1,721,178 research outputs found
Methodological challenges in researching activism in action: civil society engagement towards health for all
Full text linkCivil society engagement around health care and population health improvement is an important driver towards Health for All. Research can improve the effectiveness of health activism by examining the resources, structures and strategies of civil society engagement. However, research to support such engagement faces epistemological and methodological challenges which call for specific research strategies.
A four year multi-country study was undertaken by the People’s Health Movement, a global network working for health for all. The research took place in six countries (Brazil, Colombia, DR Congo, India, Italy, South Africa) and globally, and was directed to understanding five domains of civil society engagement: movement building; campaigning and advocacy; capacity building; knowledge generation, access and use; and engaging with governance. The research plan and methods of data collection and analysis were tailored to address the objective of improving activist practice, while negotiating research challenges identified during the design phase.
Results include insights into the practice of civil society engagement in relation to the five domains of activist practice, as well as experience gained in managing six methodological challenges which we describe as: making meaning, aligning research and action, managing power relations, valuing experiential knowledges, chaos and contingency, challenging preconceptions.
Researching activism can produce useful insights into practice as well as support continuous improvement in the effectiveness of such activism. However, there are significant methodological challenges that can be addressed through appropriate strategies. More research, building on the approach described in this paper, can contribute to more effective civil society activism for health
The Meaning of Culture within Public Health Practice - Implications for the study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health
No full textThis paper critically examines the conceptualisation of culture within public health practice, and considers implications for our understandings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health status. There is no doubt that culture is a popular concept within public health, particularly in describing health differentials between populations distinguished by race, ethnicity and culture. However, this popularity is not matched by critical self-reflection upon the ways in which the concept of culture has been constructed within this space. This paper suggests a number of conceptualisations are apparent each reflecting a limited and problematic portrayal of the richness of culture
Social Capital and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health - problems and possibilities
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Global health activists’ lessons on building social movements for Health for All
Full text linkBackground: The People’s Health Movement (PHM) was formed in 2000 and drew inspiration from the Alma Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care’s ‘Health for All’ (1978). Since then PHM has been an active part of a global counter-hegemonic social movement. This study aimed to gain insights on social movement building, drawing on the successes and failures reported by activists over their experiences of working in the Health for All social movement to improve health, justice and equity.
Methods: Qualitative research methods were employed in this study to capture complex and historical narratives of individual activists, through semi-structured interviews and subsequent thematic analysis of transcripts. The research design and analysis were informed by social movement theory and literature on health activism as a pathway for social change. In this study we examine the semi-structured interviews of 15 health activists who are part of the PHM, with the aim of deriving lessons for strengthening movements for Health for All.
Results: This study locates the activists’ narratives within a socio-political analysis of the global trends of late modern individualism and capitalist neoliberalism. This highlights the challenges faced by civil society groups mobilising collective action and building social movements for Health for All. The study found that within the constraints of the neoliberal socio-political and economic conditions which have caused the rise in social and health inequities, this group of long-term health activists have been nurturing alternative approaches to structuring society and building collective agency to improve health.
Conclusion: The practical long-term experiences of the PHM activists examined in this study contribute to a better understanding of the processes and motivations that lead to and sustain health activism, and the dilemmas, strategies, impacts and achievements of such activism
Social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people within the broader context of the social determinants of health
Full text linkThe social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is affected by a range of social determinants of health. These determinants include forms of State violence and inter-generational trauma, imbalanced power relations and limited access to services within the mainstream population, and systemised and individualised discrimination and racism. These contribute greatly to the perpetuation of lower income and standards of living, including poor quality and overcrowded housing and community infrastructure, and poorer outcomes in health, education, employment and the justice system. Indigenous Australians continue to experience higher levels of poverty, incarceration and ill health than the rest of the Australian population. Given these experiences, and the resulting disadvantage they exert on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s employment opportunities, it is not surprising that welfare payments originally designed as safety nets for the small minority, that is 5–10 per cent of the mainstream population that become unemployed at any given time, have become a trap for some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, where up to 80 per cent of residents live on some form of welfare. The pervasive effects of inter-generational welfare on such communities are clearly visible and continue to entrench the ‘downtrodden image’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the media. The experience of these inequities promotes adoption of risk behaviours such as smoking, inhalant use and harmful drinking, as well as poor nutrition and the morbidity associated with chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, renal disease and mental illness, and many infectious diseases (ABS & AIHW 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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