Analysis of an interview conducted by a white researcher with an African American nutritionist points to the significance of racial-ethnic dynamics in the conduct of qualitative research. Interviewers who follow the standard methodological rule—to let findings “emerge” from their data—may fail to hear the significance of race-ethnicity in the accounts of informants. Close analysis suggests that talk will sometimes reveal racial-ethnic dynamics even when these are not explicit topics and that active attention to such structured inequalities produces a more robust (...) analysis. Institutional ethnography and narrative analysis are discussed as alternatives to the grounded-theory approach to qualitative analysis. (shrink)

Excerpt from Origin of History as Metaphysic The Muse Clio, carted from Pieria to the museums, can no longer be invoked without a libation to her warders, the numerous scribes, who have been busy since her fall correlating her steps, or her metamorphoses, as some say, for she has proved a difficult subject for classification: She is becoming bigger or better, nay she is growing many; she stations one foot in the beginning, but where is the other? Alas, it is (...) in Asia, and the head is a fake in need of restoration! Thus she has become Clio Tymbuchos in the professional hands of the scribes who find lively occupation exhuming and questioning her relics corked into formaldehyde and coffined into airtight compartments called historical facts. Men have speculated her into a new myth, a sepulchre of forms, and they have named the sepulchre History. But observe her resurrections! She has arisen, a mighty thing-in-herself with her own laws and growths and decays, and disembodied, dismembered, this apparition, this butterfly-concept called Clio, is expanding towards infinity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This paper considers the use of textual analysis of oral histories as a method for historians of nursing. Fifty‐three oral histories of retired nurses in midwestern USA were analyzed for the purpose of historical reconstruction of past education experiences in nursing. Textual analysis was used to determine how nurses made sense of their educational experiences, and it involved gathering data, analyzing the information, and using a different method of interpreting the data. Although the participants responded to specific questions, the oral (...) histories in this study are more than mere answers to the researchers’ queries. The participants’ memories are narratives that are the joint product of both the historian and the participant. As such, the oral history becomes a text to be stored along with other primary sources for future historians’ use. The research also suggests decentering oral histories from an exclusively academic agenda and focusing more on what the participants choose to remember and why they make those choices. (shrink)

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival has seen hundreds of arts, public and community groups coproduce over 300 events to over 25,000 audience members. Integral to this arts-based approach, in contrast to social marketing or public education models, is the notion that mental health is an essentially contested concept whereby meanings are negotiated and debate encouraged. With emerging evidence that the festival is an ef ective way of engaging people intellectually and emotionally, we explore ethical issues, challenges and (...) paradoxes that have emerged as the festival has developed. Consideration is given to issues of power, purpose, opportunity costs, reach, impact, programming risks, and participation from those with experience of mental ill-health. Throughout, we explore practical implications for funding, managing, programming, marketing and evaluation of this and similar endeavours. (shrink)

This paper examines a number of questions about the degree to which the clinical practice of medicine is affected, if at all, by the legal systems in four countries: Chile, Germany, Japan and the United States. The focus on these four countries in four different regions of the world offers a unique perspective within which to examine medical treatment decisions made by patients and their proxies or surrogates, the potential role for universal written instruments such as advance directives, the cross-professional (...) tensions between clinical and legal concerns in very distinct cultures, and the degree to which legal activities can change or affect clinical realities in the context of these different political and health care systems. We have incorporated, whenever relevant, the insights of many disciplines, including the social sciences, in analyzing the existing interrelations between law and behavior in this specific context. Der Beitrag untersucht, inwieweit die klinische Praxis in vier Ländern mit unterschiedlichen Rechtssystemen und Berufskulturen durch Rechtsnormen oder das Verständnis von Recht beeinflußt wird. Es wird gefragt, welche Funktion rechtliche Interventionen bei der Veränderung von Verhaltensnormen in unterschiedlichen Gesundheitssystemen haben können. Folgende Themenbereiche werden diskutiert: Entscheidungen über die medizinische Behandlung, die von Patienten und ihren Angehörigen oder Stellvertretern getroffen werden; die mögliche Rolle umfassender schriftlicher Verfügungen wie z.B. der Patiententestamente ; die berufsübergreifenden Spannungen zwischen medizinischen und rechtlichen Belangen in sehr unterschiedlichen Kulturen; der Einfluß, den gesetzgeberische Aktivitäten im Kontext der verschiedenen politischen und Gesundheitssysteme auf die medizinische Wirklichkeit haben. Bei ihrer Analyse der in diesem Zusammenhang bestehenden Beziehungen im Verhältnis von Recht und Verhalten haben die Autoren die Erkenntnisse vieler Disziplinen unter Einschluß der Sozialwissenschaften, soweit sie als relevant erscheinen, in ihren Beitrag eingearbeitet. (shrink)

