Qualitative Insider Research in a Government Institution: Reflections on a Study of Policy Capacity

Embarking on a qualitative Ph.D. research project in public administration is often daunting for novice researchers. For those students who consider adopting an emic or insider approach for their research, the ethical, methodological, and analytical challenges that lay ahead may seem insurmountable at times. In this article, I reflect on my experience as a Ph.D. student completing qualitative research with my colleagues to study policy capacity in a provincial government in Canada. I review how I constructed an ethical framework by integrating policy from Research Ethics Boards and government. Throughout the article, I deal primarily with ethical considerations and the personal and professional tensions associated with insider research. In addition to providing an overview of the literature on insider and emic research, I present ethical protocols that student-practitioners in other settings should consider when completing academic research with their colleagues in government institutions. Overall, the risks one must mitigate and minimize when completing insider research in government institutions are not substantially different from insider research in private institutions. While insider approaches in the study of public administration are not without their unique challenges, they do offer great potential in broadening and deepening emic knowledge of public administration practice

Leadership, Change and Conflict: An Examination of Informal Human Resources Theory for Policy Capacity

In recent times, academics and practitioners have focused on the optimal processes and capabilities required to increase an organization’s policy capacity, but there is little research on the human resource theory adopted by practitioners to improve public policy and its development. This article presents the results of a 2018 case study of policy capacity involving thirty-one interviews with civil servants in a small provincial government in Canada.  An informal theory of policy capacity and human resources centering on leadership, conflict management, change management, and analytical capabilities is articulated using the language of practitioners. For practitioners, the findings of this article provide guidance and context for human resource strategies for policy capacity. The article concludes that there is an opportunity for academics to expand the paradigmatic boundaries of human resources research in public administration for the purposes of improving policy capacity

Discursive Black and Translucent Box Frames of Policy Work: How do Practitioners and Scholars Compare?

AbstractPolicy work in government is often framed as existing in a “black box”. It is assumed that public administrators, as “insiders”, have more knowledge of policy development processes than those outside of government. Are black box narratives of policy work constructed by practitioners? Or is the idea of a “translucent” box more appropriate to understand policy work within the bureaucracy? Based on interviews with sub-national civil servants in one provincial government in Canada, this article finds that black box narratives are used by practitioners to understand policy work. I interpret these results to argue that a theory-practice gap does not necessarily exist when it comes to constructions of policy work: practitioners in the field, like scholars, employ black box narratives to frame policy work in the bureaucracy. Yet, academics may still find that translucent box theory provides a more nuanced way of understanding government’s internal policy processes.RésuméLe travail politique au sein du gouvernement est souvent présenté comme existant dans une « boîte noire». On suppose que les administrateurs publics, en tant qu’ « initiés », ont une meilleure connaissance des processus d'élaboration des politiques que ceux qui ne font pas partie du gouvernement. Les récits en boîte noire du travail politique sont-ils construits par les praticiens ? Ou l'idée d'une boîte « translucide » est-elle plus appropriée pour comprendre le travail politique au sein de la bureaucratie ? Sur la base d'entretiens avec des fonctionnaires infranationaux d'un gouvernement provincial au Canada, cet article constate que les récits de la boîte noire sont utilisés par les praticiens pour comprendre le travail politique. J'interprète ces résultats pour soutenir qu'un fossé théorie-pratique n'existe pas nécessairement lorsqu'il s'agit de constructions de travail politique : les praticiens sur le terrain, comme les universitaires, utilisent des récits de boîte noire pour encadrer le travail politique dans la bureaucratie. Pourtant, les universitaires peuvent toujours trouver que la théorie de la boîte translucide offre une manière plus nuancée de comprendre les processus politiques internes du gouvernement.Key Words: Black Box Theory, Qualitative Semi-Structured Interviews, Social Constructivist Coding, Prince Edward Island Civil Servants, Policy CapacityMots-clés : Théorie de la boîte noire, entretiens qualitatifs semi-structurés, codage constructiviste social, fonctionnaires de l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard, capacité des politique

Evaluating Affordable Cranial Ultrasonography in East African Neonatal Intensive Care Units

Neuroimaging is a valuable diagnostic tool for the early detection of neonatal brain injury, but equipment and radiologic staff are expensive and unavailable to most hospitals in developing countries. We evaluated an affordable, portable ultrasound machine as a quantitative and qualitative diagnostic tool and to establish whether a novice sonographer could effectively operate the equipment and obtain clinically important information. Cranial ultrasonography was performed on term healthy, pre-term and term asphyxiated neonates in Rwandan and Kenyan hospitals. To evaluate the detection of ventriculomegaly and compression injuries, we measured the size of the lateral ventricles and corpus callosum. The images were also assessed for the presence of other cerebral abnormalities. Measurements were reliable across images, and cases of clinically relevant ventriculomegaly were detected. A novice sonographer had good-to-excellent agreement with an expert. This study demonstrates that affordable equipment and cranial ultrasound protocols can be used in low-resource settings to assess the newborn brain

