1,721,025 research outputs found
Associations Between Diet, Clinical Characteristics and Gut Microbiota in Cystic Fibrosis
No full textCystic fibrosis (CF) is a genetic chronic condition characterised by aberrant mucosa and localised and systemic inflammation, which affects mainly the respiratory and digestive systems secondary to dysfunctional epithelial electrolyte and water transfer. The gut microbiota in CF is distorted in comparison with healthy controls. This includes elevation of potentially pathogenic Proteobacteria or its sub-rank taxa, and suppression of taxa belonging to the phyla Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, and Actinobacteria, which predominant in the gut microbiota and play important roles in the regulation of host metabolism and immune functions in the general population. The gut dysbiosis in CF has been linked to disease manifestations in the respiratory and gastrointestinal systems. Indirect evidence from the general population and CF animal studies implies a role of gut microbiota in the pathogenesis and/or management of other CF co-morbidities associated with metabolism and inflammation, such as CF-related diabetes (CFRD), colorectal cancer, malnutrition and overweight/obesity.
Among a variety of host and environmental factors that can influence the gut microbiota, diet seems to be the most modifiable. Therefore, the present study investigated the associations between gut microbiota and diet (macronutrients, micronutrients, food groups and flavonoids), as well as clinical characteristics important in CF management (e.g. lung function, body composition and psychological status), in the group of free-living adults with CF.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Medical ScienceGriffith HealthFull Tex
The association between socio-cultural factors and well-being among young adult Middle Eastern migrants in Australia
No full textThe high prevalence of mental illness is a major public health challenge of the 21st century.
Migrant populations are at higher risk of developing mental illnesses and poor well-being due to
pre- and post-migration challenges and issues, and experience a higher rate of depression, anxiety,
schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other mental problems compared to the
mainstream population. They are also less happy and less satisfied with their lives than nonmigrants.
Of importance to this thesis, Middle Eastern (ME) migrants who originate from one of
the most crisis- and conflict-prone regions in the world, show very high rates of mental health and
well-being issues due to factors such as trauma and stressors faced prior to migration, language
barriers, marginalised cultural identity, discrimination, lack of opportunity to use their skills and
knowledge, and a highly stressful process of adjustment. If they are young adults, these
experiences are exacerbated by a wide range of further demanding and often stressful tasks, such
as negotiating education and employment pathways. Despite the understanding of the high
prevalence of mental health and well-being problems among the ME migrant group, their
contributing factors are still largely unknown. This points to the significance of research to better
understand well-being, as a key aspect of mental health, and its driving and reinforcing factors
among ME migrants.
Socio-cultural factors, comprising acculturation, religious identity, perceived
discrimination, perceived social support, and social connectedness, have been identified as factors
that potentially influence well-being outcomes among migrant populations. Although these factors
are increasingly recognised as important, very little is known about how they contribute to, and
the strength and nature of their association with well-being among migrants, and more specifically
among ME migrants. Therefore, this thesis aimed to explore the association between socio-cultural factors and well-being among young adult ME migrants in order to inform the development of
future interventions to promote the mental health of this population group.
To address the research aim, a cross-sectional survey study was designed. The study was
underpinned by the positivist paradigm aligned with the use of a quantitative approach where the
researcher collects statistical data using highly structured data collection instruments, and analyses
the data to test theory deductively in order to support or refute it. Data was collected from a sample
of 382 young adult ME migrants in Australia aged between 20 and 39 years using a selfadministered
questionnaire, through convenience sampling. The findings address existing gaps in
the literature on socio-cultural factors that contribute to the well-being of migrants, and enable a
deeper understanding of the pathways through which these factors shape well-being outcomes.
The thesis findings are presented in four papers which are published, in press, or under review by
international peer-reviewed journals.
