5,908 research outputs found

    TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF EFFORTFUL FUNDRAISING EXPERIENCES: USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN FUNDRAISING RESEARCH

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    Physical-activity oriented community fundraising has experienced an exponential growth in popularity over the past 15 years. The aim of this study was to explore the value of effortful fundraising experiences, from the point of view of participants, and explore the impact that these experiences have on people’s lives. This study used an IPA approach to interview 23 individuals, recognising the role of participants as proxy (nonprofessional) fundraisers for charitable organisations, and the unique organisation donor dynamic that this creates. It also bought together relevant psychological theory related to physical activity fundraising experiences (through a narrative literature review) and used primary interview data to substantiate these. Effortful fundraising experiences are examined in detail to understand their significance to participants, and how such experiences influence their connection with a charity or cause. This was done with an idiographic focus at first, before examining convergences and divergences across the sample. This study found that effortful fundraising experiences can have a profound positive impact upon community fundraisers in both the short and the long term. Additionally, it found that these experiences can be opportunities for charitable organisations to create lasting meaningful relationships with participants, and foster mutually beneficial lifetime relationships with them. Further research is needed to test specific psychological theory in this context, including self-esteem theory, self determination theory, and the martyrdom effect (among others)

    Walking with the Earth: Intercultural Perspectives on Ethics of Ecological Caring

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    It is commonly believed that considering nature different from us, human beings (qua rational, cultural, religious and social actors), is detrimental to our engagement for the preservation of nature. An obvious example is animal rights, a deep concern for all living beings, including non-human living creatures, which is understandable only if we approach nature, without fearing it, as something which should remain outside of our true home. “Walking with the earth” aims at questioning any similar preconceptions in the wide sense, including allegoric-poetic contributions. We invited 14 authors from 4 continents to express all sorts of ways of saying why caring is so important, why togetherness, being-with each others, as a spiritual but also embodied ethics is important in a divided world

    Developing automated meta-research approaches in the preclinical Alzheimer's disease literature

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    Alzheimer’s disease is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder for which there is no cure. A crucial part of the drug development pipeline involves testing therapeutic interventions in animal disease models. However, promising findings in preclinical experiments have not translated into clinical trial success. Reproducibility has often been cited as a major issue affecting biomedical research, where experimental results in one laboratory cannot be replicated in another. By using meta-research (research on research) approaches such as systematic reviews, researchers aim to identify and summarise all available evidence relating to a specific research question. By conducting a meta-analysis, researchers can also combine the results from different experiments statistically to understand the overall effect of an intervention and to explore reasons for variations seen across different publications. Systematic reviews of the preclinical Alzheimer’s disease literature could inform decision making, encourage research improvement, and identify gaps in the literature to guide future research. However, due to the vast amount of potentially useful evidence from animal models of Alzheimer’s disease, it remains difficult to make sense of and utilise this data effectively. Systematic reviews are common practice within evidence based medicine, yet their application to preclinical research is often limited by the time and resources required. In this thesis, I develop, build-upon, and implement automated meta-research approaches to collect, curate, and evaluate the preclinical Alzheimer’s literature. I searched several biomedical databases to obtain all research relevant to Alzheimer’s disease. I developed a novel deduplication tool to automatically identify and remove duplicate publications identified across different databases with minimal human effort. I trained a crowd of reviewers to annotate a subset of the publications identified and used this data to train a machine learning algorithm to screen through the remaining publications for relevance. I developed text-mining tools to extract model, intervention, and treatment information from publications and I improved existing automated tools to extract reported measures to reduce the risk of bias. Using these tools, I created a categorised database of research in transgenic Alzheimer’s disease animal models and created a visual summary of this dataset on an interactive, openly accessible online platform. Using the techniques described, I also identified relevant publications within the categorised dataset to perform systematic reviews of two key outcomes of interest in transgenic Alzheimer’s disease models: (1) synaptic plasticity and transmission in hippocampal slices and (2) motor activity in the open field test. Over 400,000 publications were identified across biomedical research databases, with 230,203 unique publications. In a performance evaluation across different preclinical datasets, the automated deduplication tool I developed could identify over 97% of duplicate citations and a had an error rate similar to that of human performance. When evaluated on a test set of publications, the machine learning classifier trained to identify relevant research in transgenic models performed was highly sensitive (captured 96.5% of relevant publications) and excluded 87.8% of irrelevant publications. Tools to identify the model(s) and outcome measure(s) within the full-text of publications may reduce the burden on reviewers and were found to be more sensitive than searching only the title and abstract of citations. Automated tools to assess risk of bias reporting were highly sensitive and could have the potential to monitor research improvement over time. The final dataset of categorised Alzheimer’s disease research contained 22,375 publications which were then visualised in the interactive web application. Within the application, users can see how many publications report measures to reduce the risk of bias and how many have been classified as using each transgenic model, testing each intervention, and measuring each outcome. Users can also filter to obtain curated lists of relevant research, allowing them to perform systematic reviews at an accelerated pace with reduced effort required to search across databases, and a reduced number of publications to screen for relevance. Both systematic reviews and meta-analyses highlighted failures to report key methodological information within publications. Poor transparency of reporting limited the statistical power I had to understand the sources of between-study variation. However, some variables were found to explain a significant proportion of the heterogeneity. Transgenic animal model had a significant impact on results in both reviews. For certain open field test outcomes, wall colour of the open field arena and the reporting of measures to reduce the risk of bias were found to impact results. For in vitro electrophysiology experiments measuring synaptic plasticity, several electrophysiology parameters, including magnesium concentration of the recording solution, were found to explain a significant proportion of the heterogeneity. Automated meta-research approaches and curated web platforms summarising preclinical research could have the potential to accelerate the conduct of systematic reviews and maximise the potential of existing evidence to inform translation

