicious thought - in order to better understand jealousy, and its relationship to other kinds of suspicious thought in non-clinical populations. Chapter 1 offers an overview of jealousy and its clinical and forensic importance. Chapters 2 and 3 review the jealousy literature and theory, and offer critiques and areas to examine further, such as, the role of abnormal cognitive processes, negative affect, and in particular, psychosis-like thought. Chapter 4 explores jealousy's structure and its relationship to paranoid ideation and finds indications of a shared, cumulative, latent, psychosis-like structure. Chapter 5 further examines the structure of jealousy found in Chapter 4 and confirms the cumulative structure and jealousy's overlap with paranoia. Chapter 6 investigates how irrational processes, including jealousy, arise, evolve and impact couple relationships in real time. The study found that interpersonal socio-cognitive processes, such as intuition, appear to play a role in irrational thought formation and maintenance and may have a role in both functional and dysfunctional relationship processes. Chapter 7 summarises the thesis and integrates theory to build a new model of the jealousy process. The results of the thesis are discussed in terms of both implications for practice and directions for future research.