Paper 1 is a validation study with two aims. First, to assess the reliability and validity of
Suinn-Lew Asian Self-Identity Scale (SL-ASIA) using linear and orthogonal approaches. Second,
to explore the agreement between the outcomes of linear and orthogonal approaches of
acculturation using SL-ASIA. Data analysis was conducted in three stages. In the two first stages,
the linear SL-ASIA, and the orthogonal SL-ASIA were validated respectively, using Confirmatory
Factor Analysis (CFA), convergent validity, and discriminant validity indices. In the third stage,
the agreement between the validated linear and orthogonal SL-ASIA was measured using Cohen’s
kappa analysis. Based on the findings, both linear and orthogonal SL-ASIAs demonstrated
satisfactory reliability and validity indices. Also, comparing the classifications achieved by the
linear and orthogonal SL-ASIA showed a high level of consistency between the two scales. Paper 2 involved research on the relationship between socio-cultural factors and
psychological well-being among young adult ME migrants with two aims. First, to examine the
association between socio-cultural factors (i.e. acculturation, perceived social support, and
perceived discrimination) and psychological well-being. Second, to investigate the moderating
role of demographic variables (i.e. gender and education) in the association between socio-cultural
factors (i.e. acculturation, perceived social support, and perceived discrimination) and
psychological well-being. The study findings revealed that mainstream and ethnic acculturation,
perceived discrimination and perceived social support all had direct effects on psychological wellbeing.
Moreover, perceived discrimination and perceived social support were found to be
mediators in the relationship between acculturation and psychological well-being. In addition,
gender and education were found as moderators in the associations between ethnic acculturation,
perceived social support and perceived discrimination.
Paper 3 explored the association between social factors (i.e. religious identity, perceived
social support, perceived discrimination, and social connectedness) and psychological well-being
among young adult ME migrants. The findings showed that all the research variables (i.e. religious
identity, perceived social support, perceived discrimination, and social connectedness) had direct
effects on psychological well-being. The association between religious identity and psychological
well-being was found to be mediated by perceived social support, perceived discrimination, and
social connectedness. Perceived social support had the highest total effect on the psychological
well-being among all research variables.
Paper 4 aimed to determine the association between socio-demographic factors (i.e.
perceived social support, perceived discrimination, gender, education, and marital status) and subjective well-being in young adult ME migrants in Australia. It also aimed to examine the
moderating role of perceived social support in the association between perceived discrimination
and subjective well-being. Gender, education, marital status, perceived social support, and
perceived discrimination contributed significantly to some or all components (i.e. positive affect,
negative affect, and life satisfaction) of subjective well-being among ME migrants. Perceived
social support was found to have a moderating role in the association between perceived
discrimination and subjective well-being.
Collectively, the findings of this thesis highlight the significant effects of the selected
socio-cultural factors on the well-being outcomes among young adult ME migrants in Australia.
This research also identifies the associations between the socio-cultural factors in shaping wellbeing
outcomes. The findings from this research can inform professionals and institutions working
with migrants, including healthcare workers, public health officers, planners, policymakers,
educators and researchers, of the importance of considering these socio-cultural factors and
provides recommendations for further action and research. Migrants are important community
groups in Australia and worldwide and how societies act to promote their health outcomes would
benefit not only the migrant groups, but the entire populationThesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of MedicineGriffith HealthFull Tex
Factors of holistic wellbeing for members of the Aboriginal health and community workforce.
No full textThe following thesis is an explanation of a lore and culture informed perspective of worker wellbeing for the Aboriginal health and community workforce derived from the lived experiences of such workers. The entirety of this perspective required the furthering of current understandings or explanations of social and emotional wellbeing that were further removed from western understandings of being, particularly organisational wellbeing and more inclusive of notions of lore and culture. For the modelling to blossom a bricolage Indigenist methodology was required.
A qualitative methodology incorporating elements of Indigenous standpoint theory, grounded theory, critical theory, autobiographical ethnicity and yarning was used to form a bricolage for this study. This bricolage was developed after acknowledging that none of the above-mentioned approaches on their own quite fit the purposes of the current study however elements of each were considered integral. For the purposes of this study, this bricolage was labelled: Critical Aboriginal Bricolage (CAB).
Critical Aboriginal Bricolage (CAB) offers a culturally responsive research methodology that fits with the need to protect Aboriginal knowledge production and to meet academic rigour. It is an approach that promotes the active search for pieces of methodology that most fit the situation under investigation and for those for whom the investigation is occurring. The aim of CAB is to empower the voice of the subject from the culturally informed and involved perspective of the investigator.
