The effectiveness of manual stretching in the treatment of plantar heel pain: a systematic review

Background: Plantar heel pain is a commonly occurring foot complaint. Stretching is frequently utilised as a treatment, yet a systematic review focusing only on its effectiveness has not been published. This review aimed to assess the effectiveness of stretching on pain and function in people with plantar heel pain. Methods: Medline, EMBASE, CINAHL, AMED, and The Cochrane Library were searched from inception to July 2010. Studies fulfilling the inclusion criteria were independently assessed, and their quality evaluated using the modified PEDro scale. Results: Six studies including 365 symptomatic participants were included. Two compared stretching with a control, one study compared stretching to an alternative intervention, one study compared stretching to both alternative and control interventions, and two compared different stretching techniques and durations. Quality rating on the modified Pedro scale varied from two to eight out of a maximum of ten points. The methodologies and interventions varied significantly between studies, making meta-analysis inappropriate. Most participants improved over the course of the studies, but when stretching was compared to alternative or control interventions, the changes only reached statistical significance in one study that used a combination of calf muscle stretches and plantar fascia stretches in their stretching programme. Another study comparing different stretching techniques, showed a statistically significant reduction in some aspects of pain in favour of plantar fascia stretching over calf stretches in the short term. Conclusions: There were too few studies to assess whether stretching is effective compared to control or other interventions, for either pain or function. However, there is some evidence that plantar fascia stretching may be more effective than Achilles tendon stretching alone in the short-term. Appropriately powered randomised controlled trials, utilizing validated outcome measures, blinded assessors and long-term follow up are needed to assess the efficacy of stretching

“In the Beginning, It Was Little Whispers...Now, We’re Almost a Roar”: Conceptualizing a Model for Community and Self in LGBTQ+ Health Information Practices

Although LGBTQ+ populations experience significant health challenges, little research exists that investigates their health from an informational perspective. Our study addresses this gap by exploring the health information practices of LGBTQ+ communities in South Carolina, focusing on how sociocultural context shapes these practices. Thirty semi-structured interviews with South Carolina LGBTQ+ community leaders analyzed using open qualitative coding informed the development of a conceptual framework describing their information practices. Findings show that participants engaged in two broad types of practices – protective and defensive – as responses to risks and barriers experienced, which are in turn produced by social and structural factors. Findings advance information practices and marginalization approaches and offer ways for medical professionals to improve service to LGBTQ+ populations

Facing differences with an open mind: Openness to Experience, salience of intra-group differences, and performance of diverse groups.

This study examined how the performance of diverse teams is affected by member openness to experience and the extent to which team reward structure emphasizes intragroup differences. Fifty-eight heterogeneous four-person teams engaged in an interactive task. Teams in which reward structure converged with diversity (i.e., "faultline" teams) performed more poorly than teams in which reward structure cut across differences between group members or pointed to a "superordinate identity." High openness to experience positively influenced teams in which differences were salient (i.e., faultline and "cross-categorized" teams) but not teams with a superordinate identity. This effect was mediated by information elaboration

Resolution, Relief, And Resignation:A Qualitative Study Of Responses To Misfit At Work

Research has portrayed person–environment (PE) fit as a pleasant condition resulting from people being attracted to and selected into compatible work environments; yet, our study reveals that creating and maintaining a sense of fit frequently involves an effortful, dynamic set of strategies. We used a two-phase, qualitative design to allow employees to report how they become aware of and experience misfit, and what they do in response. To address these questions, we conducted interviews with 81 individuals sampled from diverse industries and occupations. Through their descriptions, we identified three broad responses to the experience of misfit: resolution, relief, and resignation. Within these approaches, we identified distinct strategies for responding to misfit. We present a model of how participants used these strategies, often in combination, and develop propositions regarding their effectiveness at reducing strain associated with misfit. These results expand PE fit theory by providing new insight into how individuals experience and react to misfit—portraying them as active, motivated creators of their own fit experience at work

Towards an approach for analysing external representations created during sensemaking using generative grammar

During sensemaking, users often create external representations to help them make sense of what they know, and what they need to know. In doing so, they necessarily adopt or construct some form of representational language using the tools at hand. By describing such languages implicit in representations we believe that we are better able to describe and differentiate what users do and better able to describe and differentiate interfaces that might support them. Drawing on approaches to the analysis of language, and in particular, Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory, we analyse the representations that users create to expose their underlying ‘visual grammar’. We do this in the context of a user study involving evidential reasoning. Participants were asked to address an adapted version of IEEE VAST 2011 mini challenge 3 (interpret a potential terrorist plot implicit in a set of news reports). We show how our approach enables the unpacking of the heterogeneous and embedded nature of user-generated representations and allows us to show how visual grammars evolve and become more complex over time in response to evolving sensemaking needs

A model of management academics' intentions to influence values

Business schools face increased criticism for failing in the teaching of management studies to nurture their students’ values. Assuming that individual academics play an important role in shaping the value-related influence of business schools, I model management academics’ intentions to influence values. The suggested model encompasses academics’ economic and social values as internal variables, as well as perceived support for attempting to influence values and academic tenure as social and structural variables. A test with empirical data from 1,254 management academics worldwide reveals that perceived external support is most relevant for explaining intentions. Moreover, academics’ social values, but not their economic ones, contribute to an explanation of their intentions to influence values. The results reveal how important it is for academics to believe that their colleagues, higher education institutions, and other stakeholders support their value-related behavioral intentions

Needing NoDI (normal democratic information)? The problem of information poverty in post-industrial society

The paper addresses one of the main paradoxes of post-industrial society: information poverty. While digital divides of various types have been extensively theorized and researched, the actual condition of the information poor – those at the wrong end of socioeconomic information-divides – has not received sufficient attention. Yet if advanced nations have ‘informatized’ and thus become, at least in some measure, information societies, the plight of those lacking the definitive resource ought surely to be high on academic and political agendas. The article reviews the scattered multidisciplinary literature on the condition, confirming the iron link between economic poverty and information poverty, while also registering cultural and behavioural dimensions. Building on such work, a focused, up-to-date and, it is believed, original conception is able to be introduced, namely, information poverty as a deficiency in certain taken-for-granted categories of political and cognate information, or normal democratic information (NoDI). The new construct is then trialled in the field, among a sample of severely disadvantaged men in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. The informants are indeed found to be, by and large, wanting in these key categories of information, an epistemic pathology that reflects and reinforces their material malaise. The article concludes that the ‘option for the poor’ – the political duty of care for the worst off – in the twenty-first century demands new modes of State action to combat an acute and increasingly salient social problem