Understanding organisational tensions in voluntary action: National-Local relations in the Simon Community and the Cyrenians

This paper is based on doctoral research. It begins from the position that the general contextual changes relating to the growing space taken up by the state and the growing dominance of business modes of organisation (critical developments in the twentieth century) have had a crucial influence on the development of voluntary action. From this, the paper considers the history of the recurrent and changing organisational outcomes of this development. A central theme within this has been the evolving relationship of national body to local group. This theme provides a mechanism or ‘lens’ with which to consider the question – how have voluntary bodies organised themselves to achieve their objectives. Many organisational issues relating to membership, decision-making, communications, funding, will cluster around this theme. More specifically there are general questions relating to how an organisation originated (did the national body come first or second?); what were/are its aims and objectives (did these vary between national and local bodies and in what way?); what is the membership and how is it organised (does the national body own the local group or is it the other way round?); what is the power structure (unitary or decentralised? Federative or hierarchical?). How these features are organised on a national-local basis is crucial to understanding the internal organisational dynamic, especially the degree of interdependence and the balance of power between national body and local group. This in turn points to the degree of autonomy between the respective parts and is central to the nature of the relationship. However this idea of autonomy has an external dimension as well and one which impinges on the nature of the national/local relationships, namely the context within which a voluntary organisation operates and more specifically how autonomous a voluntary organisation is vis a vis the state and business. The general issues and questions outlined above provide a framework for unpicking the organisational history of voluntary action and this paper will use case-study material by way of illustration

Women’s Voluntary Action: Social Investigations into Poverty and health 1900-1940

This paper focuses on three influential women’s voluntary organisations which worked to address family poverty, during the period around the first world war and inter war period. The work and achievements are contextualised within the shifting debates about the legitimate roles of the state, market and voluntary sectors in meeting social needs. The organisations were: The Fabian Women’s Group; the Women’s Co-operative Guild; and the Women’s Health Enquiry Committee. All three organisations were led by women and they investigated poverty and women's health following the tradition of social investigation set by social reformers such as Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. The work they did and the reports they produced are sources which convey women’s own views about their conditions. This paper focuses on the reports: Round about a pound a week (1913) by Maud Pember-Reeves from the FWG; Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915) and Life as we have known it (1931) by Margaret Llewelly-Davis of the CWG; and Working Class Wives: their health and conditions (1939) by Margery Spring-Rice of the WHEC

Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution? From quiescence to resistance in the contemporary university

In discussing the events leading up to the resignation of the former Open University Vice Chancellor in April 2018, we focus on the enactment of a form of resistance against proposals for the university through a WhatsApp group, enabling rapid information exchange, discussion of tactics and concrete planning for action. We suggest our group – ‘the Hive’ - was unusual because, first, it countered the politically quiescent trend in academia to comply (at least outwardly) with neoliberalisation, and/or only to write about it, as opposed to mounting challenges. Second, the Hive was virtual; comprising various staff categories, including people based off-campus, it operated almost entirely online and many members had never met face-to-face. This for us evokes notions of the multitude. Third, the group exemplifies alternative forms of solidarity and resistance in other ways, being non-hierarchical, highly pluralist and non-exclusionary. Finally, our Hive provided a supportive, caring space for resisters, which we suggest emerged partly through members’ love for the distinctive social mission of The Open University - although our story also provides hope for harnessing similar emotions within other academic institutions

Identifying Community-Engaged Translational Research Collaboration Experience and Health Interests of Community-Based Organizations Outside of Metropolitan Atlanta

Background: While rural health research has increased over the last two decades, there is limited understanding of the self-reported health priorities and research interests of rural and suburban community-based representatives and residents. These insights can be used to inform more successful intervention strategies that are responsive to the lived experiences of local residents and leaders who are the gatekeepers to buy-in and sustainability of community engaged research. The Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance, a collaboration between four academic institutions includes a Community Engagement Program (CE) designed to facilitate community-academic research partnerships. This study aimed to assess the health priorities, community-academic research experience, and interests of community respondents outside of Metropolitan Atlanta through the Community Engagement Facilitation Survey (CEFS). Methods: CE Program and Community Steering Board created the CEFS to assess the health topic priorities, research experience, and interests of community-based representatives and community members across the state of Georgia. The 11-item survey was administered (paper and electronic surveys) statewide at community events and professional organization meetings. Descriptive statistics were analyzed, and geospatial mapping was conducted. Data were analyzed in SPSS and Microsoft Excel software systems to clean data and to calculate data counts and percentages. Three maps were created in Tableau Version 19.2 depicting all counties represented by the survey sample superimposed with the counties from which at least one respondent indicated each of the top three health priorities for this sample. Results: Four-hundred six (406) surveys were analyzed, representing 83.6% of rural and suburban Georgia counties. The most frequently identified health priorities and research interests were diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and mental health

Using a business model approach and marketing techniques for recruitment to clinical trials

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Just do it? Investigating the gap between prediction and action in toddlers' causal inferences

Adults’ causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can represent the possibility that acting to bring about the first event might generate the second. Here we show that although toddlers (mean age: 24 months) readily learn predictive relationships between physically connected events, they do not spontaneously initiate one event to try to generate the second (although older children, mean age: 47 months, do; Experiments 1 and 2). Toddlers succeed only when the events are initiated by a dispositional agent (Experiment 3), when the events involve direct contact between objects (Experiment 4), or when the events are described using causal language (Experiment 5). This suggests that causal language may help children extend their initial causal representations beyond agent-initiated and direct contact events.James S. McDonnell Foundation (Causal Learning Collaborative)American Psychological FoundationTempleton Foundatio

Discriminating relational and perceptual judgments: Evidence from human toddlers

The ability to represent same-different relations is an important condition for abstract thought. However, there is mixed evidence for when this ability develops, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. Apparent success in relational reasoning may be evidence for genuine conceptual understanding or may be the result of low-level, perceptual strategies. We introduce a method to discriminate these possibilities by pitting two conditions that are perceptually matched but conceptually different: in a "fused" condition, same and different objects are joined, creating single objects that have the same perceptual features as the two object pairs in the "relational" condition. However, the "fused" objects do not provide evidence for the relation 'same.' Using this method with human toddlers in a causal relational reasoning task provides evidence for genuine conceptual understanding. This novel technique offers a simple manipulation that may be applied to a variety of existing match-to-sample procedures used to assess same-different reasoning to include in future research with non-human animals across species, as well as human infants

The generalised anxiety stigma scale (GASS): psychometric properties in a community sample

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Although there is substantial concern about negative attitudes to mental illness, little is known about the stigma associated with Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) or its measurement. The aim of this study was to develop a multi-item measure of Generalised Anxiety Disorder stigma (the GASS).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Stigma items were developed from a thematic analysis of web-based text about the stigma associated with GAD. Six hundred and seventeen members of the public completed a survey comprising the resulting 20 stigma items and measures designed to evaluate construct validity. Follow-up data were collected for a subset of the participants (n = 212).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The factor structure comprised two components: Personal Stigma (views about Generalised Anxiety Disorder); and Perceived Stigma (views about the beliefs of most others in the community). There was evidence of good construct validity and reliability for each of the Generalised Anxiety Stigma Scale (GASS) subscales.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The GASS is a promising brief measure of the stigma associated with Generalised Anxiety Disorder.</p