For the knowledge produced to be most relevant to those it was produced for and from whom the knowledge came, the importance of Aboriginal ways of sharing knowledge had to be respected and used. This leads to more weight being applied to knowledge transfer through story rather than strict Western academic expectation. The author of this thesis is unforgiving in this pursuit and considers relevance to the target audience and acceptance of the themes from Aboriginal Elders to be of more value than
Western academic ‘excellence’. The author questions the status of power and authority of and over knowledge by western institutions and the legitimacy of such claims particularly with reference to Indigenist knowledges.
Australia has both an internationally recognised (through being a signatory to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)) and a moral obligation to ensure the wellbeing of Australia’s Aboriginal populations is improved as a national priority. Improvements in health outcomes and well–being are dependent on providing self-determination and sovereignty for Aboriginal peoples. This requires allowing Aboriginal people to utilise their own ontologies and epistemologies at all levels of the lived experience, be those education, work, healing, policy, child rearing, living and even dying. It also requires opportunity for Aboriginal peoples to know and to practice their own law as law is intrinsically linked to self–determination. Lore and culture have always provided Aboriginal peoples with the frameworks required to live well with each other and with place on the Australian continent. Looking at lore and culture to inform future policy and procedure is likely to lead to positive outcomes for Aboriginal peoples.
Aboriginal people as a population group experience far greater burden of disease than other Australians. This is the case across all physical and mental health indicators. There is therefore a greater need for service provision for Aboriginal peoples and communities yet engagement and adherence remain low. Access to culturally informed and appropriate health provision is often mentioned as a barrier to Aboriginal health. One identified effective strategy for increasing engagement with health and community services and further improving adherence to health and community service interventions has been to increase the number of Aboriginal workers within the fields of health and community service work.
Increasing the workforce is only a viable strategy if the workforce is stable. Aboriginal health and community service workers experience high levels of stress driven by multiple and at times unique stressors associated with the work they undertake and the communities in which they live or are from. This culminative stress impacts on the overall wellbeing of workers. Negatively impacted wellbeing is likely to be a factor influencing the high turnover and burnout rates experienced by Aboriginal people employed in health and community service work. Given the unique mix of cultural,
historical, professional and social influences of wellbeing present for Aboriginal health and community service providers it is unlikely that western explanations of workplace stress and worker wellbeing such as those offered around burnout or compassion fatigue for instance will be a true and complete fit for this workforce. Currently there is little work investigating the wellbeing of this particular workforce from a culturally rooted standpoint. As Aboriginal workers are themselves Aboriginal people and community members, if we are to be guided by the UN Declaration then culturally informed and appropriate strategies should be developed to assist with the maintenance of their wellbeing. It is therefore pertinent that strategies are developed to better maintain the wellbeing of Aboriginal workers that are developed from Aboriginal ontologies and epistemologies.
The theories offered in this thesis have come from the knowledge and experience of the workers themselves and may support this important work force in staying strong, supported, resilient and empowered in their work. Notions of lore and culture are prominent and are the basis for the theories offered as they have since the beginning of time kept us strong while caring for each other and caring for country.
A new model of holistic being, highlighting the importance of spirit is offered. This model incorporates lore as paramount in the wellbeing experience for Aboriginal people. It is further suggested that this model could be utilised with any population group as humans, in our great diversity of understandings of well-being and healthcare, all share the same basic structure of being. This involves spirit as core; mind, body and soul (as genetic memory) as a basic framework; and multiple connections influencing our story of self and other. This is all surrounded by a constant flow of positive and negative experiences that influence the choices we make and the expressions of being we create at any given time.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of MedicineGriffith HealthFull Tex
The Voices of Muslim Men: The Experiences of Australian Muslim Men in the Workplace
No full textGriffith Health, School of MedicineNo Full Tex
Engendering Occupational Health and Safety: RSI in the Poultry Processing Industry
No full textThis thesis explores the gendered discourses that surround the experience of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) for women workers in the poultry processing industry. RSI is a significant and debilitating injury and is one of the major occupational health and safety concerns for all assembly line workers. While there is a wealth of research on RSI, very few studies use a gender analysis to understand the experience of this injury. Despite RSI being a key concern for many women workers, women for the most part are ignored in research. When women are central to the analysis of RSI, injured women are labelled as neurotic, weak and marginal workers.
