6,655 research outputs found
Lost in Translation: An Ethnography of Self-directed Support in Scotland
Self-directed support (SDS) is Scotlandâs approach to social care and was enshrined in legislation with the passing of the Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013. This policy is underpinned by a shift towards personalised social care services with the intention that people who require support can exercise as much choice and control as possible over their receipt of social care. With a clear emphasis on co-production and outcome-focussed support, SDS is intended to support people to participate in society whilst also protecting their human rights, including the right to independent living. Although the positive transformative potential of the policy is evident from its overarching principles and values, it is widely acknowledged that SDS is not being delivered as was intended. Within the growing SDS literature, scarce attention has been paid to the daily work of practitioners, who are tasked with translating SDS legislation into everyday practices. Consequently, in order to bridge this gap, this thesis places an emphasis on what practitioners actually do, by exploring how their SDS knowledge is translated through their everyday activities.
An ethnography was undertaken in a Scottish local authority adult team to explore the everyday implementation of SDS. The fieldwork included practice observation, formal and informal interviews, document analysis, and auto-ethnographic reflection, all of which took place between December 2019 and January 2021. The mobile methods captured desk work, meetings, informal interactions, and home visits within fieldnotes, a reflective log, and interview transcripts. The fundamental question being addressed was not whether SDS works, but rather how SDS works. Consequently, the work of practitioners has become the unit of analysis and the central focus of this thesis. The findings were analysed through Freeman and Sturdyâs (2014) embodied-inscribed-enacted knowledge framework, which provides a powerful tool to identify and capture practitionersâ SDS knowledge during policy translation. Practitioners embody SDS knowledge through their emotions, feelings, and embrained information. They inscribe SDS knowledge into documents and artefacts as they construct the policy reality, and enact it through their everyday encounters as they create and recreate a collective SDS world.
The thesis renders the unseen backstage SDS practice visible, providing a window into the black box of social work practice, or what has been described as the âthe invisible tradeâ (Pithouse, 1998). The findings highlight the contested nature of SDS implementation and reveal a concerning gap between social work practice and policy expectations. Practitioners are pulled in different directions due to competing functions in daily work, and the thesis therefore shines a light on the complex position occupied by social workers. Although SDS processes and procedures attempt to standardise work, highly bureaucratic tasks seem to have encroached on their practice, depleting the time available to build relationships with supported people. The evidence suggests that relationship-based practice thus takes a back seat, and high eligibility criteria, thresholds, and procedural demands are placed upon practitioners instead. Workers feel frustrated and constrained by these bureaucratic boundaries imposed through local authority processes and procedures, impacting their sense of professional identity and autonomy.
Amid this global pandemic the importance of social care and SDS delivery has never been more apparent, which is why an overdue but much-needed board discussion regarding a Scottish National Care Service has been sparked. This thesis contributes to the current national conversation regarding the future direction of SDS amid the shifting social care landscape
Putting the auto in ethnography: The embodied process of reflexivity on positionality
This article describes an unexpected methodological shift made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic during doctoral research, and exemplifies reflexivity in action whilst negotiating my complex positionality as both a researcher and a social worker. The first UK national lockdown was announced after I had conducted 3 months of ethnographic data collection in a local authority adult social work team, thus halting my research. As society shut down, face-to-face research was paused overnight, however, the local authority continued to provide essential services and support. Forging a path forward, I successfully gained a job practising as a social worker within the team and completed a supplementary ethics application to include auto-ethnographic data which would complement the existing ethnography. Although practicing reflexivity and analysing positionality are established and encouraged parts of ethnographic research, how a researcher actively conducts them varies and usually remains unseen. Methodologies are often presented in a sanitised and polished manner, depriving the reader of the messy yet informative reality of research. This article draws upon fieldnotes to practically illustrate and bring this reflexivity on positionality to the fore. As I move from participant-observer to complete-participant, the findings zoom in on my experience of navigating positionality, revealing a micro picture of the details and subtleties of this process. This unexpected research journey enhanced my level of intimacy with the phenomenon, the research site, and the participants. Overall, this example of enacting reflexivity helps to bridge the gap between how positionality is theorised and how it actively practiced. Finally, this article is a call for more open, deeper, and continual reflexivity on our positionality as researchers
Self-directed support: ten years on
Key Points:
It is ten years since the publication of the first national strategy for Self-directed Support (SDS).
Evidence, both from scrutiny activity and research, indicates a very mixed picture of delivery across Scotland, with some people benefitting and others not having full access
Processes for delivery of SDS are often bureaucratic and unwieldy, with the voice of the supported person not being fully heard.
In order for the goals of the SDS strategy to be fully implemented, a change of culture will be required to fully put the voice of the supported person at the heart of SDS processes.
