The Potential of Government Intervention in Violence Against Women: Lessons from Newfoundland and Labrador

AbstractWhile an increasingly neoliberal and neoconservative state has created challenges for Canadian feminists, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Purple Ribbon Campaign, launched in 2009, illustrates how feminist analyses of gender-based violence can be incorporated into a government-sponsored anti-violence campaign. This article examines the successes and limitations of the Purple Ribbon Campaign’s anti-violence analyses.RésuméAlors qu’une situation de plus en plus néolibérale et néoconservatrice pose des défis aux féministes canadiens, la campagne du ruban violet à Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador, lancée en 2009, illustre la façon dont les analyses féministes de la violence à caractère sexiste peuvent être intégrées dans une campagne antiviolence appuyée par le gouvernement. Cet article examine les succès et les limites des analyses antiviolence de la campagne du ruban violet

Riding out the risks: an ethnographic study of risk perceptions in a South Louisiana bayou community

This ethnographic study explores the risk perceptions of a small unincorporated coastal community in southeastern Louisiana. This community has experienced social and environmental change due to events including tropical storms and hurricanes, erosion, subsidence, oil and gas activities, development, and the impact of global seafood markets. Many global risk perception studies have focused on the perception of risk to human health and property connected with natural and technological disasters, but few have explored the issue of minorities and small at-risk communities. To explore this theoretical and methodological gap, this study uses a variety of qualitative ethnographic methods to examine a small at-risk community of minorities. The central question of this research asks: Why does a marginalized community with few resources choose to stay in an area that they perceive to be burdened with environmental and social threats? Findings suggest that geographical displacement is a greater ‘risk’ than living in an area burdened with continual environmental and social threats. As Meda states: “…if we follow the same traditional ways of evacuating for a storm that our fathers and grandfathers did, we pack up and go to our boats. Traditionally that’s what we do, that’s what we know, that’s how we keep ourselves safe. But the land has changed…the land standing between us and the storms has diminished because of erosion, subsidence, and all of these other things that came into play. Now when storms come, we get flooded with greater frequency and with higher tides and the porosity of the currents that come through, its stronger and stronger…so, those safe harbors will no longer be safe harbors and our traditional ways of evacuating, we will have to find somewhere else to go. Because they will no longer be able to sustain us and its something that we know and its something that we are going to have to face, but because of who we are and because of…our ties to the community…life at all costs is better than anything that I can think of. But we do stay and we fight for what we have and risk is part of it.

An Exploratory Study of the Similarities and Differences Between Special Care Units (SCUs) For People With Dementia and Non-SCUs With Recommendations For New SCUs

Special care units for people with dementia are a relatively new phenomenon within the long-term care setting, having evolved as a way to meet the special needs of individuals with dementia. The numbers of people who will be affected by dementia is projected to rapidly increase in the future. The literature reveals that special care units are very heterogeneous in their physical characteristics, program designs, and therapeutic approaches, yet most appear to be based on common theoretical conceptual frameworks. This exploratory study examined the current nature of special care units designed for people with Alzheimer\u27s disease/dementia in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area. Through qualitative interviews with social workers who work in SCUs, the similarities and differences of SCUs and non-SCUs were obtained as well as recommendations for the development and design of new special care units

Collaborative Poetic Processes: Methodological Reflections on Co-Writing with Participants

This article illustrates how the author engaged in a collaborative poetry-making process with two participants, Margaret and Mary, in this feminist qualitative research study exploring women’s experiences of displacement, as loss of sense of place, in Newfoundland, Canada. The author evaluates some of the key successes of this type of process, including credible representation of participants’ experiences and reciprocity in the research process, as well as some of the methodological and philosophical tensions surrounding co-writing with participants that emerged during the poetry process. This article will be of particular interest to researchers and students who are looking for ways to collaborate with participants in crafting poems about their lived experience in poetic inquiry work

Detection or decision errors? Missed lung cancer from the posteroanterior chest radiograph

A test bank of verified chest radiographs was compiled for visual search experiments to investigate radiology performance in the detection of early lung cancer. A measure of the physical characteristics of the lesions was derived to determine the conspicuity (x) of the nodules and to investigate possible causes of failed detection. Observer performance was measured by alternate free response operating characteristic (AFROC) methodology and was supplemented with visual search recording. Correlation of AFROC scores and the x values was poor but inspection of the visual search recordings showed that most nodules were fixated. Fixations on missed lesions produced average dwell times greater than three times the minimum duration thought to be associated with detection. We conclude that the majority of errors were failures of decision rather than detection and comment on the implications of this for strategies to improve diagnostic effectiveness