    The Angel of Art Sees the Future Even as She Flies Backwards: Enabling Deep Relational Encounter Through Participatory Practice-Based Research.

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    This research addresses the current lack of opportunity within interdisciplinary arts practices for deep one-to-one relational encounters between creative practitioners operating in applied arts, performance, and workshop contexts with participant-subjects. This artistic problem is situated within the wider culture of pervasive social media, which continues to shape our interactions into forms that are characteristically faster, shorter, and more fragmented than ever before. Such dispersal of our attention is also accelerating our inability to deeply focus or relate for any real length of time. These modes of engaging within our technologically permeated, cosmopolitan and global society is escalating relational problems. Coupled with a constant bombardment of unrealistic visual images, mental health difficulties are also consequently rising, cultivating further issues such as identity ‘splitting’, (Lopez-Fernandez, 2019). In the context of the arts, this thesis proposes that such relational lack cannot be solved by one singular art form, one media modality, one existing engagement approach, or within a short participatory timeframe. Key to the originality of my thesis is the deliberate embodiment of a maternal experience. Feminist Lise Haller-Ross’ proposes that there is a ‘mother shaped hole in the art world’ and that, ‘as with the essence of the doughnut – we don’t need another hole for the doughnut, we need a whole new recipe’ (conference address, 2015). Indeed, her assertion encapsulates a need for different types of artistic and relational ingredients to be found. I propose these can be discovered within particular forms of maternal love; nurture; caring, and through conceptual relational states of courtship; intercourse; gestation, and birth. Furthermore, my maternal emphasis builds on: feminist, artist, and psychotherapist Bracha Ettinger’s (2006; 2015) notions of maternal, cohabitation and carrying; architect and phenomenologist Juhani Pallasmaa’s (2012) views on sensing and feeling; child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s (1971) thoughts on transitional phenomena and perceptions of holding. Such psychotherapeutic and phenomenological theories are imbricated in-action within my multimodal arts processes. Additionally, by deliberately not privileging the ocular, I engage all my project participants senses and distil their multimodal data through an extended form of somatic and artistic Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin, 2009). IPA usefully focuses on the importance of the thematic and idiographic in terms of new knowledge generation, with an analytical focus on lived experience. Indeed, whilst the specifics of the participants in my minor and major projects are unique, my research activates and makes valid, findings that are collectively beneficial to the disciplines of applied and interdisciplinary arts; the field of practice-based research, and beyond. My original contribution to new knowledge as argued by this thesis, comprises both this text exposition and my practice. This sees the final generation of a new multimodal arts Participatory Practice-Based Framework (PartPb). Through this framework, the researcher-practitioner is seen to adopt a maternal role to gently guide project participants through four phases of co-created multimodal artwork generation. The four participatory ‘Phases’ are: Phase 1: Courtship – Digital Dialogues; Phase 2: Intercourse – Performative Encounters; Phase 3: Gestation – Screen Narratives; Phase 4: Birth – Relational Artworks. The framework also contains six researcher-only ‘Stages’: Stage 1: Participant Selection; Stage 2: Checking Distilled Themes; Stage 3: Location and Object Planning; Stage 4: Noticing, Logging, Sourcing; Stage 5: Collaboration and Construction; Stage 6: Releasing, Gifting, Recruiting. This new PartPb framework, is realised within a series of five practice-based (Pb) artworks called, ‘Minor Projects 1-5’, (2015-16) and Final Major Project, ‘Transformational Encounters: Touch, Traction, Transform’ (TETTT), (2018). These projects are likewise shaped through action-research processes of iterative testing, as developed from Candy and Edmonds (2010) Practice-based Research (PbR) trajectory. In my new PartPb framework, Candy, and Edmonds’ PbR processes are originally combined with a form of Fritz and Laura Perl’s Gestalt Experience Cycle (1947). This innovative fusion I come to term as a form of ‘Feeling Architecture,’ which is procedurally proven to hold and carry both researcher and participants alike, safely, ethically, and creatively through all Phases and Stages of artefact generation. Specifically, my new multimodal PartPb framework offers new knowledge to the field of Practice-Based Research (PbR) and practitioners working in multimodal arts and applied performance contexts. Due to its participatory focus, I develop on the term Practice-Based Research, (Candy and Edmonds, 2010) to coin the term Participatory Practice-Based Research, (PartPbR). The unique combination of multimodal arts and social-psychological methodologies underpinning my framework also has the potential to contribute to broader Arts, Well-Being, and Creative Health agendas, such as the UK government’s Social Prescribing and Arts and Health initiatives. My original framework offers future researchers’ opportunities to further develop, enhance and enrich individual and community well-being through its application to their own projects, and, in doing so, also starts to challenge unhelpful art binaries that still position community arts practices as somehow lesser to higher art disciplines

