Family health narratives : midlife women’s concepts of vulnerability to illness

Perceptions of vulnerability to illness are strongly influenced by the salience given to personal experience of illness in the family. This article proposes that this salience is created through autobiographical narrative, both as individual life story and collectively shaped family history. The paper focuses on responses related to health in the family drawn from semi-structured interviews with women in a qualitative study exploring midlife women’s health. Uncertainty about the future was a major emergent theme. Most respondents were worried about a specified condition such as heart disease or breast cancer. Many women were uncertain about whether illness in the family was inherited. Some felt certain that illness in the family meant that they were more vulnerable to illness or that their relatives’ ageing would be mirrored in their own inevitable decline, while a few expressed cautious optimism about the future. In order to elucidate these responses, we focused on narratives in which family members’ appearance was discussed and compared to that of others in the family. The visualisation of both kinship and the effects of illness, led to strong similarities being seen as grounds for worry. This led to some women distancing themselves from the legacies of illness in their families. Women tended to look at the whole family as the context for their perceptions of vulnerability, developing complex patterns of resemblance or difference within their families

The Horizon Conquerors: Post-war London through Colonial Eyes.

Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul both arrived in London a few years after the end of the Second World War. This paper looks at their perceptions of the city as 'colonials', as seen from their fiction and non-fiction writings

The “Double Loss” Effect: Exploring how people react to another person’s loss – the griever’s perspective

This study intended to explore the “double loss” effect and people’s reactions to another person’s loss. When individuals negative react to a person who is in grief there is a common tendency to avoid, provide pseudo care, and/or stiff-arm. Five interviews were conducted with college students who experienced losing a loved one. These interviews addressed the phenomenon of the “double loss” effect and other people’s reactions to another person’s loss through the perception of the grievers. Practice, policy and research implications resulted from this research and are discussed within paper

Evaluation of exercises designed to increase children's use of descriptive words.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Santa Clara Review, vol. 104, no. 1

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/sc_review/1017/thumbnail.jp

Tracking changes in everyday experiences of disability and disability sport within the context of the 2012 London Paralympics

The 2012 Paralympics was the biggest ever, the most accessible and best attended in its 64-year history. The Paralympics and ideas of disability associated with the Games provide significant opportunity for reflection on how far societal opinions, attitudes and behaviour have changed regarding disability. In 2012 – the first ever “legacy games” – an explicit aim of the Paralympics was to “transform the perception of disabled people in society”, (Channel 4), and use sport to contribute to “a better world for all people with a disability” (IPC 2011). The 2012 Games therefore came with a social agenda: to challenge the current perceptions many people have about disability and disability sport. Within this report – commissioned by the UK’s Paralympic broadcaster, Channel 4 – we consider everyday experiences of disability and disability sport within the context of the London 2012 Paralympics and televised coverage of the Games. The analysis is based 140 in-depth interviews that took place in the UK over a period of eighteen months, during the lead up to, and immediately after, the Games: between January 2011 and September 2012. Embedded in the lifeworld of our participants, we ask whether the 2012 Paralympics was successful in changing perceptions of disability

The Impact of Cultural Folklore on National Values: A Preliminary Study with a focus on Bhutan

Video of the National Storytelling Conference 2009. A male introduces Her Royal Highness Ashi Sonam Dechan Wangchuck who delivers the keynote address. This is followed by a presentation by Mr Steve Evans on the impact of cultural folklore on national values in Bhutan.World Oral Literature Project: an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record

Continuing bonds with the living : bereaved parents’ narratives of their emotional relationship with their children

© 2017 Cruse Bereavement Care.The death of a child can be seen as one of the most devastating experiences for parents which can result in a unique and enduring grief. Parents with surviving children face the task of navigating their own grief while continuing to parent. This narrative inquiry explores bereaved parents’ stories of their emotional relationship with their surviving children. Parents told stories of emotional connection and disconnection with surviving children, influenced by the competing and potentially incompatible tasks of ‘parenting’ and ‘grieving’. The need for a relational focus to bereavement research and practice is highlighted. The findings demonstrate the need for clinicians to provide i) parents an opportunity to explore their sometimes contradicting and troubling experiences of grief and parenting and ii) children with support to make sense of their experiences in relation to the parent-child relationship.Peer reviewe

Beyond research skills training: an opportunity to support the wider 'ecosystem' of the part-time research student

This paper presents the findings from a UK study of one hundred part-time research students. The participants were students attending one of a series of training days provided specifically for part-time research students. Free text responses were collected on: what it’s like being a part-time research student; what they would like from training events; and what they thought of this series of training days. The students were particularly appreciative of the opportunity to meet fellow part-time research students, albeit in different disciplines and at different stages of their PhD. Rather than solely listing specific research skills they would like covered, most of their ideas for future training sessions concerned more nebulous personal and emotional aspects of the experience of studying for a PhD on a part-time basis. Four dimensions of training need were identified: research techniques; research skills; engagement with the part-time PhD process; and engagement with their part-time peers. It is suggested that research training involving part-time research students, could usefully build in time to focus explicitly on some aspect(s) of the more personal and emotional elements of the part-time doctoral experience, as well as on technical aspects of research work