There are significant implications for the workforce in terms of training and autonomy; real investment in education and training is required
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Positive allosteric modulators of the a-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) receptor
L-glutamate is the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system (CNS) and plays a fundamental role in the control of motor function, cognition and mood. The physiological effects of glutamate are mediated through two functionally distinct receptor families. While activation of metabotropic (G-protein coupled) glutamate receptors results in modulation of neuronal excitability and transmission, the ionotropic glutamate receptors (ligand-gated ion channels) are responsible for mediating the fast synaptic response to extracellular glutamate
Rapid Maize Leaf and Immature Ear Responses to UV-B Radiation
Because of their sessile lifestyle, plants have evolved adaptations to environmental factors, including UV-B present in solar radiation. To gain a better understanding of the initial events in UV-B acclimation, we have analyzed a 10âmin to 1âh time course of transcriptome responses in irradiated and shielded leaves, and immature maize ears to unravel the systemic physiological and developmental responses in exposed and shielded organs. After 10âmin of UV-B exposure, 262 transcripts are changed by at least two-fold in irradiated leaves, and this number doubles after 1âh. Indicative of the rapid modulation of transcription, 130 transcripts are only changed after 10âmin. This is true not only in irradiated leaves, but also in shielded tissues. After 10âmin of exposure, the overlap in transcriptome changes in irradiated and shielded organs is significant; however, after 30âmin of UV-B, there are only two transcripts showing similar UV-B regulation between the three organs; 35 are similarly regulated in both IL and SL. Therefore, at longer irradiation times, there is more specificity of responses, and these are organ-specific. We suggest that early signaling in different tissues may be elicited by common signaling pathways, while at longer exposure times responses become more specific. To identify metabolites as possible signaling molecules, we looked for compounds that increased within 5â90âmin in both irradiated and shielded leaves, to explain the kinetics of profound transcript changes within 1âh. We found that myoinositol is one such candidate metabolite; and we also demonstrate that if 0.1âmM myoinositol is applied to leaves of greenhouse maize, some metabolites that are changed by UV-B are also changed similarly by the chemical treatment. Therefore, this metabolite can partially mimic UV irradiation
HIV gene expression from intact proviruses positioned in bacterial artificial chromosomes at integration sites previously identified in latently infected T cells
AbstractHIV integration predominantly occurs in introns of transcriptionally active genes. To study the impact of the integration site on HIV gene expression, a complete HIV-1 provirus (with GFP as a fusion with Nef) was inserted into bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) at three sites previously identified in latent T cells of patients: topoisomerase II (Top2A), DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1), or basic leucine transcription factor 2 (BACH2). Transfection of BAC-HIV into 293T cells resulted in a fourfold difference in production of infectious HIV-1. Cell lines were established that contained BACâTop2A, BACâDNMT1, or BACâBACH2, but only BACâDNMT1 spontaneously produced virus, albeit at a low level. Stimulation with TNF-α resulted in virus production from four of five BACâTop2A and all BACâDNMT1 cell lines, but not from the BACâBACH2 lines. The results of these studies highlight differences between integration sites identified in latent T cells to support virus production and reactivation from latency
Memory and comprehension for health information among older adults: distinguishing the effects of domain-general and domain-specific knowledge
While there is evidence that knowledge influences understanding of health information, less is known about the processing mechanisms underlying this effect and its impact on memory. We used the moving window paradigm to examine how older adults varying in domain-general crystallised ability (verbal ability) and health knowledge allocate attention to understand health and domain-general texts. Participants (n = 107, age: 60-88 years) read and recalled single sentences about hypertension and about non-health topics. Mixed-effects modelling of word-by-word reading times suggested that domain-general crystallised ability increased conceptual integration regardless of text domain, while health knowledge selectively increased resource allocation to conceptual integration at clause boundaries in health texts. These patterns of attentional allocation were related to subsequent recall performance. Although older adults with lower levels of crystallised ability were less likely to engage in integrative processing, when they did, this strategy had a compensatory effect in improving recall. These findings suggest that semantic integration during reading is an important comprehension process that supports the construction of the memory representation and is engendered by knowledge. Implications of the findings for theories of text processing and memory as well as for designing patient education materials are discussed
Lesions of the ventral hippocampus attenuate the acquisition but not expression of signâtracking behavior in rats
Individual variation in the attribution of motivational salience to rewardârelated cues is believed to underlie addiction vulnerability. Pavlovian conditioned approach measures individual variation in motivational salience by identifying rats that are attracted to and motivated by reward cues (signâtrackers) or motivationally fixed on the reward itself (goalâtrackers). Previously, it has been demonstrated that signâtrackers are more vulnerable to addictionâlike behavior. Moreover, signâtrackers release more dopamine in the nucleus accumbens than goalâtrackers in response to rewardârelated cues, and signâ but not goalâtracking behavior is dopamineâdependent. In the present study, we investigated whether the ventral hippocampus, a potent driver of dopaminergic activity in the nucleus accumbens, modulates the acquisition and expression of Pavlovian conditioned approach behavior. In Experiment 1, lesions of the ventral, but not dorsal or total hippocampus, decreased signâtracking behavior. In Experiment 2, lesions of the ventral hippocampus did not affect the expression of signâ or goalâtracking behaviors nor conditioned reinforcement. In addition, temporary inactivation of the ventral subiculum, the main output pathway of the ventral hippocampus, did not affect the expression of signâ or goalâtracking behaviors. Highâpressure liquid chromatography of nucleus accumbens tissue punches revealed that ventral hippocampal lesions decreased levels of homovanillic acid and the homovanillic acid/dopamine ratio (a marker of dopamine release and metabolism) in only signâtrackers, and decreased accumbal norepinephrine levels in both signâ and goalâtrackers. These results suggest that the ventral hippocampus is important for the acquisition but not expression of signâtracking behavior, possibly as a result of altered dopamine and norepinephrine in the nucleus accumbens. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134415/1/hipo22619.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134415/2/hipo22619_am.pd
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