The thesis explains why women are represented in this way in the RSI literature. It identifies two powerful discourses at the centre of explanations of RSI, which also inform occupational health and safety research generally. The first, occupational health and safety discourse, ignores women or draws on a construction of woman that defines her primarily as wife and mother and excludes her from the category of worker. The second, medical discourse, centralises women in the analysis of occupational injury based on reproductive function, psyche and physicality. I argue that while each of these discourses conceptualise gender in a different way, they both draw on a modernist conceptualisation of gender which essentialises gender categories. Men and masculinity are used as a basis for all experience against which women’s experiences are compared and measured, thus limiting our understanding of those experiences. This has meant that women’s physiological, psychological and social differences to men are prioritised in women’s occupational health research, rather than the hazards and risks that they face at work.
This thesis offers a more meaningful explanation of women’s experience of RSI through postmodernist critiques of modernism. It deconstructs the essentialist conceptualisation of gender found in modernism and thereby disrupts the knowledge claims made about injured women workers. In particular, postmodernist insights serve to highlight the ways in which medical discourse constructs illness, disease and other social realities such as gender. However, recognising gender as a constructed category also challenges its very utility as an analytical tool. This makes talking about women as a group problematic.
The central argument of this thesis is that we need to maintain gender as an analytical concept. I argue that to speak meaningfully about women as a group we need to expand on the modernist conceptualisation of gender by incorporating insights from postmodernism. Modernism reveals the material structures that impact on gendered experience while postmodernism reveals how those experiences are constructed via dominant discourses.
These dominant discourses surrounding gender were evident in the stories of twenty-five injured poultry process workers who were interviewed as part of this research. The workers’ narratives illuminate the dominant constructions of gender that surround contemporary experiences of RSI. At the same time, their narratives highlight how women contest and negotiate these constructions through defining themselves as workers rather than women.
The study demonstrates that reading the women’s stories through a modernist and postmodernist lens reveals how gender continues to structure our experiences. This has significant implications for both occupational health and safety research and feminist research. Engendering occupational health and safety research through the incorporation of postmodernism’s emphasis on the discursive provides new ways of understanding injury and disease at work. Utilising a broad definition of gender has the potential to yield new insights into not only women’s occupational health and safety concerns, but also men’s. Furthermore, engendering occupational health and safety could provide a deeper and richer understanding of the occupational health and safety implications of our globalised economy.
Finally, this thesis provides evidence that gender continues to significantly impact on our lives. Over the last two decades, there have been debates surrounding the utility of gender to adequately understand our experiences. This thesis clearly demonstrates that gender still matters. It matters on both a material and a discursive level.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Public HealthGriffith HealthFull Tex
Occupational Health and Safety: International Influences and the "New" Epidemics (Book Review)
No full textReview of Occupational Health and Safety: International Influences and the "New" Epidemics. Edited by Chris L Peterson and Claire Mayhew. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing.Griffith Health, School of MedicineNo Full Tex
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
The Role of Social Capital in Shaping the Wellbeing and Lifestyle Behaviours of Young Iranian Women
No full textThe benefits of social capital, in particular its relationship with population health, have only recently received research attention. The concept of social capital signifies a community’s potential for cooperative action to address local problems and provide support for members in times of need. It embraces all the social, collective, economic, and cultural resources to which a community has access. Creating and enhancing supportive physical and social environments and expanding community resources could impact health and wellbeing directly by increasing individuals’ capacities to support one another in all aspects of their lives.
There is a growing understanding of the detrimental relationship between social exclusion, health and wellbeing. However, evidence shows that the relationship differs between genders, particularly in countries like Iran, where social systems mean that women may experience reduced opportunities. Much of the research on social capital and wellbeing has been undertaken in western industrialised nations. There has been limited research on the role of social capital in transitional societies such as Muslim countries. In such countries, there has been very limited research into the potential role of social capital for improving health and wellbeing for specific populations such as young women. Hence, this research aims to provide an integrative view on social capital at both the individual and the societal level, and explore its relationship with the wellbeing and lifestyle behaviours of young Iranian women.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Medical ScienceGriffith HealthFull Tex
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