Ambiguities of ‘doing what works’:how professionals make sense of applying solution-focused support for people with intellectual disabilities

Objectives: Solution-focused support (SFS) is an upcoming approach to support people with intellectual disabilities (ID). However, while research shows that clients appreciate this approach, insight into professionals’ experiences and their application of SFS is lacking. This article describes a qualitative study aimed at understanding how professionals make sense of learning and applying SFS, specifically, Cauffman’s Solution Cube. Methods: Logbook files in which professionals reported their experiences with SFS for a full year were qualitatively analyzed in two steps: (1) identification of how professionals assigned successful and unsuccessful applications of SFS, and reflected on what worked and dilemmas arising during this application process, (2) identification of patterns over time in how professionals learned how to deal with the encountered dilemmas. Results: The main dilemma experienced by professionals concerns ‘doing what works’ in conjunction with other dimensions of the Solution Cube. Three overall patterns were identified to address how professionals made sense of learning how to apply SFS over time and deal with ambiguities of ‘doing what works’ in practice: (1) a focus on caring, (2) a focus on empowering, and (3) a focus on balancing between the two. Conclusions: Understanding how professionals deal with SFS over time enables researchers to identify different ways professionals learn SFS, along with the ambiguities they experience about the approach and unintended applications. Implications for implementing SFS and learning facilitators that might help promote a balance between caring and empowerment, specifically for people with ID, are provided

De casus van het Griekse Referendum in 2015:Persoonlijke toekomstverbeelding als prospectief reflectie-instrument

In this article, we explore a new application of personal imaginations of the future as prospective reflective instrument in a political context. The case is the Greek Referendum of 2015. In the days preceding the Referendum, we collected via an online Survey 124 letters from the future from 99 potential Greek voters about a desired future after a Yes or No Referendum result. While the letters are quite divers in content, form and valence, the letters have in common that potential voters perceive the Referendum situation as ambiguous and uncertain. We analyse one letter in-depth to demonstrate how future identity construction operates to determine values relevant to guiding the present. In dit artikel wordt een nieuwe toepassing van persoonlijke toekomstverbeeldingen besproken, namelijk als prospectief reflectie-instrument in een politieke context. De casus hiervoor is het Griekse Referendum van 2015. In de dagen voorafgaand aan dit Referendum werden via een online Survey 124 brieven vanuit de toekomst van 99 Griekse potentiele kiezers verzameld over een gewenste toekomst na een ja of een nee uitslag van het Referendum. De brieven laten een zeer divers beeld zien, maar hebben als overeenkomst dat het Referendum door potentiele kiezers als een ambigue en onzekere situatie wordt beschouwd. Aan de hand van één brief analyseren we diepgaand hoe de toekomstige identiteitsconstructie van een potentiele kiezer functioneert als waardebepaling voor het hede

Emotional expression in oral history narratives: comparing results of automated verbal and nonverbal analyses

Audiovisual collections of narratives about war-traumas are rich in descriptions of personal and emotional experiences which can be expressed through verbal and nonverbal means. We complement a commonly used verbal analysis with a nonverbal one to study emotional developments in narratives. Using automatic text, vocal, and facial expression analysis we found that verbal emotional expressions do not correspond much to nonverbal ones. This observation may have important implications for the way narratives traditionally are being studied. We aim to understand how different modes of narrative expression relate to each other, and to enrich digital audiovisual interview collections with emotion-oriented tags

Navigating Stories in Times of Transition

Introduction: In this paper, we present the project Navigating Stories in Times of Transition, a collaboration between the University of Twente and the Netherlands eScience Center. The project aims to make state-of-the-art tools for natural language processing available to researchers in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). The tools we develop advance multidisciplinary approaches to analyzing stories across different media and time. We are particularly interested in further developing digital story grammar, a computational method for narrative analysis (Andrade & Andersen, 2020). We want to show how an analysis of personal narratives collected in the times of COVID-19 pandemic with our computerized narrative tools will help researchers to chart how people make sense of the pandemic and respond to its socio-political framings in uncertain times (Murray & Sools, 2014). We will embed our tools in relevant infrastructures to make them sustainable for future use (such as CLARIAH or the SSH Open Marketplace). As a platform for integrating the tools, we use Orange, a modular data mining toolkit (Demšar et al., 2013).Current practices: Narrative researchers already use several software programs, such as Atlas.ti and NVivo for qualitative data analysis, LIWC for automatic text analysis, and Excel, R, SPSS, and Stata for statistical analysis. In the past decade, automated natural language analysis tools have become available that could be useful for narrative analysis. Whereas several methods for natural language analysis (e.g., named entity recognition and sentiment analysis) have already been integrated into various tools used for narrative research studying textual data in English, the situation is direr for other languages. In addition, the application of more advanced approaches such as semantic role labelling and digital story grammar requires programming ability, which prevents broad application.Goals: We aim at making digital story grammar available for other languages than English. In our initial work, we have developed crude versions of digital story grammar based on semantic role labelling for Dutch, Danish and German. Our next work has two objectives. First, inspired by narrative methodology, we want to extend our tools to advance the analysis from the level of sentences to the story level. Second, to register changes in narratives in response to societal events, we intend to enable comparative analyses across time and space with computational methods. Initially, we will focus on analyzing the dynamic relationship between narratives and societal conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.Concluding remarks: Our project aims at making state-of-the-art tools for natural language processing and data visualization available to SSH researchers. In our initial work, we have developed a new version of digital story grammar for the languages of Dutch, Danish and German. Our project will extend the digital toolbox for narrative analysis and thus support researchers in studying larger volumes of digital texts. All software produced by the project will be open source and we strive to balance usability and complexity when developing our tools for narrative research

Storylines for practice: a visual storytelling approach to strengthen the science‑practice interface

A growing number of scientifc publications is available to promote sustainable river management. However, these publications target researchers rather than water management professionals who are responsible for the implementation of management practices. To bridge this science-to-practice gap, we conceptualize and propose a series of steps to prepare efective storylines targeted at a practitioner audience. We developed this approach within a research program that supports integrated and collaborative river management. We prepared three storylines, each based on one scientifc publication. The storylines combined text and interactive visuals using the ESRI StoryMaps tool to make them available online. Via focus groups with 44 participants from research and practice, we evaluated the perceived usefulness of and engagement with the content and design. We collected feedback from participants using a survey as well as via audio and screen recordings. Our fndings show that we should narrow down the audience of the storylines by tailoring them to the needs of project managers rather than specialized advisors. Therefore, the content should ofer more than a visual summary of the research by showing examples of the management application. A more engaging sequence with a clear protagonist is further required to better relate to the problem and the potential application. Although visuals and interactive elements were considered attractive, a multi-disciplinary editorial team is necessary to better complement the visuals’ design to the text. The level of detail of participants’ feedback shows that involving project managers to co-create storylines can be an important step for improvement.Peer reviewe