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Background Despite the availability of effective evidence-based treatments for depression and anxiety, many ‘harder-to-reach’ social and patient groups experience difficulties accessing treatment. We developed a complex intervention, the AMP (Improving Access to Mental Health in Primary Care) programme, which combined community engagement (CE), tailored (individual and group) psychosocial interventions and primary care involvement. Objectives To develop and evaluate a model for community engagement component of the complex intervention. This paper focuses on the development of relationships between stakeholders, their engagement with the issue of access to mental health and with the programme through the CE model. Design Our evaluation draws on process data, qualitative interviews and focus groups, brought together through framework analysis to evaluate the issues and challenges encountered. Setting & participants A case study of the South Asian community project carried out in Longsight in Greater Manchester, United Kingdom. Key findings Complex problems require multiple local stakeholders to work in concert. Assets based approaches implicitly make demands on scarce time and resources. Community development approaches have many benefits, but perceptions of open-ended investment are a barrier. The time-limited nature of a CE intervention provides an impetus to ‘do it now’, allowing stakeholders to negotiate their investment over time and accommodating their wider commitments. Both tangible outcomes and recognition of process benefits were vital in maintaining involvement. Conclusions CE interventions can play a key role in improving accessibility and acceptability by engaging patients, the public and practitioners in research and in the local service ecology.

Interactions with retail salespersons in stores contribute to building trust and profits. Within the largely impersonal Internet, an interactive animated character or avatar, playing the social role of an online sales assistant, should provide a potent source of social presence and so have the potential to replace some of these interactions. This investigation tests whether avatars with social- or task-oriented communication styles contribute to user trust and patronage intentions. Further tests explore the moderating effects of product/service type. The study includes an online experiment and survey, involving 636 participants, mainly from North America, Oceania and Europe, allocated randomly to different treatments. Task-oriented communications contribute to trust, which in turn contributes to patronage intentions, especially for search goods/services. Social-oriented communications also contribute directly to trust and to patronage intentions, most strongly for credence goods/services. The authors recommend a three-fold approach to avatar implementation, involving requirements captured to define appropriate appearance, role, interaction style and content for the task. Conclusions include further suggestions for development and research.

Avatars are now appearing as online assistants on transactional websites, yet their scope is still limited. This paper explores their potential roles in providing assistance, a friendlier interface and purchase recommendations. As avatars are at early stages of implementation, the conceptual framework draws upon human-computer interaction research, plus cognate literature on salesperson roles and the use of synthetic characters in other contexts. The empirical study involved two longitudinal panels of online buyers and an international, online survey of 2114 internet users. Following split-sample principal components analysis and k-means clustering, four categories of role preference are identified. The results inform decisions on the appropriateness of avatars, their adaptation to customer needs and buying contexts, and their possible roles. Hypothesised relationships with age, gender and online buying experience are tested, suggesting scope for avatar role segmentation. Suggestions are offered for marke...

University students, divided on a quartile split into low ( n = 53) and high ( n = 42) depression groups (Beck scores of 0–1 or 7 and higher), were presented a series of failure situations in which failure occurred under high effort (with situational factors causing failure) or low effort. Subjects rated their affective reactions to each situation. It was hypothesized that the group low on depression would feel worse after high effort (since this would challenge their sense of self-efficacy) whereas the high depression group would feel better in this condition (since attribution of failure to situational factors would protect their sense of self-esteem). Results were consistent with expectations for the group low on depression. For the group high on depression, the means were rank-ordered as predicted but the difference was not significant.