Testing peatland testate amoeba transfer functions: Appropriate methods for clustered training-sets

Transfer functions are widely used in palaeoecology to infer past environmental conditions from fossil remains of many groups of organisms. In contrast to traditional training-set design with one observation per site, some training-sets, including those for peatland testate amoeba-hydrology transfer functions, have a clustered structure with many observations from each site. Here we show that this clustered design causes standard performance statistics to be overly optimistic. Model performance when applied to independent data sets is considerably weaker than suggested by statistical cross-validation. We discuss the reasons for these problems and describe leave-one-site-out cross-validation and the cluster bootstrap as appropriate methods for clustered training-sets. Using these methods we show that the performance of most testate amoeba-hydrology transfer functions is worse than previously assumed and reconstructions are more uncertain

Between speaking out in public and being person-centred: collaboratively designing an inclusive archive of learning disability history

The Living Archive of Learning Disability History is being developed by an inclusive team of researchers both with and without learning disabilities. We argue the archive is important in making publicly visible the lives of people with learning disabilities. Yet – drawing on thinking that came out of our collaborative workshops – we also identify alternative imperatives, that you might want to have control over how you share your personal memories and stories, with whom, when you share them and for how long. We show how we are responding to these different ideas in the design of the Living Archive in order to create pathways between two traditions that have emerged through self-advocacy: ‘speaking out in public’ and ‘being person-centred’. We outline our research on consent processes to ensure that our archive builds capacity for as many people as possible to consent while also offering a legally compliant ‘Best Interests’ process in line with the requirements of the Mental Capacity Act, England and Wales (2005). We argue that deploying and actively navigating between the different political logics of ‘speaking out in public’ and ‘being person-centred’ offers a way forward for ongoing debates concerning community engagement in archives, museums and heritage

Epistemological journeys in participatory action research: alliances between community psychology and disability studies

This paper seeks to explore emancipatory disability research possibilities through the use of participatory action research and the cross-fertilisation of ideas between British disability studies (DS) and community psychology (CP). First, we consider the psychology in CP and suggest that it is far removed from mainstream psychology's pathological vision of disabled people. Second, we draw on Burrell and Morgan's (1979) model of paradigms to interrogate research practice in DS and CP. Third, we compare and contrast research narratives from DS and CP through reference to some examples of our own research. We argue that CP pays particular attention to the development of community selves and cultural identities within the participatory action research process: which we feel to be a key concern for the development of an emancipatory DS. We conclude that recognising the radical humanist element of participatory action research (PAR) permits us to navigate an enabling journey for disability research