Elephants show a rich social organization and display a number of unusual traits. In this paper, we analyse reports collected over a thirty-five year period, describing behaviour that has the potential to reveal signs of empathic understanding. These include coalition formation, the offering of protection and comfort to others, retrieving and 'babysitting' calves, aiding individuals that would otherwise have difficulty in moving, and removing foreign objects attached to others. These records demonstrate that an elephant is capable of diagnosing animacy and (...) goal directedness, and is able to understand the physical competence, emotional state and intentions of others, when they differ from its own. We argue that an empathic understanding of others is the simplest explanation of these abilities, and discuss reasons why elephants appear to show empathy more than other non-primate species. (shrink)

What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. Where critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject had, in recent years, produced a resistance to ethics in many fields of scholarship, today these critiques have generated a crossover among disciplines and led to theories and practices that see and do ethics otherwise. The decentering of the subject, the (...) contributors to this volume suggest, has brought about a recentering of the ethical. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions. Many of these authors express concerns that the turn to ethics is a turn away from politics towards moralism. All ultimately conclude, however, that such concerns, rather than leading away from ethics, have helped to reinvigorate the intellectual field in the present moment. Contributors: Judith Butler, Homi K. Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Nancy Fraser, John Guillory, Beatrice Hanssen, Barbara Johnson, Perri Klass, Chantal Mouffe, Doris Sommer, Rebecca Walkowitz. (shrink)

Little is known about the consequences of moral distress. The purpose of this study was to identify clinical situations that caused nurses to experience moral distress, to understand the consequences of those situations, and to determine whether nurses would change their practice based on their experiences. The investigation used a descriptive approach. Open-ended surveys were distributed to a convenience sample of 204 critical care nurses employed at a university medical center. The analysis of participants’ responses used an inductive approach and (...) a thematic analysis. Each line of the data was reviewed and coded, and the codes were collapsed into themes. Methodological rigor was established. Forty-nine nurses responded to the survey. The majority of nurses had experienced moral distress, and the majority of situations that caused nurses to experience moral distress were related to end of life. The nurses described negative consequences for themselves, patients, and families. (shrink)

Background: Editorial peer review is universally used but little studied. We examined the relationship between external reviewers' recommendations and the editorial outcome of manuscripts undergoing external peer-review at the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Methodology/Principal Findings: We examined reviewer recommendations and editors' decisions at JGIM between 2004 and 2008. For manuscripts undergoing peer review, we calculated chance-corrected agreement among reviewers on recommendations to reject versus accept or revise. Using mixed effects logistic regression models, we estimated intra-class correlation coefficients at the (...) reviewer and manuscript level. Finally, we examined the probability of rejection in relation to reviewer agreement and disagreement. The 2264 manuscripts sent for external review during the study period received 5881 reviews provided by 2916 reviewers; 28% of reviews recommended rejection. Chance corrected agreement on rejection among reviewers was 0.11. In mixed effects models adjusting for study year and manuscript type, the reviewer-level ICC was 0.23 and the manuscript-level ICC was 0.17. The editors' overall rejection rate was 48%: 88% when all reviewers for a manuscript agreed on rejection and 20% when all reviewers agreed that the manuscript should not be rejected. Conclusions/Significance: Reviewers at JGIM agreed on recommendations to reject vs. accept/revise at levels barely beyond chance, yet editors placed considerable weight on reviewers' recommendations. Efforts are needed to improve the reliability of the peer-review process while helping editors understand the limitations of reviewers' recommendations. © 2010 Kravitz et al. (shrink)