    B/order work: recomposing relations in the seamful carescapes of health and social care integration in Scotland

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    As people, ageing and living with disabilities, struggle with how care is enacted through their lives, integrated care has gained policy purchase in many places, especially in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, there have been various (re)forms of care configurations instigated, in particular, promoting partnership and service redesign. Despite integrations apparent popularity, its contribution to improved service delivery and outcomes for people has been questioned, exposing ongoing uncertainties about what it entails and its associated benefits. Nonetheless, over decades, a remarkably consistent approach to integrated care has advanced collaboration as a solution. Equally, any (re)configurations emerge through wider infrastructures of care, in what might be regarded as dis-integrated care, as complex carescapes attempt to hold and aporias remain. In 2014, the Scottish Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act mandated Health and Social Care Integration (HSCI), as a means to mend fraying carescapes; a flagship policy epitomising public service reform in Scotland, in which normative aspirations of collaboration are central. What then are the accomplishments of this ambitious legislation? From the vantage point of 2021, HSCI has been assessed as slow and insubstantial, but this is not the complete picture. Narratives about failing to meet expectations obscure more complicated histories of cooperation and discord, successes and failures, and unintended consequences. Yet given collaborative ubiquity, if partnerships are contested how then are they practiced? To answer this question, I embarked on an interorganisational ethnography of the enactment of a Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), which went ‘live’ on April 1st, 2016; in a place I call ‘Kintra’. I interrogate what happened when several managers (from the NHS and Council) endeavoured to implement HSCI according to the precepts of the Act; working to both (re)configure and hold things together behind care frontiers; away from the bodywork of direct care, immersed in everyday arrangements in the spaces of governance and operations. I chart their efforts to comply with regulations, plan, and build governance apparatuses through documents. I explore through coalescent objects how distributed forms of governance, entwined in policy implementation, were subsequently both sustained, and challenged. I observed for seven months actors struggling to (re)configure care services embedded in a collaborative approach, as well as establish the legitimacy of the HSCP; exemplified through the fabrication of what was understood as a 'must-do' commissioning plan. In tracing documents, I show the ways in which HSCI was simultaneously materialised and constituted through documentation. I reveal how, in the mundane mattering of document manufacturing, possibilities for (re)forming the carescape emerged. By delving into inconspicuous, ‘seamful’ b/order work that both sustained distinctions between the NHS and Council and enabled b/order crossings, I expose how actors were knotted, and how this shaped efforts to recompose the contours of the carescape. While ‘Kintra’s story might be familiar, situated in concerns that may resonate across Scotland; I reveal how collaboration-as-practice is tangled in differing organisational practices, emerging from quotidian intra-actions in meeting rooms, offices, car parks and kitchenettes. I deploy a posthuman practice stance to show not only the way in which public administration ‘does’ care, but it’s world-making through a sociomaterial politics of anticipation. I was told legislation was the only way to make HSCI in ‘Kintra’ happen, nevertheless, there was resistance to limit the breadth and depth of integrating. Consequently, I show how the (re)organising of b/orders was an always-ongoing act of maintenance and repair of a (dis)integrating carescape; as I learnt at the end of my fieldwork, ‘it’s ‘Kintra, ‘it’s aye been!

