Ethnographic strategies for making the familiar strange: Struggling with ‘distance’ and ‘immersion’ among Moroccan-Dutch students

Ethnographic fieldwork is a balancing act between distancing and immersing. Fieldworkers need to come close to meaningfully grasp the sense-making efforts of the researched. In methodological textbooks on ethnography, immersion tends to be emphasized at the expense of its counterpart. In fact, ‘distancing’ is often ignored as a central tenet of good ethnographic conduct. In this article we redirect attention away from familiarization and towards ‘defamiliarization’ by suggesting six estrangement strategies (three theoretical and three methodological) that allow the researcher to develop a more detached viewpoint from which to interpret data. We demonstrate the workings of these strategies by giving illustrations from Machteld de Jong’s field- and text-work, conducted among Moroccan-Dutch students in an institution of higher vocational education

A dual pathway of student motivation: Combining an implicit and explicit measure of student motivation

Abundant research in social psychology shows human behaviour is guided by beliefs through two pathways, a deliberate and automatic pathway. Research on student motivation has thus far focused mostly on the deliberate pathway and consequently almost exclusively relied on explicit measures (i.e. self-reports of motivation) to assess student motivation and subsequently predict student behaviour and achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine whether student motivation is associated with students’ behavioural engagement and school grades through dual pathways by assessing motivation with a newly developed implicit measure and an explicit measure. Participants were 139 students in year 3 of secondary education (58% female, M = 14.8 years). Motivation was assessed with an implicit association test (IAT) as well as an explicit measure (self-report). Behavioural engagement was assessed by teacher ratings, and school grades were reported by students. The explicit and implicit measures of student motivation were not significantly correlated, suggesting that both measures tap into different aspects of student motivation. Furthermore, structural equation analyses revealed that students’ explicit and implicit motivation were positively associated with school grades. Neither motivation measure was associated with teacher ratings of behavioural engagement. This study contributes to existing research by showing that an implicit measure of student motivation can predict unique variation in school grades in addition to an explicit measure. As such, the current study provides initial support for a dual pathway model of student motivation

Vloeibare totaalwasmiddelen

De voors en tegens van vloeibare totaalwasmiddelen

The Subcellular Localization of an Aquaporin-2 Tetramer Depends on the Stoichiometry of Phosphorylated and Nonphosphorylated Monomers

In renal principal cells, vasopressin regulates the shuttling of the aquaporin (AQP)2 water channel between intracellular vesicles and the apical plasma membrane. Vasopressin-induced phosphorylation of AQP2 at serine 256 (S256) by protein kinase A (PKA) is essential for its localization in the membrane. However, phosphorylated AQP2 (p-AQP2) has also been detected in intracellular vesicles of noninduced principal cells. As AQP2 is expressed as homotetramers, we hypothesized that the number of p-AQP2 monomers in a tetramer might be critical for the its steady state distribution. Expressed in oocytes, AQP2-S256D and AQP2-S256A mimicked p-AQP2 and non–p-AQP2, respectively, as routing and function of AQP2-S256D and wild-type AQP2 (wt-AQP2) were identical, whereas AQP2-S256A was retained intracellularly. In coinjection experiments, AQP2-S256A and AQP2-S256D formed heterotetramers. Coinjection of different ratios of AQP2-S256A and AQP2-S256D cRNAs revealed that minimally three AQP2-S256D monomers in an AQP2 tetramer were essential for its plasma membrane localization. Therefore, our results suggest that in principal cells, minimally three monomers per AQP2 tetramer have to be phosphorylated for its steady state localization in the apical membrane. As other multisubunit channels are also regulated by phosphorylation, it is anticipated that the stoichiometry of their phosphorylated and nonphosphorylated subunits may fine-tune the activity or subcellular localization of these complexes

Ethnography

Many qualitative studies in journalism and mass communication research draw on ethnographic methods that originated in anthropology and sociology. These methods involve studying people within their own cultural environment through intensive fieldwork; they emphasize the subjects' frames of reference and understandings of the world. This article uses a comparison between journalism and ethnographic research as a framework for highlighting common problems with manuscripts using this method. It offers veteran ethnographers' tips about what they look for in a manuscript and identifies three ethnographies that are examples of successful application of the method to topics of interest to journal readers