Three experiments are reported which show that in certain contexts subjects reject instances of the valid modus ponens and modus tollens inference form in conditional arguments. For example, when a conditional premise, such as: If she meets her friend then she will go to a play, is accompanied by a conditional containing an additional requirement: If she has enough money then she will go to a play, subjects reject the inference from the categorical premise: She meets her friend, to the (...) conclusion: She will go to a play. Other contexts suppress the conditional fallacies. The first experiment demonstrates the effects of context on conditional reasoning. The second experiment shows that the inference suppression disappears when the categorical premise refers to both of the antecedents, such as: She meets her friend and she has enough money. In this case, subjects make both the valid inferences and the fallacies, regardless of the contextual information. The third experiment establishes that when subjects are given general information about the duration of a situation in which a conditional inducement was uttered, such as: If you shout then I will shoot you, they reject both the valid inferences and the fallacies. The results suggest that the interpretation of premises plays an even more central role in reasoning than has previously been admitted. Trois expériences montrent que dans certains contextes les sujets rejettent des instances valides de modus ponens et de modus tollens dans des énoncés conditionnels. Par exemple, quand une prémisse conditionnelle comme: Si elle rencontre son ami, alors elle ira jouer, est accompagnée par une phrase contenant une condition supplémentaire: Si elle a assez d'argent, alors elle ira jouer, les sujets rejettent l'inférence liant la prémisse catégorielle: Elle rencontre son ami, à la conclusion: Elle ira jouer. D'autres contextes éliminent également les inférences conditionnelles fallacieuses. La premiére expérience démontre l'effet du contexte sur la raisonnement conditionnel. La deuxiéme expérience montre que la suppression de l'inférence disparait quand la prémisse catégorielle fait référence aux deux antécédants, comme: Elle rencontre son ami et elle a assez d'argent. Dans ce cas, les sujets font aussi bien les inférences valides et fallacieuses, quelle que soit l'information contextuelle. La troisiéme expérience établit que quand l'on donne aux sujets des informations générales à propos de la durée d'une situation dans laquelle une conditionnelle a été prononcée, comme Si tu cries, alors je te tire dessus, ils rejettent autant les inférences valides que les inférences fallacieuses. Ces résultats suggèrent que l'interprétation des prémisses joue un rŏle encore plus central dans le raisonnement que l'on admettait auparavant. (shrink)

The diversity of topics discussed in this book reflects the breadth of Judith Jarvis Thomson's philosophical work. Throughout her long career at MIT, Thomson's straightforward approach and emphasis on problem-solving have shaped philosophy in significant ways. Some of the book's contributions discuss specific moral and political issues such as abortion, self-defense, the rights and obligations of prospective fathers, and political campaign finance. Other contributions concern the foundations of moral theory, focusing on hedonism, virtue ethics, the nature of nonconsequentialism, and the (...) objectivity of moral claims. Finally, contributions in metaphysics and epistemology discuss the existence of sets, the structures reflected in conditional statements, and the commitments of testimony. Contributors: Jonathan Bennett, Richard L. Cartwright, Joshua Cohen, N. Ann Davis, Catherine Z. Elgin, Gilbert Harman, Barbara Herman, Frances Myrna Kamm, Claudia Mills, T.M. Scanlon, Ernest Sosa. (shrink)

This is a collection of some two dozen articles on the philosophical, rather than mathematical, aspects of probability, by the well known statistician, I. J. Good. In the abstract of his article "The Bayesian Influence, or How to Sweep Subjectivism under the Carpet" Good announces that among the topics to be discussed are.

Contributing Authors Include Oliver L. Reiser, Alvin Priestly Bradford, Irving J. Lee, And Others. Non-Aristotelian Methodology Applied For Sanity In Our Time.

External economic aid has played an important role in Northern Ireland’s peacebuilding process, particularly by funding community-based intervention projects.As a consequence of the Troubles, Northern Ireland suffered from severe socioeconomic inequality. These locally funded projects have fostered social cohesion by encouraging cross community interaction aimed at reducing violence and sectarianism. The NGO projects also promote social justice, reduce inequality, and provide the means to meet people’s basic human needs. The field research for this article was conducted during the summer of (...) 2010 and explores the perceptions of 120 civil society leaders and funding agency development officers on the effectiveness of the aid from the IFI and EU Peace III Fund in creating local social-economic NGOs to promote equity, equality, and social justice. The findings of this study reveal significant diversity in the respondents’ descriptions of the aids’s role in promoting equality, equity, and social justice as well as their expressed hopes and frustrations regarding its overall effectiveness. (shrink)

