Two voices (Sylvia Jamieson Sandy, Mohawk, Ontario)

Two Voices is the story of Sylvia Jamieson Sandy, a 95 year old Elder and Clan Mother of the Wolf Clan, Mohawk Nation, Six Nations Territory on the Grand River. The thesis employs the methodology of borrowing in which the participants use each other’s gifts and talents; the participants are Sylvia and her urban-raised cousin who has been entrusted by Sylvia to carry her story outside of Six Nations Territory. In her own words, Sylvia tells of her experiences and memories of the Jamieson family, and her life as a teacher, an entrepreneur, a community member and Elder. Sylvia’s story, spanning most of the twentieth century, shows the effects of assimilation on her people, the degree to which assimilation has penetrated and changed Haudenosaunee culture and Sylvia’s own adjustment to and battles against this encroachment. Included are discussions of Sylvia’s agency, independence and her life long service to her family, her community and her people. The collaboration from which Two Voices arose also highlights how Sylvia helped to bring home her urban-raised cousin

In situ observations of trophic behaviour and locomotion of Princaxelia amphipods (Crustacea, Pardaliscidae) at hadal depths in four West Pacific Trenches

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Here, there and everywhere: an analysis of reference services in academic archives

The purpose of this study is to investigate how archivists conduct reference services. The investigators administered two surveys to 19 participants at 15 Canadian academic archives to understand archivists’ behaviour while performing reference. There is no standard approach to reference as many archivists use institution-specific tools coupled with their own knowledge. Finding aids are the most frequently accessed tool and are most often used in conjunction with other tools. Limited resources are the primary barrier to the provision of effective reference services. The tools that are employed by archives are archivist focused, which results in reference services that are not user focused

Toward a competency framework for Canadian archivists

The goal of this research project is to establish a foundational competency framework for Canadian archivists. This was achieved by performing a qualitative analysis of established frameworks and generating a foundational competency framework from that analysis. The framework reflects current skills and knowledge requirements. The competency framework is meant to capture all facets of managing an archives, including activities such as governance and human resources. It is intended to strike a balance among all aspects of archival practice. Future iterations should include emergent issues such as emotional labor and regional practices. This competency framework is intended to define and communicate our skills and knowledge. Its acceptance and implementation will benefit our community, our stakeholders, and our collections and will support the longevity and the prosperity of the archival profession

Women's understandings and experiences of empowerment in an organisation: a qualitative feminist approach

This study explores women's understandings and experiences of empowerment so that they could empower themselves by using their own knowledge to see through factors that serve to disempower them. At a time when empowerment and its future is under intense discussion in South Africa, it seems wise to move away from quantitative studies which do not facilitate the development of comprehensive theory in industrial psychology. This study provides a qualitative feminist analysis of women's understandings and experiences of empowerment in an organisation. Written protocols, interviews and a workshop were used as data collection tools and seven women from one organisation participated in the study. The research revealed that women understand and experience empowerment in a number of ways. These understandings and experiences are affected by various factors: organisational factors; personal characteristics and abilities; their relationship with others at work and at home; and societal factors such as double standards for men and women and role expectations. The breadth and scope of the results imply that any attempt to empower women should include relational, motivational and feminist perspectives on power and empowerment. In addition, the results indicate that providing a space in which the women could explore the network of disempowering practices in their lives, was empowering for the women. Through the process of the research, the participants' understandings of empowerment evolved from viewing empowerment as something that is predominantly external (for example, influenced by others and organisational factors) to something that is internal (for example, influenced by motivational factors). This study cautions against seeing empowerment as something that is solely internal because by doing so women are placing the responsibility of empowerment upon themselves thus setting themselves up for failure. However, through the process of seeing empowerment as internal, the women were able to move towards a feminist understanding of empowerment in which not only is empowerment external ("out there") or internal ("within") but includes acknowledging one's own responsibility in empowerment as well as external societal factors that serve to hamper women

