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Selected AbstractsAssessment of the benefits of user involvement in health research from the Warwick Diabetes Care Research User Group: a qualitative case studyHEALTH EXPECTATIONS, Issue 3 2007Antje Lindenmeyer PhD Abstract Objective, To assess the benefits of involving health-care users in diabetes research. Design and participants, For this qualitative case study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with researchers who had worked extensively with the group. During regular meetings of the Research User Group, members discussed their views of the group's effectiveness as part of the meeting's agenda. Interviews and discussions were transcribed, coded using N-Vivo software and analysed using constant comparative methods. Results, Involvement of users in research was generally seen as contributing to effective and meaningful research. However, the group should not be considered to be representative of the patient population or participants of future trials. An important contributor to the group's success was its longstanding nature, enabling users to gain more insight into research and form constructive working relationships with researchers. The user-led nature of the group asserted itself, especially, in the language used during group meetings. A partial shift of power from researchers to users was generally acknowledged. Users' main contribution was their practical expertise in living with diabetes, but their involvement also helped researchers to remain connected to the ,real world' in which research would be applied. While the group's work fulfilled established principles of consumer involvement in research, important contributions relying on personal interaction between users and researchers were hard to evaluate by process measures alone. Conclusions, We demonstrated the feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness of this longstanding, experienced, lay-led research advisory group. Its impact on research stems from the continuing interaction between researchers and users, and the general ethos of learning from each other in an on-going process. Both process measures and qualitative interviews with stakeholders are needed to evaluate the contributions of service users to health research. [source] ,A Very Sensible Man': Imagining Fatherhood in England c.1750,1830HISTORY, Issue 319 2010JOANNE BAILEY Fathers are at once everywhere and nowhere in the historiography of eighteenth-century England. They interact with children in family history, bear authority in histories of women, gender and marriage, use the role to demonstrate virility, and the capacity for household mastery and citizenship in the history of masculinity, and are metaphors in political culture. Yet there is little sustained work on what constituted the key attributes of fatherhood before 1830. This article shows that the ideal father in the period c.1750 to 1830 was tenderly affectionate, sensitized and moved by babies; he provided hugs, material support and a protective guiding hand. Engrossed in his offspring to the exclusion of much else apart from his wife and national duties, he offered his children a moral example and instruction and possessed a deep understanding of his children's personalities. The genesis of this imagined fatherhood lay in fundamental eighteenth-century concerns about social, class, gender and familial relationships, and national strength. His form and the language used to describe him owed much to the combined forces of the culture of sensibility and of general Christian ideals antedating Evangelical revival. [source] Re-awakenings?: A discourse analysis of the recovery from schizophrenia after medication changeINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MENTAL HEALTH NURSING, Issue 2 2001Trudy Rudge ABSTRACT This paper explores the construction of recovery from schizophrenia after medication change through the analysis of people living with schizophrenia. The study is framed by a discourse analysis which assumes that the language used to discuss schizophrenia and its treatment by medication is imbued with the power relations of mental health. The analysis uses research literature, pharmaceutical literature and previous studies of schizophrenia as the discursive background that frames how recovery can be talked about. The discussion highlights how the discourses of medical science construct recovery as a linear event that silences the embodiment of schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia refuse this construction, through finding a ,niche' for themselves. In conclusion, the paper suggests how such analysis opens up for exploration of the silencing of ,insanity', and establishes a beginning dialogue with people who live with the continuing presence of schizophrenia. [source] Husserl and Heidegger: Exploring the disparityINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NURSING PRACTICE, Issue 1 2009Tracy McConnell-Henry RN BN GDN (Critical Care) MHSc (Nse Ed) PhD candidate MRCNA Introduced as an alternative to empirical science, phenomenology offers nursing an insightful means for understanding nursing phenomena specifically in relation to lived experiences. However, not all phenomenologies were created equal, a point which has left many a nursing researcher not only confused. Furthermore, this confusion might result in the choosing of a philosophical framework that is neither cognizant with the research question nor the epistemological lens through which the researcher operates. Drawing on common nursing examples to illustrate concepts, the authors closely examine and debate the disparities between Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and Heidegger's hermeneutic approach to phenomenology. The aim of the article is to demystify the dense language used and present the fundamental beliefs of each philosopher in a format that is accessible to novice phenomenologists. [source] An investigation of language