Cnuasach Bhealoideas Eireann : The national folklore collection, University College Dublin

This current essay is divided into three main sections. It begins by placing the Collection in its cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts. It then addresses the Collection itself and the material it has to offer in terms of folkloristics and other aspects of social and cultural research. The final section offers an example from the archive in the form of a single sheet of music transcription and its collecting that underlies the importance and urgency of ongoing ethnographic fieldwork as well as its potential.Not

Drug and alcohol recovery outcomes framework.

Shared measurement involves using common tools to track outcomes across similar organisations and settings. It is both a process to understand a sector’s shared outcomes and a tool that can be used by multiple organisations to track social impact. Drug and Alcohol Task Forces (DATF) fund and run a number of services tackling various issues related to substance misuse. To date, many task forces have used logic models to understand their outcomes and have evaluated their work in different ways. However, as of yet there has not been a consistent approach to measuring outcomes across the many local and regional taskforces. This project aims to develop a shared outcomes framework and a set of common measures for taskforces to begin tracking the impact of their work in a consistent way. It is hoped that this will enable better understanding of what works to promote recovery from drug and alcohol misuse, enable learning across services, taskforces and regions and allow evidence of what interventions are effective at a local context to be fed into national strategy

Advancing performance measurement theory by focusing on subjects : lessons from the measurement of social value

Performance measurement and management (PMM) researchers have recently called for a closer inspection of social controls – the cultural and behavioural aspects of PMM inside organisations – as a complement to longstanding inquiries into technical controls – the rational and structural processes that enable measurement. We address this call by first reviewing the principal findings obtained in the field of social value measurement (SVM), which focuses on the measurement of how and to what extent individuals and groups perceive and realise subjective changes (i.e., in knowledge, access, health, etc.) from interactions with organisations. Subsequently, we distil the main characteristics of SVM research (i.e., the basic conceptualisations, stated purposes and normative principles). We find that SVM tends to highlight the importance of individual and group wellbeing and welfare, aims to understand how organisational actions influence these conditions, and focuses upon individuals’ lived experiences of measuring or being measured. In comparison, PMM research concentrates on technical controls, mainly relies on notions of systems and structured processes, and assumes people’s behaviours are impacted by measures, but does not fully explore their responses. We argue that to properly acknowledge and integrate social aspects of PMM into research and practice, subjects – with their thoughts, emotions and experiences – should be included more explicitly in future studies and theorisations