Evaluating Affordable Cranial Ultrasonography in East African Neonatal Intensive Care Units

Neuroimaging is a valuable diagnostic tool for the early detection of neonatal brain injury, but equipment and radiologic staff are expensive and unavailable to most hospitals in developing countries. We evaluated an affordable, portable ultrasound machine as a quantitative and qualitative diagnostic tool and to establish whether a novice sonographer could effectively operate the equipment and obtain clinically important information. Cranial ultrasonography was performed on term healthy, pre-term and term asphyxiated neonates in Rwandan and Kenyan hospitals. To evaluate the detection of ventriculomegaly and compression injuries, we measured the size of the lateral ventricles and corpus callosum. The images were also assessed for the presence of other cerebral abnormalities. Measurements were reliable across images, and cases of clinically relevant ventriculomegaly were detected. A novice sonographer had good-to-excellent agreement with an expert. This study demonstrates that affordable equipment and cranial ultrasound protocols can be used in low-resource settings to assess the newborn brain

CSIRO In-Situ Lab : a multi-pronged approach to surface gas and groundwater monitoring at geological CO2 storage sites

In February 2019, at the CSIRO In-Situ Laboratory CCS project, a test was conducted where 38 t of gaseous CO2 were injected over 5 days into a fault zone at a depth of approximately 340 m. As a release test, this project enabled the testing and validation of surface and shallow well monitoring strategies at intermediate depths (i.e. depths much deeper than previous release projects and shallower than reservoirs used for CO2 storage). One of the aims of this project is to understand how CO2 would behave at intermediate depths if it did migrate from deeper depths (i.e. from a storage reservoir); the CO2 was not intended to migrate to the shallow subsurface or to surface/atmosphere. To verify that the injected CO2 remained in the subsurface, and to comply with environmental performance requirements on site, a comprehensive surface gas and groundwater monitoring program was conducted. The monitoring strategy was designed such that any leakage(s) to the surface of injected CO2 would be detected, mapped and, ultimately, quantified. The surface air monitoring program was comprised of three different but complementary approaches allowing data to be efficiently collected over different spatial and temporal scales. These approaches included continuous soil-gas chamber measurements at fixed locations, periodic soil-gas chamber measurements on gridded locations and near-surface atmospheric measurements on a mobile platform. The surface air monitoring approaches gave self-consistent results and reduced the risk of “false negative” test results. The only anomalous CO2 detected at the surface flowed from the observation well and could be directly attributed to a breach in the well casing at the injection depth providing a conduit for CO2/water to rise to the surface. Groundwater monitoring program revealed no impact on the groundwater resources attributable to the carbon injection project. Based on this work, we demonstrate that this multi-pronged monitoring strategy can be utilized to minimize the overall resources devoted to monitoring by increasing the number of monitoring approaches and diminishing the resources devoted to each technique. By maximizing the effectiveness of each element of the monitoring program, a cost-efficient and robust monitoring strategy capable of early leak detection and attribution of any leaking CO2 can be achieved

Search for heavy lepton resonances decaying to a ZZ boson and a lepton in pppp collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search for heavy leptons decaying to a $Z$ boson and an electron or a muon is presented. The search is based on $pp$ collision data taken at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb$^{-1}$, Three high-transverse-momentum electrons or muons are selected, with two of them required to be consistent with originating from a $Z$ boson decay. No significant excess above Standard Model background predictions is observed, and 95% confidence level limits on the production cross section of high-mass trilepton resonances are derived. The results are interpreted in the context of vector-like lepton and type-III seesaw models. For the vector-like lepton model, most heavy lepton mass values in the range 114-176 GeV are excluded. For the type-III seesaw model, most mass values in the range 100-468 GeV are excluded

Search for new phenomena in events containing a same-flavour opposite-sign dilepton pair, jets, and large missing transverse momentum in s=\sqrt{s}= 13 pppp collisions with the ATLAS detector

Two searches for new phenomena in final states containing a same-flavour opposite-lepton (electron or muon) pair, jets, and large missing transverse momentum are presented. These searches make use of proton--proton collision data, collected during 2015 and 2016 at a centre-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, which correspond to an integrated luminosity of 14.7 fb$^{-1}$, Both searches target the pair production of supersymmetric particles, squarks or gluinos, which decay to final states containing a same-flavour opposite-sign lepton pair via one of two mechanisms: a leptonically decaying Z boson in the final state, leading to a peak in the dilepton invariant-mass distribution around the Z boson mass; and decays of neutralinos (e.g. $\tilde{\chi}_2^0 \rightarrow \ell^+\ell^- \tilde{\chi}_1^0$), yielding a kinematic endpoint in the dilepton invariant-mass spectrum. The data are found to be consistent with the Standard Model expectation. Results are interpreted in simplified models of gluino-pair (squark-pair) production, and provide sensitivity to gluinos (squarks) with masses as large as 1.70 TeV (980 GeV).publishedVersio