Active music

We are a group of eleven young people with intellectual disability and three music therapists. We did action research at a university. We wanted to find out how a music group might be helpful for young people with intellectual disabilities. We wanted to tell our own story and use our own words because we have a lot to say. We wanted people to read our story and to use our ideas to help young people with intellectual disabilities to have good lives. We went to twenty sessions of music research, and five more sessions of research analysis. We also did a lot of research work in between sessions. We found out that music groups can be fun. They can also be hard work. They help us develop skills like listening and waiting. They are places where we can be independent. But music groups are also good places to practice working as a team. They can be safe places for people to express emotions. Music helps us to know people. It brings us together. Playing musical instruments can also help physical development. A good life for us would include having the chance to play music with others or to have music lessons. But it is not always easy for us to go to ordinary lessons or music groups. It might be important for young people with intellectual disability to have support from people who understand them at first. We want to be independent but we need help to develop our dreams in practical ways. We found that doing research is fun and interesting. We were all researchers but we had different things to do. The adults had to be the organisers, setting up the research. We knew from the start the research would be about what young people think about music. The adults had done their reading and had written the literature review. The young people decided on other questions, and gathered data in lots of different ways. They also did some of the analysis, and decided on the findings of each cycle. The findings of each cycle, with more of the young people’s words, are in the appendices. Later, the adults wrote the main findings, the discussion and conclusion. We all discussed the things we wrote along the way and at the end of the research. The adults have tried to help the young people understand what has been written. The research took a lot of time and it was hard work for everybody. To be a good researcher you need to learn research skills. It is important that young people with intellectual disabilities are not exhausted by research. They need to be able to enjoy the things they are doing. We all liked being involved in research even though it was hard work. We think that research is important and helpful. Young people should be involved in research that is about them. We learnt that young people with intellectual disabilities can go to university. Going to university was scary at first but we got used to it and we started to enjoy it. We need to do more research to make sure universities are ready to welcome students with intellectual disabilities. We can use our research to show universities that it can be a good idea to support people with intellectual disabilities to go to university. We can also use our research show people what we can do; what we like to do; and what we want to do in the future. Most of us would like to do more music and research in future

Fathers and Child Welfare: Stories of Men’s Everyday Lives and Service Experiences

This volume of stories from fathers involved with child welfare services acts as both a stand-alone document and a companion document to the research reports on father’s life experiences and child welfare service experiences. This volume is intended for multiple audiences including child welfare service providers, community organizations working with men, students and instructors interested in men’s issues, and fathers. This volume of stories may be useful for teaching purposes, service provision decisions, and general interest

Understanding the construction of marketers’ credibility by NZ senior managers: An interpretive study

Academics report that marketers are losing their influence in the boardroom due in part to serious challenges to marketing’s credibility. Although the credibility of marketing sources has received much attention since the early 1950s, research into how individuals in business organisations construct the credibility of marketers is scarce. This study, using in-depth interviews, describes how seven senior managers from different New Zealand businesses construct the credibility of marketers. For these senior managers, the credibility of marketers is grounded in their performance in delivering commercial outcomes. The findings also suggest that senior managers construct credibility in terms of a work aspect and a social aspect of a marketer’s performance, and that both these aspects have to be present if the marketer is to be considered credible. The work aspect of performance is made up of a marketer’s Pedigree, Projects, and Pervasive Influence. The Pedigree of a marketer includes their qualifications, skills and background. A degree is usually the minimum qualification required, particularly for more senior marketing roles. Skills expected from marketers include leadership, management, sales and intuition. With regard to background, the marketer needs to demonstrate they have achieved commercial outcomes in previous employment to be considered credible. Projects describes how marketers must design and implement cogent marketing plans, work effectively without supervision, achieve commercial outcomes in a clever or creative way, and provide evidence that their projects have contributed to commercial outcomes. Pervasive Influence describes how marketers influence others in the organisation toward customer-centricity. Marketers can lose credibility in the work aspect of their performance when they have no structured purpose to their marketing research, are unable to execute marketing plans or are unable to demonstrate the results of a marketing project. The social aspect of a marketer’s performance is made up of Personal Integrity and Professional Conduct. Personal Integrity describes marketers who are respected, take pride in their work, strive to improve themselves and are not precious. Professional Conduct describes a marketer who relates and collaborates competently and professionally with others, and is a team fit. Marketers lose credibility in the social aspect of their performance when they are precious, flighty, argumentative, and only out for themselves. This paper contributes a framework that describes the construction of a marketer’s credibility from a senior manager’s perspective. It also introduces a new understanding of credibility, grounded in performance terms, which is distinct from past conceptualisations of credibility found in the literature, which is based on expertise and trustworthiness. These findings demonstrate that while a marketer might be considered an expert and trustworthy, if they are not delivering commercial outcomes then they may not be considered credible, from a senior manager’s perspective

Goffman Told Me, It Is Really Hard to Do That Kind of Thing Well, and That Was About all the Advice I Ever Got from Him

This interview with Joel Best was recorded on August 13, 2007, during the ASA Annual meeting in New York. Dmitri Shalin transcribed the audio recording and Joel Best edited the text and gave his approval for posting the present version in the Erving Goffman Archives. Breaks in the conversation flow are indicated by ellipses. Supplementary information appears in square brackets. Undecipherable words and unclear passages are identified in the text as “[?]”. The interviewer’s questions are shortened a bit in several places

On Such a Full Sea of Novels: An Interview with Chang-rae Lee

An interview with author Chang-rae Lee

Lois Whaley Highsmith

After originally studying chemical engineering at Penn State, Lois Highsmith decided to instead pursue nursing. At Jefferson she found a passion for community health nursing, specifically related to obstetrics, gynecology, and maternal child health. Ms. Highsmith graduated in 1986 and over the years worked mostly in maternal care but also in psychology. Among other positions, she worked for ten years at Pennsylvania Hospital where she founded STEPS, Strategies to Encourage Parental Self-Sufficiency, a teen pregnancy clinic, and worked as a home visitor for Mercy Home Health educating new moms about postpartum care. Since 2002 she has worked for Nurse Family Partnership, a home visiting program for first-time pregnant women that teaches women about child development, pregnancy, women’s health, and community resources.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/nursing_oral_histories/1014/thumbnail.jp

Using Narrative Fictions to Describe Nurses’ Experiences of Computing

Nurses, it is claimed, do not engage with articles about Information Technology, although the evidence is that they have poor knowledge of many of the issues involved in the use of information and technology in practice, and poor computer skills. Three pieces of research into nurses and computers have been used to create fictional narratives of nurses’ engagement with computers. They are presented in this way to encourage nurses to read the accounts, to reflect on their own attitudes and practice, and to aid the exploration of alternative possibilities. The basis of this approach is explored, along with the process of producing the narrative fictions