    Participation and inclusion in extracurricular physical activities: an ethnographic study alongside children with disabilities

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    The aim of this thesis is to explore how children with disabilities experience their participation in extracurricular physical activities. The thesis closes a gap in literature by contributing an in-depth year-long collection of lived experiences of extracurricular physical activities which was developed alongside children with disabilities in London Ontario. Knowledge was created alongside 10 children with disabilities by utilizing an ethnographic methodology. Multi-site ethnography was adapted for each participant’s needs and communication methods. The methodology contributes to literature by a creative adaptation to interviewing children and having a flexible approach to methods which was chosen by the children themselves. The thesis answers what inclusion looks like as a lived experience in extracurricular physical activity environments, along with how adults and children create opportunities and constraints for children’s recognized participation. The analysis identified that there is a gap in understanding between literature of participation and inclusion and children with disabilities knowledge and preferences. Additionally, findings indicate that children with disabilities that communicate non-verbally experience inclusion differently than children with disabilities who communicate verbally. The knowledge created builds on literature of various attitudes and beliefs of children with disabilities by providing a further in-depth connection to lived experience, participation and inclusion opportunities. The thesis concludes by emphasizing a flexible approach to creating knowledge alongside children with disabilities, and more specifically advocating for more inclusion of children who communicate non-verbally in research. The thesis suggests an emphasis for continuous communication to understand changing perceptions of participation and inclusion from the perspectives of children themselves and how it is shaped by the surrounding environment and interactions

    Proceedings videojogos 2020

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    The 12th Edition of the International Conference on Videogame Sciences and Arts, Videojogos2020, is a joint organization of the School of Public Management, Communication and Tourism – Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (EsACT – IPB) and the Portuguese Society of Videogames Sciences (SPCV). This year, due to the pandemic context, activities were conducted online.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Examining the Potential for Isotope Analyses of Carbon, Nitrogen, and Sulphur in Burned Bone from Experimental and Archaeological Contexts.

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    The aim of this project was to determine whether isotope analyses of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur can be conducted on collagen extracted from burned bone. This project was conducted in two phases: a controlled heating experiment and an archaeological application. The controlled heating experiment used cow (Bos taurus) bone to test the temperature thresholds for the conservation of ή13C, ή15N, and ή34S values. These samples were also used to test the efficacy of Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and colour analysis, for determining the burning intensities experienced by bone burned in unknown conditions. The experiment showed that ή13C values were relatively unchanged up to 400°C (<2‰ variation), while ή15N values were relatively stable up to 200°C (0.5‰ variation). Values of ή34S were also relatively stable up to 200°C (1.4‰ variation). Colour change and FTIR data were well correlated with the change in isotope ratios. Models estimating burning intensities were created from the FTIR data. For the archaeological application, samples were selected from two early Anglo-Saxon cemetery sites: Elsham and Cleatham. Samples were selected from both inhumed and cremated individuals. Among the inhumed individuals ή13C values suggested a C3 terrestrial diet and ή15N values suggested protein derived largely from terrestrial herbivores, as expected for the early Anglo-Saxon period. However, ή34S values suggested the consumption of freshwater resources and that this consumption was related to both the age and sex of the individual. The experimental data shows that there is potential for isotope analyses of cremated remains, as during the cremation process heat exposures are not uniform across the body. The samples selected for the archaeological application, however, were not successful. Bone samples heated in controlled conditions produced viable collagen for isotope analysis; however, there are several differences between experiments conducted in a muffle furnace and open-air pyre cremation that need to be investigated further. Additionally, the influence of taphonomy on collagen survival in burned bone needs to be quantified. Finally, methods of sample selection need to be improved to find bone samples from archaeologically cremated remains that are most likely to retain viable collagen. While there is significant research that must be conducted before this research can be widely applied there are a multitude of cultures that practised cremation throughout history and around the world that could be investigated through the analyses proposed in this project
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