1,721,052 research outputs found
Book review: 'Researching society and culture' by Clive Seale (ed.)
No full textReviews the book 'Researching society and Culture' by Clive Seale (ed.) (2004). This new edition provides a multimethod overview and methodological contextualization of research for students of sociology and other disciplines. In his introduction Seale claims the text avoids the pitfalls of toolbox methods book approaches by addressing both methodology and method and also interlinking this discussion with philosophy, theory and practice in the social sciences. The text provides its own definitions of relevant contexts by including eleven chapters on relevant contexts for research including philosophy of social science, politics and identities, and history. Given the catholic audience of novice researchers of society and culture that the text attempts to address, it is perhaps not surprising that discourse analysis per se does not feature extensively in the text. The collection will provide a good exemplification of what researchers of other methodological persuasions see as relevant in understanding society and culture
History of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles
No full textAnnotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 December 2009. Introduction by Professor Clive Seale, QMUL. First published by Queen Mary, University of London, 2011. ©The Trustee of the Wellcome Trust, London, 2011. All volumes are freely available online at www.history.qmul.ac.uk/research/modbiomed/Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 December 2009. Introduction by Professor Clive Seale, QMULAnnotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 December 2009. Introduction by Professor Clive Seale, QMULAnnotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 December 2009. Introduction by Professor Clive Seale, QMULAnnotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 December 2009. Introduction by Professor Clive Seale, QMULAnnotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 December 2009. Introduction by Professor Clive Seale, QMULAnnotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 14 December 2009. Introduction by Professor Clive Seale, QMULA National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL) was proposed in the mid-1980s. This was to provide data to help predict and prevent the transmission and spread of HIV, in response to the critical need for information on the AIDS epidemic. Set up by biomedical and social scientists, NATSAL-1 was carried out in 1990, and the results used for AIDS projections and the national HIV and sexual health strategy. Subsequent surveys (NATSAL-2 and -3) have followed in 2000 and 2010 extending the objectives to include other sexually transmitted infections such as Chlamydia and Human Papillomavirus. Introduced by Professor Clive Seale, this volume focusses primarily on NATSAL-1 and addresses the background to the survey, the methodology, the results, and the funding: its initial support by the Department of Health, the dramatic withdrawal of government funds and subsequent funding by the Wellcome Trust. Contributors include many of the key people involved in setting up the survey, experts in public and sexual health, individuals from the Wellcome Trust, interviewers, and the Sunday Times journalist who, in September 1989, reported Margaret Thatcher’s veto of Government support.The History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group is funded by the Wellcome Trust, which is
a registered charity, no. 210183
Thoroughly Post-Modern Mary. [A Biographic Narrative Interview With Mary Gergen]
No full textMethod: The Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (Prue CHAMBERLAYNE, Joanna BORNAT & Tom WENGRAF, 2000; Tom WENGRAF 2001; Gabriele ROSENTHAL 2004; Kip JONES 2004) uses an interview technique in the form of a single, initial narrative-inducing question (minimalist-passive), for example, "Tell me the story of your life," to elicit an extensive, uninterrupted narration. This shift encompasses willingness on the part of the researcher to cede "control" of the interview scene to the interviewee and assume the posture of active listener/audience participant. A follow-up sub-session can then be used to ask additional questions, but based only on what the interviewee has said in the first interview and using her/his words and phrases in the same order. Through hypothesising how the lived life informs the told story, the case history is then finally constructed from the two separate threads of the "lived life" and the "told story." In this paper, the "lived life" and "told story" are presented in a "raw" form with the further involvement of the reader in mind. The story has not been "analysed" by the interviewer, but left open and transparent. Still, the production of the story becomes the creative output and social construction of both the storyteller and the interviewer (the performer and the audience) and, in this case particularly, one story of many stories that could have been told by the person interviewed. Routine facts are often back-grounded by the narrator through the use of this method in favour of spontaneity in the storytelling and the creation of meaningful life metaphors. In this way, the personal journey to "who the interviewee is today" is described, rather than merely a list of accomplishments. The Lived Life: Mary GERGEN (née McCANNEY) was born in 1938. The first part of her childhood was spent in the small town of Balaton, Minnesota. She subsequently moved with her family to Minneapolis when she was 12. She attended a suburban middle-class high school where she was popular. She went on to the University of Minnesota after graduating high school and continued to be both a gifted student, well-liked and social. In her final year she met an architecture student and married him shortly after graduation. The couple had a girl, Lisa, and a boy, Michael. Over the next seven years, Mary studied part-time for a Master's Degree in Counselling Psychology. Her husband was a fast track architect and they expected to move to Rome in the early 60s, but moved instead to Boston where he could continue his studies at MIT. At a Halloween party given at Harvard, Mary met Ken GERGEN for the first time. They had a long conversation and she discovered that he had an opening for a research assistant, a position for which she immediately applied. She got the job and Ken encouraged her to finish her Master's Degree. She worked for him for two years; he later accepted a position at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, leaving Harvard (and Mary) behind. Both of their marriages began to end. Ken received a fellowship to study in Rome and Mary and her two children left with him on a ship to Rome in 1968. They were married in October of 1969. Back at Swarthmore, they began to work together on experimental projects, antiwar protests, etc. Ken and Mary lived and worked in Japan in 1972-73. By the mid-70s, Mary realised that she wanted a PhD and became a graduate student at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1974 where she quickly became involved in teaching. In 1976-77 the couple spent a year in Paris. After receiving her PhD, Mary worked for a time at ATT doing longitudinal studies on managers' lives. Eventually, she got a teaching job at the Pennsylvania State University local campus, fifteen minutes drive from their house, where she went through the ranks from assistant professor to associate professor to full Professor of Psychology and of Women's Studies. In 1988-89 Ken and Mary went to Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, but Ken spent most of the year at Heidelberg in Germany, leaving Mary on her own in the Netherlands. She and Ken persist in teaching and are involved in the Taos Institute promoting social constructionist ideas, as well as co-editing The Positive Aging Newsletter. Mary continues to travel, teach, write and give papers and workshops. Recent publications include Social Construction: A Reader with Ken GERGEN and Feminist Reconstructions in Psychology Narrative, Gender, and Performance.
URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs040318
Embracing the Practical, the Pragmatic, and the Personal: A Review of Clive Seale, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman’s Qualitative Research Practice
Full text linkIn their 2007 book, Qualitative Research Practice: Concise Paperback Version, Clive Seale, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman have offered students, teachers, and researchers a practical guide for understanding and conducting qualitative research. In doing so, they and their chapter contributing colleagues have also taken us as readers into their insiders’ worlds of being qualitative researchers, so we can benefit from their self-narratives of the “nitty-gritty of research practice.” The result is an excellent text that is both pragmatic and personal
The Verismo of the Quotidian: A Biographic Narrative Interpretive Approach to Two Diverse Research Topics
No full textThe turn to narrative enquiry shifts the very presence of the researcher from
knowledge-privileged investigator to a reflective position of passive
participant/audience member in the storytelling process. The interviewer as
writer/storyteller then emerges later in the process through her/his retelling of
the story as a weaver of tales, a collage-maker or a narrator of the narrations.
Recent times have seen the development of myriad methods of narrative
inquiry; one such method and the practicalities of its interview protocol will be
discussed in this chapter
Book Review: Researching Society and Culture
Full text linkReview of Researching Society and Culture, edited by Clive Seale (London: Sage Publications, 2011
Managing medical advice seeking in calls to Child Health Line
No full textChild Health Line is a 24-hour Australian helpline that offers information and support for parents and families on child development and parenting. The helpline guidelines suggest that nurses should not offer medical advice; they do, however, regularly receive calls seeking such advice. This paper examines how the service guidelines are talked into being through the nurses' management of callers' requests for medical advice and information, and shows how nurses orient to the boundaries of their professional role and institutionally regulated authority. Three ways in which the child health nurses manage medical advice and information seeking are discussed: using membership as a nurse to establish boundaries of expertise, privileging parental authority regarding decision making about seeking treatment for their child, and respecifying a 'medical' problem as a child development issue. The paper contributes to research on medical authority, and nurse authority in particular, by demonstrating the impact of institutional roles and guidelines on displays of knowledge and expertise. More generally, it contributes to an understanding of the interactional enactment and consequences of service guidelines for telehealth practice, with implications for training, policy and service delivery
Problems with the critical posture? Foucault and critical discourse analysis
Full text linkThis paper provides a brief analysis of Michel Foucault’s work on power and governmentality, and mounts the argument that the treatment of these concepts by Foucault is theoretical rather than empirical or historical. Foucault’s approach – a Kantian dialectical approach – allows the social to engulf politics, sovereignty and the state. Ultimately, Foucault follows a Kantian line to a moral critique of society. Given this critical edge to Foucault’s work, it is not surprising that endeavours such as critical discourse analysis use Foucault’s work to ballast their approach. Like Bruno Latour, however, we suspect that the fascination with social and moral critique is exhausted; and we suspect that the commitment to critique masks the understanding of the critic as an historically specific persona, and disallows – on moral grounds – non-teleological descriptive analyses. Rather than critique critique, however – and risk being hoist by our own petard – our purpose here is an exploration of those who adopt the critical person
User participation in the categorisation of the State Library of Queensland digital image collections: characteristics, motivations and experiences
Full text linkIn 2010, the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) donated their out-of-copyright Queensland images to Wikimedia Commons. One direct effect of publishing the collections at Wikimedia Commons is the ability of general audiences to participate and help the library in processing the images in the collection. This paper will discuss a project that explored user participation in the categorisation of the State Library of Queensland digital image collections. The outcomes of this project can be used to gain a better understanding of user participation that lead to improving access to library digital collections. Two techniques for data collection were used: documents analysis and interview. Document analysis was performed on the Wikimedia Commons monthly reports. Meanwhile, interview was used as the main data collection technique in this research.
The data collected from document analysis was used to help the researchers to devise appropriate questions for interviews. The interviews were undertaken with participants who were divided into two groups: SLQ staff members and Wikimedians (users who participate in Wikimedia). The two sets of data collected from participants were analysed independently and compared. This method was useful for the researchers to understand the differences between the experiences of categorisation from both the librarians’ and the users’ perspectives. This paper will provide a discussion on the preliminary findings that have emerged from each group participant. This research provides preliminary information about the extent of user participation in the categorisation of SLQ collections in Wikimedia Commons that can be used by SLQ and other interested libraries in describing their digital content by their categorisations to improve user access to the collection in the future
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