Jennifer Lavoie

• Doctorate, Psychology
• Professor (Associate) at Wilfrid Laurier University

Virtual reality is an emerging frontier that offers immersive simulations with the capacity to revolutionize police training. This study evaluated a scenario-based training approach by comparing the delivery of simulations in Virtual Reality (VR) and Live Action (LA). Participation in this mental health crisis response training program in either fo...

Using the current empirical landscape of police responses to people in mental health crisis as a backdrop, this methods paper makes an argument for the central role of collaborative co-design and production by diverse community experts and stakeholders to build transformative specialized training for frontline officers. Subject matter experts (SMEs...

Police officers play a key role in determining the result of incidents that involve people in mental health crisis given their role as first responders and gatekeepers to services. In this paper, we ethnographically study one Canadian, mid-size municipal police service’s integration of an electronic mental health screener (MHS). The screener was de...

Official police data from a Canadian city were used to provide insight into calls for police service that were primarily related to mental health concerns (N = 400). People with mental illness (PMI) consumer demographics, situation features, and outcomes of these interactions were analysed. Police encounters with PMI included youth and ethnic minor...

An integrative review was conducted to evaluate and synthesize the current state of knowledge of family carers’ experiences of emergency psychiatric crises of an adult relative. A literature review was performed by searching key terms in EBSCO (CINAHL, Criminal Justice Abstracts, Social Work Abstracts), and Proquest (MEDLINE, PsycINFO) citation dat...

Housing quality (HQ) is associated with mental health, and may mediate outcomes in housing interventions. However, studies of housing interventions rarely report HQ. The purpose of this study was to describe HQ in a multi-site randomized controlled trial of Housing First (HF) in five Canadian cities and to examine possible differences by treatment...

Purpose: Housing First (HF) has been shown to improve housing stability, on average, for formerly homeless adults with mental illness. However, little is known about patterns of change and characteristics that predict different outcome trajectories over time. This article reports on latent trajectories of housing stability among 2140 participants...

We conducted a narrative analysis of a collective narrative comprising inscriptions left on the locally famed "Apology Wall," written by thousands of community members in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup Riot. In considering the Apology Wall as an "evocative object," this study emphasized the significance of material object...

Amongst individuals with mental illness, rates of self-harm and suicide-related behavior (SRB) are higher compared to the general population. Studies have found that when dealing with distressing circumstances, people with psychiatric conditions often use less effective task-orientated strategies and more ineffective emotion-orientated coping. Poor...

Quality of housing has been shown to be related to health outcomes, including mental health and well-being, yet "objective" or observer-rated housing quality is rarely measured in housing intervention research. This may be due to a lack of standardized, reliable, and valid housing quality instruments. The objective of this research was to develop a...

Sources of perceived stress, coping style and coping efficacy were investigated among psychiatric patients being discharged to the community. The study's purpose was to (i) qualitatively characterize sources of perceived stress; (ii) identify preferred coping styles, and (iii) test the effectiveness of coping styles. Thematic coding of participants...

The expansion of online social networking sites and the relative accessibility to personal information provided by these sites has raised concerns about the risks for a variety of negative experiences, including cyberstalking. The present study investigated whether the theoretical concepts of Routine Activities Theory (RAT) could account for patter...

The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS; Cohen, Kamarck, & Mermelstein, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24: 385–396, 1983) and its derivatives are among the most commonly used self-report measures of subjective global stress. Several factorial models of the PSS have been proposed; however, which of these structures reliably measures individuals with...

Purpose. Three studies were conducted to determine the effect of a judicial declaration of competence on perceptions of credibility towards a child witness and an adult defendant. Methods. Undergraduates read vignettes about a 5‐ or a 13‐year‐old child witness or an adult involved in either a sexual assault case or a motor vehicle accident case. In...

Perceptions of children's credibility were studied in two experiments wherein participants watched a videotape of a 4- to 5- or a 6- to 7-year old child report details of a play session that had been experienced once (single-event) or was the last in a series of four similar play sessions (repeat-event). The child's report was classified as high or...

This study was designed to examine correctional officers' (COs') perceptions of offenders with mental disorders (MDOs) in relation to non-disordered offenders, patients with mental illness, and the general public as a replication of research conducted by Kropp, Cox, Roesch, and Eaves (1989). The objective was to investigate i) the nature of COs' pe...

This study was designed to explore the extent to which time spent online was related to self reports of procrastination. A sample of 308 participants (Mean age = 29.4 years, SD = 12.0, 198 females) from various regions of North America completed a survey posted to the World Wide Web. Data collected included demographic information, attitudes toward...