1,720,960 research outputs found
Sportivate: A case study of community physical activity programmes and their sustainability
Get PDFThe purpose of this research was to answer the research question (RQ), which factors play a role in the sustainability of community sport programmes delivered by organisation funded through Sportivate in London? To achieve this, a case-study of Sportivate in London was adopted to measure influence on the perceptions from stakeholders on emerging themes of sustainability. Initially, sustainability factors and the implementation of sport policy were reviewed to determine the existing framework for the theoretical concepts. This research adopted critical realism ontological perspectives and retroductive reasoning to infer causal mechanisms from existing social structures defined by stratified modes of reality.
With a mixed-methods approach, the main body of investigation was conducted across two studies. The first utilised a qualitative research design by conducting 33 interviews from 12 different organisations grouped as Target Achieved (TA) or Target Not Achieved (TNA) delivered Sportivate programmes in London between 2014-15. Interviewees were from TA organisations (n = 18) and TNA organisations (n = 15). Interviewing multiple staff from the same organisation allowed the investigation to explore how emerging themes of sustainability may differ across strategic or delivery-level positions within the organisation.
The second study built upon the sustainability themes emerging from study 1, with the collection of 214 responses from online surveys administered to assemble quantitative data. The collected data informed the research prior to exploratory factor analysis (EFA) which was employed to investigate the reliability of sustainability themes surveyed. Subsequently, analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were relayed as the final step of data analysis procedure, testing hypotheses relevant to the independent variables of organisation type, staff capacity, staff role, and length of time at organisation.
Emerging themes from study 1 included the material sustainability concepts of policy remodelling, sport-for-health, delivery level staff, and revenue dependency. From these, study 2's EFA proposed splitting the revenue dependency concept into themes of funding resources at organisations and public funding dependency. Furthermore, EFA indicated that evaluation and feedback should be considered as a sustainability factor. Neither partnerships nor staff diversity, as artefactual sustainability concepts, were identified by EFA in study 2. Finally, the social concept of sustainability featured strongly after EFA, as role of the Board and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) detected a need for clear leadership. Also, the autonomy of staff was considered as a sustainability factor, however, the social reality considering social bonds and communications streams was not confirmed by EFA.
Study 2 results indicated the importance of three influential factors of sustainability relating to; a sense of clear leadership and programme championing present between staff at organisation, the importance of funding for medium-sized organisations and governing bodies, and evaluation measures being necessary, but only practical for larger organisations with co-ordinators able to carry this out as a planning activity. These attitudes specifically relate to the nature of influence held by staff roles, staff capacity, and organisation type. However, the limited balance in different types of organisation types who responded to the survey suggests only staff roles and staff capacity can be held as conclusive influences on sustainability factor perceptions emerging from this study 1 and 2. Future developments suggests minimising the likelihood of error in variance for organisation type as this influence on sustainability was reviewed as an important variable affecting community intervention programmes
Social benefits and cultural consequences of basketball in Alaska
Get PDFDissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2013This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the social and cultural significance of the game of basketball in the community of Nenana, Alaska. Since the building of high school gymnasiums across rural Alaska in the mid-1970s, basketball has become a popular and socially significant activity in rural Alaskan communities. The dissertation focuses on the nature of the social relations that arise from playing basketball and related activities and the constitution of a social space within which these relations become meaningful. It argues that the sport is a metaphor for community cohesiveness and ultimately a reflection of the social and cultural construction of community itself. Moreover, basketball has an effect on the everyday life of a community by providing a symbolic stage, which reinforces community identity and a sense of belonging through the renegotiation of interpersonal relations, dissemination of cultural values, and storytelling.Chapter 1.1. Introduction -- 1.1.1. Research questions -- 1.2. The community of Nenana -- 1.2.1. History -- 1.2.2. The community today -- 1.2.3. Demographic challenges -- 1.3. An anthropologist in Nenana -- 1.4. Alaskan basketball literature -- 1.5. Sports and social theory -- 1.6. Sports settings as symbolic spaces -- Chapter 2.1. History of basketball in Alaska: a brief overview -- 2.1.1. Basketball as an indoor sport for students -- 2.2. Basketball in Alaska -- 2.2.1. Organizational efforts -- 2.3. Basketball adopted and adapted -- 2.3.1. Why basketball? -- 2.4. Basketball in Nenana -- 2.5. Conclusion -- Chapter 3.1. Basketball nights in Nenana -- 3.1.1. Basketball games; a wealth of symbolisms -- 3.2. Analyzing the experience of high school basketball -- 3.2.1. Practices: learning the rules -- 3.2.2. Written rules: eligibility and the ASAA contract -- 3.2.3. Unwritten rules -- 3.2.4. Educative purpose and the teaching of values -- 3.2.5. Understanding conflict -- 3.2.6. Making friends in practice -- 3.3. Road trips in Alaska -- 3.4. The game: living in the moment -- 3.5. Watching the game: spectatorship and participation -- 3.6. Conclusion -- Chapter 4.1. The ups and downs of Nenana's school spirit -- 4.2. Community spirit in Nenana -- 4.3. The social function of basketball -- 4.3.1. Pick-up games -- 4.3.2. High school basketball nights -- 4.3.3. Nenana Invitational Tournament (NIT) -- 4.4. The heart of the game and collective memory -- 4.4.1. The "heart of the game" -- 4.4.2. Collective memory: consolidation of the social effects -- 4.5. Conclusion -- Chapter 5.1. Gym life -- 5.1.1. The gym as a contested space -- 5.2. The gym: a symbolic world -- 5.2.1. The gymnasium deconstructed -- 5.3. The gym versus the street -- 5.4. The gym and the world; connecting people -- 5.5. Conclusion -- Chapter 6.1. Conclusion -- 6.1.1. More than science -- References
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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