A tale of two societies : The doing of qualitative comparative research in Hong Kong and Britain

This article explores the challenges and opportunities for methodological innovation arising from an exploratory, cross-national, qualitative study of women’s lives in Hong Kong and Britain. We begin by briefly outlining the aims of our study and its original research design, based on life history interviews with young adult women and their mothers in each location.We then turn to a discussion of how this was modified as we recruited participants and conducted the interviews, including the use of vignettes. We aim to be transparent about some of the problems of implementing a symmetrical approach to generating qualitative data in very different socio-cultural settings compounded by the practical difficulties of geographical distance between team members. We argue for a flexible approach that takes account of local cultural sensibilities rather than trying to follow rigidly identical procedures, recognising also that, in any qualitative research team, there will be differences in approach that affect the data produced. We highlight some of the insights yielded by the problems we encountered and, in particular, an accidental innovation that occurred through an ad hoc decision to conduct focus groups with the young women, which we call ‘cross-cultural data feedback’. This innovation involved our participants in contributing to cross cultural comparison and also brought taken-for-granted assumptions in each setting into sharp relief, as well as sensitising us to issues that proved important in analysing our data. This leads us to raise issues of interpreting and analysing data from differing socio-cultural locations and translating between cultures. We conclude with some recommendations including the potential for the future development of our method of cross-cultural data feedback

Simultaneous intra/extravascular administration of antiproliferative agents as a new strategy to inhibit restenosis: The peak of reactive cell proliferation as a hallmark for the duration of the treatment

BACKGROUND: Strictly intravascular approaches for the treatment of postangioplasty restenosis are effective in the intima and the inner parts of the media but may be insufficient to control redundant pathways in the more outer parts of the media and the adventitia. An inverse situation may occur subsequently to a strictly extravascular approach, like the recently suggested pericardial approach in pigs. We hypothesized that simultaneous intra/extravascular administration of anti-restenotic agents inhibits restenosis by blocking all stimulatory pathways in the entire arterial wall. METHODS: Fresh hearts of 25 domestic pigs were obtained from a local slaughterhouse. Left anterior descending coronary arteries (LAD) were harvested, cut into cylindric 5 mm segments, and cultured as ex vivo porcine organ cultures (POCs). After 9 bar ballooning simultaneous intra/extravascular administration of high dose diltiazem (50 μg/mL) was carried out for a period of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 days. At day 7 and 28 proliferative activity (BrdU), neointimal thickening, and staining against smooth muscle α-actin and vWF was analysed. RESULTS: 7 days after ballooning administration of diltiazem for 4, 5, 6, and 7 days inhibited reactive cell proliferation by more than 50% (n.s.) as compared to control, 28 days after ballooning administration for 6 and 7 days inhibited neointimal thickening by more than 75% (p < 0.05). Simultaneous intra/extravascular administration of high dose diltiazem did not affect the expression of vWF in endothelial cells or smooth muscle α-actin in smooth muscle cells. CONCLUSIONS: Simultaneous intra/extravascular administration of high dose diltiazem (50 μg/mL) has to be maintained for at least 6 days to achieve a significant inhibition of neointimal thickening. The data demonstrate the importance of the maximal reactive cell proliferation (= day 7 in the POC-model) for the calculation of the duration of the treatment period