SummaryEinstein frequently used the historical narrative form to express his philosophical and even scientific ideas. Analysis of his historical writings reveals that he employed a distinctive historical method which may be designated an “intuitive archeology”, following one of his examples. It will be shown that his historical method was consistently directed toward the goal of freeing ongoing scientific research from arbitrary restrictions. He regarded these arbitrary restrictions, in turn, to be the result of a loss of recollection of the origins (...) of scientific concepts. Finally, Einstein's position that the reality of the historical process of science itself validated his approach to writing history will be discussed.RésuméEinstein a souvent utilisé la forme d'une narration historique pour exprimer ses idés philosophiques ou même scientifiques. L'analyse de ses écrits historiques révèle qu'il employait une méthode historique particulière qui peut être appelée »archeologie intuitive« selon I'un de ses exemples. L'auteur montre que sa méthode historique avait constéuemment pour but de libérer la recherche actuelle de restrictions arbitraires. II considérait ces restrictions arbitraires elles‐mêmes comme résultant d'un oubli des origines des concepts scientifiques. Enfin, I'auteur discute la position d'Einstein selon laquelle la réalité historique que constitue la science elle‐même justifiait sa manière d'écrire I'histoire.ZusammenfassungEinstein verwendet häufig die historisch erzählende Form, um seine philosophischen und ge‐legentlich sogar urn seine wissenschaftlichen Gedanken zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Eine Untersu‐chung seiner historischen Schriften verrät, dass er eine besondere historische Methode angewen‐det hat, die einem seiner eigenen Beispiele gemass als »intuitive Archaologie« bezeichnet werden kann. Es wird gezeigt, dass seine historische Methode immer darauf ausgerichtet ist, die fortschreitende Forschung von willkürlichen Einschräkungen zu befreien. Solche willkürlichen Beschränkungen betrachtete er als das Ergebnis einer Miss‐achtung des Ursprungs der wissenschaftlichen Begriffe. Es wird schliesslich Einsteins Anspruch diskutiert, wonach der wirkliche Entwicklungsprozess der Wissenschaft seine Art, Geschichte zu schreiben, rechtfertigt. (shrink)

La cohabitation avec la dialyse à domicile, ce lieu privé habituellement préservé de la maladie, invite à des questionnements sur la dynamique du couple au regard du nouveau rôle de soignant endossé par le conjoint et de celui de patient assigné au conjoint malade. Les auteurs, psychologues cliniciennes, interrogent ici les motivations conscientes et inconscientes qui conduisent à cette décision commune et leurs retentissements sur la dynamique du couple. Différentes configurations relationnelles observées dans notre clinique seront abordées. L’article, cas clinique (...) à l’appui, montre l’intérêt d’un groupe thérapeutique avec malades et conjoints pour mettre à jour les enjeux, au niveau de la relation de couple, d’une prise en charge à domicile. (shrink)

Of all the terms Jean Améry might have chosen to explain the deepest effects of torture, the one he selected was world. To be tortured was to lose trust in the world, to become incapable of feeling at home in the world. In July 1943, Améry was arrested by the Gestapo in Belgium and tortured by the SS at the former fortress of Breendonk. With the first blow from the torturers, he famously wrote, one loses trust in the world. With (...) that blow, one can no l onger be certain that “by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me — and more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being.” In a vault inside the fortress, beyond the reach of anyone who might help — a wife, a mother, a brother, a friend — it turned out that all social contracts had been broken and torture was possible. His attackers had no respect for him, and no-one else could or would help. (shrink)

Because our only access to color qualities is through their appearance, Byrne & Hilbert's insistence on a strict distinction between apparent colors and real colors leaves them without a principled way of determining when, if ever, we see colors as they really are.

Objective Standards of care regarding obstetric management of life-threatening anomalies are not defined. It is hypothesised that physicians' management of these pregnancies is variable and influenced by demographic factors. Design A questionnaire was mailed to members of the Society of Maternal–Fetal Medicine with valid US addresses assessing obstetric management of both ‘uniformly lethal’ (eg, anencephaly, renal agenesis) and ‘uniformly severe, commonly lethal’ (eg, trisomy 13 and 18) anomalies. Respondents were asked to answer as if not limited by state/institutional restrictions. Fisher's (...) exact or χ2 tests were used as appropriate and correction made for multiple comparisons in analyses that were not prespecified. Results The response rate was 36% (732/2038). Nearly 100% of respondents discuss termination for both uniformly and commonly lethal anomalies. In continuing pregnancies, with patient request for obstetric non-intervention 99% of providers would comply for either uniformly or commonly lethal anomalies. The majority ‘encourage’ such management, but some were non-directive or discouraged this management. In continuing pregnancies, with patient request for full obstetric intervention the majority of respondents was willing to comply for both uniformly (71%) and commonly (82%) lethal anomalies. While most practitioners ‘discouraged’ full intervention, some were non-directive or encouraged this management. Demographics and severity of anomaly influenced counselling. Conclusion Discrepancies exist regarding the management of life-threatening fetal anomalies. Patients may be offered different options based on practitioner demographics. The majority of physicians comply with patient wishes. Differences were noted when comparing the management of lethal with that of severe commonly lethal anomalies, suggesting that practitioners make a distinction when counselling patients. (shrink)