Questions, biases and ‘negation’: evidence from Scots varieties

In recent years, there has been considerable linguistic interest in ‘non-canonical questions’ (Dayal 2016). These constructions express some quantity of interrogative meaning, as well as some additional bias, or some additional request beyond pure information seeking. This category includes four constructions with ‘negation’, which look superficially similar but have received varying analyses in the literature: matrix biased questions; tag questions; polar rhetorical questions, and interrogative exclamatives. In this thesis, I address the question of how these constructions are related, and argue that the relationships between these four ‘non-canonical questions’ are closer than the existing literature suggests, building on and extending work from Sudo (2013) and Domaneschi et al. (2017) who establish a framework for using speakers’ epistemic beliefs and the biases provided by the evidential context to account for matrix biased questions. In order to develop this overarching argument, I focus primarily on two constructions that have received little attention in the literature: –int in Glasgow Scots and –n in the Shetland dialect of Scots. I adapt an acceptability judgment style methodology for dialect syntax research to incorporate recent work on non-canonical questions in experimental pragmatics in order to establish the distribution of these particles across constructions and belief/bias contexts. As part of this, I also qualitatively investigate how speakers of different ages in communities with different relationships to linguistic change interact with this common methodology for investigating linguistic variation, positing what I term ‘perceptual hyperdialectalism’ for the patterns of behaviour we see in an obsolescing variety. From the results of the Scots research, I show that –int is acceptable in a subset of the ‘non-canonical questions’, with –n available in the full set for older speakers but seemingly undergoing loss in one context and moving towards the distribution of Glasgow –int for younger speakers. This suggests that we should indeed treat the non-canonical question constructions as more closely related than the literature suggests. I then provide an analysis for the –int and –n constructions, arguing that they are check moves by establishing the pragmatic similarities between the constructions that permit the particles and then developing a semantic analysis for them within Ginzburg’s (2012) interactional semantics for dialogue. The final part of this analysis is to position the particles syntactically. I do so by employing a conversational domain in the syntax above CP, and by arguing for movement to this domain I build on existing literature that shows that discourse particles exhibit syntactic behaviour and should be analysed as such. My analysis of the Scots data has three main contributions: firstly, a full description and analysis of the previously understudied Scots particles; secondly, an analysis for standard English tag questions that clearly shows how they differ from the Scots constructions and is also able to deal with problematic data from the literature more accurately than other proposals; thirdly, new evidence that there needs to be more fine-grained distinctions made, based on beliefs and biases, between the types of conversational move that are made in e.g. tag questions and invariant particles, often grouped together as ‘confirmationals’ or ‘checks’. As well as the Scots data, I also address the relationship between the four non-canonical questions through two sets of constructions in standard English. Firstly, I present the results of an experiment which shows that although both matrix biased questions and tag questions are permitted in neutral and negative evidential contexts, speakers prefer biased questions in negative contexts, and tag questions in neutral ones. I show that this follows from the analysis I presented for the syntax and semantics of tag questions in standard English, and suggest that the results point towards a scalar model of beliefs and biases as the best way to understand the licensing of interrogative constructions. Finally, I look at polar rhetorical questions and rhetorical wh-questions. In the literature, these constructions receive the same analysis throughout. However, the Scots data indicates that the bias that is, or can be, expressed in polar rhetorical questions is not the same as the bias that is expressed in rhetorical wh-questions. I argue that polar rhetorical questions should receive the same analysis as matrix biased questions, following Romero’s (2015) falsum/verum approach to the construction, and show that this cannot hold for wh-questions. I then extend Kotek’s (2016) semantics for wh-questions to also include rhetorical wh-questions, showing how this can account for a number of properties that these constructions have (e.g. polarity flipped vs. non-flipped instances, NPI licensing, lack of pair-list readings and ‘generic’ interpretations)

Risk Factors Associated with Opioid Misuse Among Military Personnel

Risk Factors Associated with Opioid Misuse Among Military Personnel Opioid overdoses are increasing among military personnel. Opioids are a class of drugs that include heroin, synthetic opioids, and pain relievers. Almost half of all Veterans returning from deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq have chronic pain; one in six veterans turn to opioids for pain relief. Veterans between the ages of eighteen and fifty-three are five times as likely to have a Substance Use Disorder and two times as likely to have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in contrast to the general public. Risk factors that have been shown to increase the probability of misusing opioids in the literature include prior history of substance abuse, alcohol use, mental illness, age, and male gender. However, these risk factors are not always consistent. Methods: Data were obtained from the Opioid Registry for the military. The opioid registry contains information about opioid data management and reporting platform developed through Carepoint Military Health System Population Health Portal. For this research, hospice, palliative, and cancer treatment patients as well as all nonmilitary personnel were removed from the data set. The final analytic sample was N=10,422. An opioid misuse variable was developed which represented patients using opioids for over 30 days. Multivariate logistic regression models were utilized to estimate associations between opioid misuse and patient-level risk factors (N=10,422). Results: Results from the logistic regression models showed that: Air Force service (compared to Army) and Active Duty status had lower risk of opioid misuse Depression, PTSD, and serious mental illness have are associated with increased risk of opioid misuse for both genders. These associations were further explored in gender-stratified models. Age slightly increases the risk of opioid misuse. Sleep apnea increases the risk of opioid misuse, particularly for males

Ethical dilemmas and reflexivity in qualitative research.

Context: For medical education researchers, a key concern may be the practicalities of gaining ethical approval where this is a national or local requirement. However, in qualitative studies, where the dynamics of human interaction pervade, ethical considerations are an ongoing process which continues long after approval has been granted. Responding to ethical dilemmas arising ‘in the moment’ requires a reflexive approach whereby the researcher questions his/her own motivations, assumptions and interests. Drawing on empirical studies and their experiences in academic and clinical research practice, the authors share their reflections on adhering to ethical principles throughout the research process to illustrate the complexities and nuances involved. Objectives and findings: These reflections offer critical insights into dilemmas arising in view of the ethical principles driving good conduct, and through domains which distinguish between procedural ethics, situational ethics, ethical relationships and ethical issues in exiting the study. The accounts consider integrity and altruism in research, gatekeeping and negotiating access, consent and confidentiality, power dynamics and role conflict, and challenges in dissemination of findings. The experiences are based on a range of examples of research in a UK context from managing difficult conversations in the classroom to video-ethnography in the operating theatre. Discussion and conclusions: These critical reflections make visible the challenges encountered and decisions that must be taken in the moment and on reflection after the event. Through sharing our experiences and debating the decisions we made, we offer insights into reflexivity in qualitative research which will be of value to others

A soldier and a sex worker walk into a therapist’s office. Who’s more likely to have PTSD?

When we think about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we most often think of soldiers traumatised by their experiences of war. But the statistics tell another story. While about 5-12% of Australian military personnel who have experienced active service have PTSD at any one time, this is about the same (10%) as rates for police, ambulance personnel, firefighters and other rescue workers. And while these rates are significant, they are not vastly different to rates in the general Australian population (8% of women and 5% of men)