10 research outputs found
Extracting scientific articles from a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Background: The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a large digital archive of legacy biological literature, comprising over 31 million pages scanned from books, monographs, and journals. During the digitisation process basic metadata about the scanned items is recorded, but not article-level metadata. Given that the article is the standard unit of citation, this makes it difficult to locate cited literature in BHL. Adding the ability to easily find articles in BHL would greatly enhance the value of the archive. Description: A service was developed to locate articles in BHL based on matching article metadata to BHL metadata using approximate string matching, regular expressions, and string alignment. This article locating service is exposed as a standard OpenURL resolver on the BioStor web site http://biostor.org/openurl/. This resolver can be used on the web, or called by bibliographic tools that support OpenURL. Conclusions: BioStor provides tools for extracting, annotating, and visualising articles from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BioStor is available from http://biostor.org
Healing through culturally embedded practice: an investigation of counsellorsâ and clientsâ experiences of Buddhist Counselling in Thailand
This thesis is concerned with an exploration of counsellorsâ and clientsâ lived experiences of
Buddhist Counselling, an indigenous Buddhist-based counselling approach in Thailand. Over
the past decade, Buddhist Counselling has received a growing interest from Thai counselling
trainees and practitioners, and it has also expanded to serve Thai people in various settings.
Research on Buddhist Counselling is very limited and most of the existing studies in the
field have focused on measuring the effectiveness of the approach. While these studies have
consistently indicated the positive effects of Buddhist Counselling on psychological
improvement across several population groups, the significant questions of how Buddhist
Counselling brings about such outcome and how it is experienced are still largely
unanswered. Moreover, existing research is concentrated much more on clientsâ views than
counsellorsâ views, although counsellorsâ views of their counselling practice can also serve as
a knowledge base of the field. This thesis thus sets out to contribute to rectifying this
omission by exploring Buddhist Counselling from the perspectives of both counsellors and
clients.
The thesis is based on two qualitative studies. The first study addressed Buddhist
Counselling from the perspective of five counsellors through a focus group and semi-structured
interviews. The second study explored Buddhist Counselling from the perspective
of three clients, using two semi-structured interviews with each of them. All data received
were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).
The study reveals counsellorsâ and clientsâ overall positive experience of engaging in
Buddhist Counselling. Central to the accounts of the counsellors are the following
perceptions: that their practice of Buddhist Counselling is culturally congruent with the
existing values and beliefs of both themselves and their clients; that their personal and
professional congruence is key to their therapeutic efficacy; and that they enhance such
congruence through their application of Buddhist ideas and practices in their daily lives. Key
to the clientsâ accounts is their emphasis on the significant roles of the counsellorsâ Buddhist
ideas and personal qualities, and of their religious practices in facilitating healing and change.
Key shared findings from both studies reveal that the participantsâ accounts of their cultural
background and their experiences of Buddhist Counselling are intertwined. Adopting
hermeneutics to address this intertwinement, I reveal the cultural and moral dimensions
underlying the practice of Buddhist Counselling. Based on such revelation, I suggest that
Buddhist Counselling in particular, as well as psychotherapy in general, should be better
understood as a historically situated, culturally bound, and morally constituted activity of
people who are concerned with improving the quality of their lives and their community,
rather than the transcultural and merely relational work of morally-neutral practitioners
Is touch a valid therapeutic intervention? Early returns from a qualitative study of therapists' views
Body oriented psychotherapy. The state of the art in empirical research and evidence-based practice: A clinical perspective
An examination of Thai practitionersâ perceptions of risk assessment techniques in real estate development projects
A Two-Center Study of Muslim Women's Views of Breast Cancer and Breast Health Practices in Pakistan and the UK
Les mĂ©canismes de changements hĂ©modynamiques pendant le pontage aortocoronarien Ă cĆur battant
Embodiment and embedment: integrating dance/movement therapy, body psychotherapy, and ecopsychology
The importance of ecological and behavioural data in studies of hybridisation among marine fishes
Natural hybridisation is a widespread phenomenon, particularly well documented in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, where it has been ascribed substantial evolutionary and adaptive relevance. Hybridisation has received comparatively less attention in marine systems, though there has been a recent surge of reported marine hybrids, particularly among corals and fishes. This review summarises the current knowledge of hybridisation in marine fishes, with a focus on ecological and behavioural factors that may play a role in hybridisation processes. Rarity of one or both parental species within the hybrid zone, overlap in habitat use, dietary overlap and the breakdown in assortative mating appear to have a role in facilitating hybridisation. Despite this, most of the recent literature on marine fish hybridisation has a strong genetic focus, with little or no quantitative information about the ecological and behavioural factors that initiate or facilitate hybridisation. Future studies should attempt to gather ecological and behavioural data from hybrid zones, thus teasing out which processes are most relevant to overcoming pre-zygotic barriers to reproductive isolation. Not only will this advance our understanding of the adaptive and evolutionary relevance of hybridisation in marine fishes, but it will also provide unique insights into the maintenance of reproductive isolation and the process of speciation in the marine environment