Generating Data in Qualitative Longitudinal Research: A methodological review

This working paper has explored the process of generating QL research data. A review has been provided of a number of broad approaches to this enterprise: ethnographic, interview-based, participatory and the use of documentary and archival sources. As in all dimensions of QL enquiry, the process of working through the longitudinal frame of a study can be a challenge. Strategies to balance continuity and flexibility in the process of generating data are needed and suggestions are made here. The paper then focuses on interview-based approaches, outlining the basic tenets of biographical interviewing, and introducing cartographic and recursive strategies that are particularly pertinent for QL researchers. Finally a range of participatory field tools have been reviewed and their potential in QL enquiry considered. QL research offers rich potential to combine elements from different traditions and to draw on new tools as a study progresses. At the same time, there is the ever-present danger that a field enquiry will unravel, leading to the creation of an incoherent dataset. Whatever data generation tools and techniques are utilised, a clear rationale is needed for their use, and they need to be piloted and chosen with care. While QL research is an inherently creative process, the discussion here reveals the importance of working with a carefully crafted data generation strategy, one that is tailored to the aims of a study, and based on a careful choice of field tools and techniques

Factors Related to the Resettlement of Migrant Adults in New York State

The purpose of this study was to explore factors related to the resettlement of migrant adults in New York State. Differences among groups of resettled, intrastate, and interstate migrant adults were analyzed in the areas of formal education received, reading achievement, attitudes toward reading, and socioeconomic and cultural factors chosen as important reasons for resettlement. Two questionnaires were developed by the researcher to aid in this study. Possible relationships between attitudes toward reading and reading achievement, between reading achievement and formal education, and between attitudes toward reading and sex were also explored. Significant differences were found among the three groups in years of formal education completed. Significant differences were also found for eighteen of the twenty socioeconomic and cultural reasons for resettlement tested. From this study one can conclude that the majority of migrant adults sampled aspire to careers other than in agricultural labor for themselves and for their children but must overcome low levels of educational attainment and even lower levels of reading achievement in order to realize these goals

Seeing Young Fathers in a Different Way: Editorial

I think it's absolutely outrageous that so many young men in our society feel they can go out, get women pregnant, allow them to have children, make them bring them up by themselves, often on benefits, and then just disappear. It is utterly shocking and I hope ... the ministers will get hold of some of these feckless fathers, drag them off, make them work, put them in chains if necessary.... (David Davies MP, 12 November 2013, House of Commons; Cornack, 2013

Supporting young fathers: the promise, potential and perils of statutory service provision

This article provides a case study of the challenges faced by one local authority in supporting young fathers, in a context of changing models of service provision, resource constraints and professional training needs. Developments in service provision are tracked over a decade, starting with a mentoring service set up under New Labour's 10-year Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, and considering how this has been refashioned under new models of service provision. The article was developed in close consultation with local authority service providers and draws on both professional accounts and the perspectives of young fathers as clients of the service. Overall, the article contributes to debates around the relative strengths of mainstream and specialist support for young fathers, and suggests the value of specialist support within mainstream provision

Events, processes, and the time of a killing

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defense of process ontology, relying instead on extant defenses. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it

PyMT-Maclow: A novel, inducible, murine model for determining the role of CD68 positive cells in breast tumor development

CD68+ tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) are pro-tumorigenic, pro-angiogenic and are associated with decreased survival rates in patients with cancer, including breast cancer. Non-specific models of macrophage ablation reduce the number of TAMs and limit the development of mammary tumors. However, the lack of specificity and side effects associated with these models compromise their reliability. We hypothesized that specific and controlled macrophage depletion would provide precise data on the effects of reducing TAM numbers on tumor development. In this study, the MacLow mouse model of doxycycline-inducible and selective CD68+ macrophage depletion was crossed with the murine mammary tumor virus (MMTV)-Polyoma virus middle T antigen (PyMT) mouse model of spontaneous ductal breast adenocarcinoma to generate the PyMT-MacLow line. In doxycycline-treated PyMT-MacLow mice, macrophage numbers were decreased in areas surrounding tumors by 43%. Reducing the number of macrophages by this level delayed tumor progression, generated less proliferative tumors, decreased the vascularization of carcinomas and down-regulated the expression of many pro-angiogenic genes. These results demonstrate that depleting CD68+ macrophages in an inducible and selective manner delays the development of mammary tumors and that the PyMT-MacLow model is a useful and unique tool for studying the role of TAMs in breast cancer

Toward a More Secure HRIS: The Role of HCI and Unconscious Behavior

By design, human resource information systems (HRIS) hold confidential and sensitive information. Therefore, one needs to ensure the security of these systems from unintentional mistakes that may compromise such information. Current systems design and training procedures of HRIS unintentionally help reinforce unsecure behaviors that result in non-malicious security breaches. Measures to improve security through design and training may only occur by breaking the use/impact cycle that individuals have habitually formed. Using strong contexts and cues allow trainers to interrupt individuals’ habits. Then, they have the opportunity to enforce the repetition of the desired behavior. This paper introduces a model of habit formation from consumer behavior that one may apply to HRIS

Utilising family-based designs for detecting rare variant disease associations.

Rare genetic variants are thought to be important components in the causality of many diseases but discovering these associations is challenging. We demonstrate how best to use family-based designs to improve the power to detect rare variant disease associations. We show that using genetic data from enriched families (those pedigrees with greater than one affected member) increases the power and sensitivity of existing case-control rare variant tests. However, we show that transmission- (or within-family-) based tests do not benefit from this enrichment. This means that, in studies where a limited amount of genotyping is available, choosing a single case from each of many pedigrees has greater power than selecting multiple cases from fewer pedigrees. Finally, we show how a pseudo-case-control design allows a greater range of statistical tests to be applied to family data

Pediatric basal cell carcinoma burden and management preferences in Gorlin syndrome: A survey study

Gorlin syndrome (GS) is a risk factor for early basal cell carcinomas (BCCs), although its prevalence of fewer than 1 in 30,000 individuals limits existing literature. There are sparse pediatric GS studies beyond case reports, creating a knowledge gap regarding childhood cutaneous findings and sequelae, including BCC age at onset, quantity, treatments, and impact. Herein, we describe a global survey to illustrate the clinical presentation, childhood perspectives, and BCC management trends for pediatric GS to improve the understanding and inform patient care

Flow of S-matrix poles for elementary quantum potentials

The poles of the quantum scattering matrix (S-matrix) in the complex momentum plane have been studied extensively. Bound states give rise to S-matrix poles, and other poles correspond to non-normalizable anti-bound, resonance and anti-resonance states. They describe important physics, but their locations can be difficult to find. In pioneering work, Nussenzveig performed the analysis for a square well/wall, and plotted the flow of the poles as the potential depth/height varied. More than fifty years later, however, little has been done in the way of direct generalization of those results. We point out that today we can find such poles easily and efficiently, using numerical techniques and widely available software. We study the poles of the scattering matrix for the simplest piece-wise flat potentials, with one and two adjacent (non-zero) pieces. For the finite well/wall the flow of the poles as a function of the depth/height recovers the results of Nussenzveig. We then analyze the flow for a potential with two independent parts that can be attractive or repulsive, the two-piece potential. These examples provide some insight into the complicated behavior of the resonance, anti-resonance and anti-bound poles.Comment: 23 pages, 15 figure