Exploring illness and social care management: comparing consumer perspectives of suffering and the challenges faced by service providers

This thesis as a case study explored the narratives of a convenience sample of four women with the disease known as lupus. The author used an ethnographic approach to investigate how these women coped and how service providers, including carers, met their needs. The author used participant observation in his role as Occupational Therapist (and son) to gain access to this sample. He asked them to keep written diaries about their day-to-day experiences of living with the illness. These diaries were later given to the author to read, study and analyse. Additionally, the author’s personal ethnography as a son was submitted as data for this study. This ethnographic writing centred on the life of one sole informant, his mother, who later died with the disease in hospital. Qualitative data analysis (QDA) techniques with grounded theory origins (Glaser and Strauss 1965,1967 and Charmaz 2007) was used to analyse the data. The techniques comprised of line-by-line analysis and coding, constant comparison of cases, thematic analysis, theoretical sampling and the development of framework tables. The study revealed a range of findings, which were later conceptualised into an ethnographic ontology of lupus. First, people encounter a daily struggle to cope with illness symptoms. Second, there was evidence of poor communication between the hospital ward staff (and carers) and failure for social workers to be the main advisor/counsellor of end of life care needs including missing referrals to hospice services. Health and social care professionals sometimes struggle to provide a basic level of service leading to a “know do” gap. This leads to an inconsistent level of end of life care for the individual and limited support for the identified carers. Narratives in diary form have a role to play in helping clinical teams develop meaningful insights into their life of their patients. Clinical teams in turn need to be forthright enough to develop “death covenants” for all patients (and their carers) with palliative care needs. Developing these tools and including them as intervention turn will lead to more cohesive practices within health and social care (Dean 1996, Dean and Melrose 1996, Mol 2008)

Robust Statistics

In lieu of an abstract, here is the entry\u27s first paragraph: Robust statistics are procedures that maintain nominal Type I error rates and statistical power in the presence of violations of the assumptions that underpin parametric inferential statistics. Since George Box coined the term in 1953, research on robust statistics has centered on the assumption of normality, although the violation of other parametric assumptions (e.g., homogeneity of variance) has their own implications for the accuracy of parametric procedures. This entry looks at the importance of robust statistics in educational and social science research and explains the robustness argument. It then describes robust descriptive statistics, their inferential extensions, and two common resampling procedures that are robust alternatives to classic parametric methods

Winsorizing

In lieu of an abstract, here is the entry\u27s first paragraph: Winsorizing is a procedure that moderates the influence of outliers on the mean and variance and thereby creates more robust estimators of location and variability. The procedure is named for biostatistician Charles P. Winsor. Parametric inferential procedures that rely on the mean and variance (e.g., t test) become more robust when they incorporate Winsorized estimators. Winsorizing is an important tool for educational and social science researchers for two reasons. First, significance tests based on the mean and variance are very common procedures for significance testing in the social sciences. Second, surveys of the educational and psychological literature show that nonnormally distributed data are the rule rather than the exception, and even modest departures from normality disproportionately affect the mean and variance compared with other more robust estimators of location (e.g., median) and variability (e.g., median absolute deviation

Representing Patterns of autonomous agent dynamics in multi-robot systems

It is proposed that vocabularies for representing complex systems with interacting agents have a natural lattice hierarchical structure. We investigate this for the example of simulated robot soccer, using data taken from the RoboCup simulation competition. Lattice hierarchies provide symbolic representations for reasoning about systems at appropriate levels. We note the difference between relational constructs being human supplied versus systems that abstract their own constructs autonomously. The lattice hierarchical representation underlies both