Meaning: lost, found or 'made' in translation? A hermeneutical approach to cross-language interview research

Qualitative research that includes interviews in languages foreign to the researcher(s) has become increasingly common. However, there is surprisingly little reflection on the methodological implications of such research practices. Furthermore, strategies on how to analyse cross- and multi-language interview material are lacking. The aim of this article is to present possible ways of handling these challenges, focusing mainly on analysis. I propose a hermeneutical approach to the issue. First, I will discuss the epistemological/methodological foundations of the approach before proposing some 'tools' to help practically tackle the 'problem' of analysis using the chosen methodological perspective. Rather than ignoring or trying to circumvent the question of foreign language and/or translation, in the proposed approach linguistic questions and questions of translation are the central focus

Meaning: lost, found or 'made' in translation? A hermeneutical approach to cross-language interview research

Qualitative research that includes interviews in languages foreign to the researcher(s) has become increasingly common. However, there is surprisingly little reflection on the methodological implications of such research practices. Furthermore, strategies on how to analyse cross- and multi-language interview material are lacking. The aim of this article is to present possible ways of handling these challenges, focusing mainly on analysis. I propose a hermeneutical approach to the issue. First, I will discuss the epistemological/methodological foundations of the approach before proposing some 'tools' to help practically tackle the 'problem' of analysis using the chosen methodological perspective. Rather than ignoring or trying to circumvent the question of foreign language and/or translation, in the proposed approach linguistic questions and questions of translation are the central focus

Measurement of inclusive proton double -spin asymmetries and polarized structure functions

The scattering of polarized electrons from a polarized proton target provides a means for studying the internal spin structure of the proton. The CLAS (CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer) EG1b experiment in Hall-B at Jefferson Laboratory measured double-spin inclusive and exclusive electron-nucleon scattering asymmetries using longitudinally polarized frozen NH3 and ND3 targets and a longitudinally polarized electron beam at 4 different energies (1.6, 2.5, 4.2, 5.6 GeV). Extraction of the virtual photon asymmetry Ap1 (for 0.05 GeV2 \u3c Q2 \u3c 5.0 GeV2) provides precision measurements of the polarized proton spin-structure function gp1 in and above the resonance region. Linear regression of data between the varying energies yields new constraints on the virtual photon asymmetry Ap2 (and thus the structure function gp2 ) in the resonance region (for 0.3 GeV2 \u3c Q2 \u3c 1.0 GeV2). Measurements of these structure functions and their moments allows testing of perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD) models and evaluation of moments of the structure functions in the Operator Product Expansion. Testing of Chiral Perturbation Theory (chiPT) at Q2 \u3c 0.2 GeV 2 is enabled by the new data. Other applications of polarized structure functions include measurement of foward-spin polarizability, evaluation of high-order corrections in 1H hyperfine splitting, and testing of quark-hadron duality

Building, breaking, overriding…? Migrants and institutional trust in the Danish welfare state

Purpose Migrants constitute an interesting case concerning the question of how trust in welfare state institutions can emerge, as one can study their newly built relationships with such institutions in a distinct way. The Danish welfare state can be considered a “high trust” context. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of qualitative interviews with migrants on how institutional trust in the welfare state can emerge with migrants in Denmark as a case. Design/methodology/approach With the help of a multi-dimensional theoretical concept, this paper provides an analysis of qualitative interviews with migrants on how institutional trust in the welfare state can emerge. Findings A perceived experience of distributive justice appears to be of crucial importance for building trust. Furthermore, strong trust in the systemic checks and balances of the welfare state can “override” negative experiences at its access points, that is, welfare state professionals. Research limitations/implications Taking into account the relatively limited number of interviews, the presented claims drawn from the empirical material are limited. The aim is to reveal some (new) tendencies that can be investigated in future research. Originality/value The paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexity of trust-generating mechanisms. </jats:sec

Droughts in Germany: performance of regional climate models in reproducing observed characteristics

Droughts are among the most relevant natural disasters related to climate change. We evaluated different regional climate model outputs and their ability to reproduce observed drought indices in Germany and its near surroundings between 1980–2009. Both outputs of an ensemble of six EURO-CORDEX models of 12.5 km grid resolution and outputs from a high-resolution (5 km) Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) run were employed. The latter model was especially tailored for the study region regarding the physics configuration. We investigated drought-related variables and derived the 3-month standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI-3) to account for meteorological droughts. Based on that, we analyzed correlations, the 2003 event, trends and drought characteristics (frequency, duration and severity) and compared the results to E-OBS. Methods used include Taylor diagrams, the Mann–Kendall trend test and the spatial efficiency (SPAEF) metric to account for spatial agreement of patterns. Averaged over the domain, meteorological droughts were found to occur approximately 16 times in the study period with an average duration of 3.1 months and average severity of 1.47 SPEI units. WRF's resolution and setup were shown to be less important for the reproduction of the single drought event and overall drought characteristics. Depending on the specific goals of drought analyses, computation resources could therefore be saved, since a coarser resolution can provide similar results. Benefits of WRF were found in the correlation analysis. The greatest benefits were identified in the trend analysis: only WRF was able to reproduce the observed negative SPEI trends to a fairly high spatial accuracy, while the other regional climate models (RCMs) completely failed in this regard. This was mainly due to the WRF model settings, highlighting the importance of appropriate model configuration tailored to the target region. Our findings are especially relevant in the context of climate change studies, where the appropriate reproduction of trends is of high importance.</p