used by children to describe discomfort expected and experienced during dental treatmentINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PAEDIATRIC DENTISTRY, Issue 5 2005K. HARMAN Summary., Objectives. A study of dental pulp testing has shown that children's linguistic comprehension and chronological age independently influence their descriptions of pain. The present study sought first to demonstrate this for expectations and experience of routine dental treatment, and secondly, to determine whether the effect of age was the result of previous dental and medical experience. Sample. Forty-six children between 6 and 17 years of age attending two paediatric dental clinics for routine invasive procedures comprised the study sample. Methods. To describe their expectations of forthcoming treatment, each child selected words from a published list, and gave ratings on scales describing the degree of severity as ,sore' or ,tingly'. They also completed the Child Dental Anxiety Scale and the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Scale for Children. After treatment, they described the treatment with the same list and scales, then completed the British Picture Vocabulary Scale and a dental,medical history questionnaire. Results. The children, especially the most anxious ones, chose more words from the list for their expectations than for their experience of treatment, suggesting, as in previous studies, that they expected more discomfort than they experienced. Ratings of ,sore' and ,tingly' did not show this discrepancy. For both expectations and experience of treatment, the children with the largest vocabularies chose the fewest words, thus being more discriminating in their choices. However, vocabulary had no effect on ratings of ,sore' and ,tingly'. There were no significant relationships among age, estimates of discomfort and medical,dental histories. Conclusions. The results suggest that a list of adjectives provides the most discriminating measure of discomfort. They also show that it is necessary to take into account children's linguistic development to evaluate their estimates of pain so as not to entertain the belief of many clinicians that children exaggerate such reports. [source] Aesthetic Composition and the Language of Light, a Subject of Academic InquiryJOURNAL OF INTERIOR DESIGN, Issue 3 2004Nancy Clark Brown M.S. ABSTRACT This study explores light as a design element in the composition of interior spaces. An analysis of two graduate-student projects demonstrates the potential in considering light from an aesthetic perspective. Further, the projects demonstrate the gap between the language used in the composition of interior space and the language of light. [source] Reforming Leasehold: Discursive Events and Outcomes, 1984,2000JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2001Sarah Blandy This article uses discourse analysis to explore and explain the limits of ongoing efforts to resolve the problems experienced by long leaseholders living in private flats in England and Wales. Attention is focused on the position of leasehold within the three discourses of property law, housing, and housing law, as revealed through the language used in legislation, consultation papers, Law Commission reports, political statements, media representations, and the accounts of leaseholders themselves. The implementation gap between legislative intentions and effects, so often neglected in discussion of housing policy, is explored. The article considers policy and legislation in the light of a metanarrative encompassing all aspects of the multi-occupancy of blocks of flats. [source] A classification of mental models of undergraduates seeking information for a course essay in history and psychology: Preliminary investigations into aligning their mental models with online thesauriJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 13 2007Charles Cole The article reports a field study which examined the mental models of 80 undergraduates seeking information for either a history or psychology course essay when they were in an early, exploration stage of researching their essay. This group is presently at a disadvantage when using thesaurus-type schemes in indexes and online search engines because there is a disconnect between how domain novice users of IR systems represent a topic space and how this space is represented in the standard IR system thesaurus. The study attempted to (a) ascertain the coding language used by the 80 undergraduates in the study to mentally represent their topic and then (b) align the mental models with the hierarchical structure found in many thesauri. The intervention focused the undergraduates' thinking about their topic from a topic statement to a thesis statement. The undergraduates were asked to produce three mental model diagrams for their real-life course essay at the beginning, middle, and end of the interview, for a total of 240 mental model diagrams, from which we created a 12-category mental model classification scheme. Findings indicate that at the end of the intervention, (a) the percentage of vertical mental models increased from 24 to 35% of all mental models; but that (b) 3rd-year students had fewer vertical mental models than did 1st-year undergraduates in the study, which is counterintuitive. The results indicate that there is justification for pursuing our research based on the hypothesis that rotating a domain novice's mental model into a vertical position would make it easier for him or her to cognitively connect with the thesaurus's hierarchical representation of the topic area. [source] A multi-ontology framework to guide agriculture and food towards diet and healthJOURNAL OF THE SCIENCE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURE, Issue 8 2007Matthew C Lange Abstract Global increases in metabolic diseases that can be influenced by diet have re-emphasized the importance of considering how different foods can improve human health. The entire agricultural