1,720,956 research outputs found
Carer impact on self-management by people with advanced cancer living with changing eating habits
No full textBackground: Internationally there is interest in supporting selfmanagement, as a way of enhancing the quality of life of people living with illness and reducing the economic cost of care. This is the first study to examine the impact of carers on self-management behaviour by cancerpatients. Methods: The research was an in-depth mixed methods study ofweight loss and eating difficulties in people with advanced cancer. The study participants included 32 patient-carer pairs receiving palliative home care inthe South of England in either 2003 or 2005. Semi-structured interviews were analysed using both content and thematic approaches, which revealed self-management of changing eating habits1. This paper reports aninterpretation of the way carers were found to impact on patient selfmanagement.Results: All carers wanted to help patients and many weretroubled by uncertainty about the adequacy of their caregiving. However, patients gave examples both of carer behaviours that promoted selfmanagement and conversely of those that were experienced as disabling. This paper critiques the patient focus of most intervention that aims to support self-management. Drawing on the example of people with advanced cancer managing eating difficulties, it argues that self-management might best be facilitated using a family focused approach to supportive cancer care.Conclusions: Further work is needed to establish the ways in which carers can be helped to support patient self-management. Acknowledgement: The author would like to thank Macmillan Cancer Support UK for funding this study
Listening to the views of people affected by cancer about cancer research: an example of participatory research in setting the cancer research agenda
No full textAim The study 'Listening to the Views of People Affected by Cancer About Cancer Research' is currently exploring the views people affected by cancer have about cancer research and identifying their research priorities. Integral to this is the broader aim of ensuring an effective, collaborative participation of patients and carers in the design and conduct of the study. On the basis of experiences with the study to date, the latter is explored in this paper.Design The study adopts a 'participatory research' approach entailing the formation of a 'reference group' and a subsequent patient and carer co-researcher group. Patient and carer members of these groups were identified through the patient forums of UK cancer networks and by approaching 'hard to reach' representatives directly through community groups and participating study sites.Findings Experiences from this study illustrate that a 'participatory research' approach is appropriate in engaging patients and carers in the research process. Establishing a group of people affected by cancer in the study was found to be particularly effective in enhancing the design and conduct of the research.Conclusions 'Participatory research' offers an effective means of involving patients and carers throughout the research process, thus strengthening the relevance and appropriateness of research findings and methods
A feasibility study: a mixed methods exploratory phase II cluster randomised trail to investigate the effectiveness of the 'Macmillan Approach to Weight loss and Eating difficulties'(MAWE)
No full textBackground: this study is part of a programme of work using the MRC complex interventions framework to develop and test a psychosocial intervention for weight and eating related distress in people with cancer cachexia syndrome.Aim: to establish the feasibility of conducting a cluster randomised controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of the Macmillan Approach to Weight and Eating (MAWE) by testing i) recruitment and data collection process, ii) the deliverability and acceptability of MAWE, and iii) the efficacy of MAWE.Method: two specialist community palliative care teams in the South of England, 2006/07 were randomised to offer MAWE, or to deliver care as usual. Twenty-five patients supported by MAWE were compared with 25 patient controls. All participants were new referrals and concerned about weight loss or eating problems.Primary outcome measure: VAS scales of weight related distress and eating related distress were completed by patient and carer at two time points. Secondary outcome measures: At the same time points all participants were interviewed and patient participants completed the EORTC-QLQ-C15-PAL.Results: fifteen of the 65 recruited patients dropped out of the study, most because of death or deteriorating condition (n=12). Selecting only patients receiving nurse-led management delayed achievement of the recruitment target. MAWE trained nurses were able to integrate the approach within their everyday practice. But enthusiastic adoption of MAWE led to contamination of the baseline data and difficulty interpreting the measures. Descriptive statistics are consistent with MAWE mitigating weight and eating related distress. Qualitative data indicate that MAWE can help with self-management of weight and eating related problems. MAWE could be refined to address issues relating to co-morbidities.Conclusion: this feasibility study has provided important information that can be used to guide the design and methodology of a full cluster randomised controlled trial
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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