enterprise has an unprecedented opportunity to increase its value by producing foods that improve the health of consumers. Research efforts in agriculture/food science/nutrition are endeavoring to do so, although little tangible success has been achieved. At the core of the problem is a failure to define the goal itself: health. Health, as a scientifically measurable concept, is poorly defined relative to disease, and yet consensus-based, curated vocabularies that describe the multiple variations in human health in useful terms are critical to unifying the scientific fields related to agriculture and nutrition. Each of the life-science disciplines relating to health has developed databases, thesauri, and/or ontologies to capture such knowledge. High-throughput and -omic technologies are expanding both the amount and heterogeneity of available information. Unfortunately, the language used to describe substantially similar (even logically equivalent) concepts is often different between information systems. Increasing the future value of agriculture, therefore, will depend on creating a process for generating common ontologies of the concept of health, and guiding the development of a common language. This paper illustrates a framework for integrating heterogeneous ontologies into interdisciplinary, foods-for-health knowledge systems. A common system of language that describes health and is shared by all the life-science disciplines will provide immediate benefits in terms of increased health-claim regulatory efficiencies and predictive functions for individualized diets. Ultimately, these vocabularies will guide agriculture to its next goal of producing health-enhancing foods. Copyright © 2007 Society of Chemical Industry [source] The Politics of Recognition in Culturally Appropriate CareMEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2005SUSAN J. SHAW Over the last 20 years, the concept of culturally appropriate health care has been gradually gaining popularity in medicine and public health. In calling for health care that is culturally appropriate, minority groups seek political recognition of often racialized constructions of cultural difference as they intervene in health care planning and organization. Based on interview narratives from people involved in community organizing to establish a federally funded community health center in a mid-size New England city, I chart the emergence of a language of "culturally appropriate health care" in language used to justify the need for a health center. An identity model of recognition underlies the call for ethnic resemblance between patient and provider seen in many culturally appropriate care programs. I contrast this model of health care with earlier calls for community access and control by activists in the 1970s and explore the practical and theoretical implications of each approach. [source] Logical Form andthe VernacularMIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 4 2001Reinaldo Elugardo Vernacularism is the view that logical forms are fundamentally assigned to natural language expressions, and are only derivatively assigned to anything else, e.g., propositions, mental representations, expressions of symbolic logic, etc. In this paper, we argue that Vernacularism is not as plausible as it first appears because of non-sentential speech. More specifically, there are argument-premises, meant by speakers of non-sentences, for which no natural language paraphrase is readily available in the language used by the speaker and the hearer. The speaker can intend this proposition and the hearer can recover it (and its logical form). Since they cannot, by hypothesis, be doing this by using a sentence of their shared language, the proposition-meant has its logical form non-derivatively, which falsifies Vernacularism. We conclude the paper with a brief review of the debate on incomplete definite descriptions in which Vernacularism is assumed as a suppressed premise. [source] Ritual, Risk, and Danger: Chain Prayers in FijiAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2004MATT TOMLINSON Abstract Rituals that defuse immediate senses of danger can perpetuate senses of powerlessness. Ambiguous language used in defensive rituals can heighten people's senses of the risks they are confronting and also compel people to perform those rituals again in the future. In this article, I illustrate this argument by examining Fijian Methodist masu sema (chain prayers), which are conducted to defuse the dangers that beset society, including curses from demonic ancestors. I argue that Fijian cultural themes of present-day human powerlessness are generated largely by competition between Methodist and chiefly authorities. "Chain prayers" are attempts to negate the power of dangerous ancestors, but in requesting God's help, ritual participants cast themselves as powerless. Verbal ambiguity in chain prayers gives "demons" lives of their own, compelling their future circulation. [source] Would a "one-handed" scientist lack rigor?AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE, Issue 3 2008How scientists discuss the work-relatedness of musculoskeletal disorders in formal, informal communications Abstract Background When research results concerning occupational health are expressed ambiguously, compensation and prevention can be affected. This study examined the language used by scientists to discuss the relation between work and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). Methods Language regarding work and MSDs in twenty articles from two peer-reviewed journals was compared with that in 94 messages on MSDs posted by published scientists to an internet list. Results Almost all the articles found some link between work and MSDs. However, few articles expressed belief in such a link unambiguously in the title or abstract, and language on links was often hard for a non-health scientist to interpret. Language and methods gave excess weight to negative results. On the listserve, many scientists expressed unambiguous views on linkages between work and MSDs. Conclusions Scientists must express their opinions more forthrightly if they wish their results to be used to favour prevention and to foster access to workers' compensation. Am. J. Ind. Med. 51:173,185, 2008. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] From bottega to studioRENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 5 2008Linda Bauer ABSTRACT The changing conception of the artist that occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been recognized in various ways. This article seeks to argue that it may be seen in the language used to describe artists' working spaces. Typically lacking any precise differentiation in the inventories of painters' estates that enumerate the contents of their dwellings room by room, the language for these spaces undergoes a change in the more rhetorically shaped literature on art. First sporadically, then strikingly, the word ,bottega' with its unwanted commercial connotations is abandoned and, before ,studio' comes to take its place, the word ,stanza', simply space or room , is used as a more neutral, less problematic word, even for multiple spaces. Entailed in this usage is both the concern for the status of the artist and the introduction of new social practices into a definition of the artist's workplace that had been largely economic. [source] Estimating the number of unlicensed brothels operating in MelbourneAUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, Issue 1 2010Marcus Y. Chen Abstract Objective: To estimate the number of unlicensed brothels operating in Melbourne, Australia, and the sexual health of the women working in them. Methods: Advertisements from Melbourne newspapers published in July 2006 were systematically analysed based on the language used to identify premises likely to be unlicensed brothels. A visit was made to each of the businesses where an address was available. Participating sex workers were tested for Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Chlamydia trachomatis, Mycoplasma genitalium and Trichomonas vaginalis using self-collected tampons and polymerase chain reaction. Results: There were 438 advertisements collated, representing 174 separate establishments. Of these, 78 were not considered likely to be brothels. Of the remaining 96, addresses were available for 42 and all of these premises were visited. Thirteen were confirmed as unlicensed brothels. We estimate there were between 13 and 70 unlicensed brothels in Melbourne. Twenty-three women were recruited from four brothels. Only 56% (95% confidence interval (CI) 35-77%) reported having regular sexual health checks and only 13% (95%CI 3-36%) reported prior testing for HIV. Among the 22 women tested, one had chlamydia while another had gonorrhoea, a prevalence of 4.5% (95%CI: 2.3-20.4%) for each infection. Conclusions: The number of unlicensed brothels in Melbourne is much smaller than is generally believed. Women in the sector are infrequently tested for STIs. Implications: As long as a licensing system persists, promotion of sexual health among women in this sector is likely to face hurdles. Further research is needed into the best model for regulating or not regulating sex industries. [source] Intimate partner violence and child abuse: a child-centred perspectiveCHILD ABUSE REVIEW, Issue 1 2010Chris Goddard Abstract A substantial body of literature assessing the impact of intimate partner violence on children and associations between intimate partner violence and child abuse now exists. Central to knowledge about these areas of practice and research is a robust, child-centred consideration of some of the more challenging conceptual issues they give rise to. In this paper, we aim to stimulate debate by presenting a critical, child-centred perspective on the intersection between intimate partner violence and child abuse. Initially, we provide the context for the review by presenting a brief overview of the literature. We then consider three central issues from a child-centred perspective. We discuss the language used to describe children forced to live with intimate partner violence, and the importance of hearing children's perspectives on their experiences of such conflict. Finally, we consider similarities and differences between the intimate partner violence and child abuse fields from a child-centred viewpoint. We conclude that increasing conceptual clarity around these issues will enhance research in the field, and ultimately improve interventions designed to protect children forced to live with intimate partner violence. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Cladistic analysis of languages: Indo-European classification based on lexicostatistical dataCLADISTICS, Issue 2 2003ina Rexová The phylogeny of the Indo-European (IE) language family is reconstructed by application of the cladistic methodology to the lexicostatistical dataset collected by Dyen (about 200 meanings, 84 speech varieties, the Hittite language used as a functional outgroup). Three different methods of character coding provide trees that show: (a) the presence of four groups, viz., Balto-Slavonic clade, Romano-Germano-Celtic clade, Armenian-Greek group, and Indo-Iranian group (the two last groups possibly paraphyletic); (b) the unstable position of the Albanian language; (c) the unstable pattern of the basalmost IE differentiation; but (d) the probable existence of the Balto-Slavonic,Indo-Iranian ("satem") and the Romano-Germano-Celtic (+Albanian?) superclades. The results are compared with the phenetic approach to lexicostatistical data, the results of which are significantly less informative concerning the basal pattern. The results suggest a predominantly branching pattern of the basic vocabulary phylogeny and little borrowing of individual words. Different scenarios of IE differentiation based on archaeological and genetic information are discussed. [source] | |||||||||||||