Active Transport, Public Transportation, and Obesity in Metropolitan Areas of the United States.

There is a well established relationship between exercise and weight in individuals. Recently, relationships between less urban sprawl and more leisure exercise and between certain urban characteristics usually associated with less sprawl and exercise for transportation have been found. This paper completes the less-sprawl-more exercise for transportation-lower weight sequence by finding that counties in metropolitan areas where more people complete their journey to work by walking, biking, or taking public transportation have fewer people who are overweight.

Leadership development programme: a multi-method evaluation

This report investigates findings arising from a variety of forms of feedback provided by the first cohort of participants (2012-2013) in Cumbria Partnership Foundation Trust’s “Leadership Development” Programme (LDP). The report summarises both quantitative and qualitative feedback, and synthesises findings to provide a more three-dimensional overview of participant experience and systemic impact. Feedback reflects, throughout, the diversity of the participating cohort in terms of professional roles and levels of seniority

Learning Leaders: a multi-method evaluation, final report

This report investigates findings arising from a variety of forms of feedback on Cumbria Partnership Foundation Trust’s “Learning Leaders” Programme (henceforth LLP) running from 2012-2013

If a pundit falls in the forest and nobody’s around: ‘having’ versus ‘doing’ expertise in broadcast talk

There are two main problems that traditionally manifest in attempts to academically investigate ‘Expert Knowledge’: firstly, what constitutes ‘expertise’, and secondly, what constitutes ‘knowledge’. Moreover, many accounts of expert knowledge become further ‘bogged down’ in ostensibly philosophical arguments over whether the pertinent expertise derives from the expert, or from the knowledge. One might ask: if a qualified ‘expert’ in a domain raises a point that any ‘layman’ could have raised, does this remain expertise? Equally, if that unqualified layman produces insight that is both original and effective, does this become expertise? These largely intractable issues are grounded in an essentially Cartesian model of human activity; expertise as an ‘internal’ state that is then publicly communicated. This paper, however, stems from an ethnomethodological understanding that no knowledge is analysable knowledge until it is activated in the social domain. In short, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around... Taking as its subject material the case of expert punditry on BBC1’s ‘Match of the Day’ programme, this paper explores a range of socio-linguistic methods involved in the public performance of expertise. Drawing primarily upon Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology, the empirical work describes specific techniques through which certified ‘experts’ microscopically attend to – and reinforce - that very identity when formulating their opinions on materials at hand. In short, rather than asking what expertise is, the focus herein is upon the public procedures through which people endeavour to demonstrate it in situated examples of activity

Sense and sensitivity: on situated questioning about self-harm and suicidal inclination in the primary care consultation

The link between depression and suicide is, in modern medical knowledge, a ‘given’. The canons of contemporary psychiatry, without exception, specify that ‘suicidal ideation’ (like the physical acts of self-harm and actual suicide) is at once a symptom of the illness and, simultaneously, a ‘characteristic’ (if not inevitable) outcome (American Psychiatric Association, 1994; World Health Organization, 1994). National Health Service directives in the UK, meanwhile, specify that, in any primary care consultation where a patient either demonstrably has - or is suspected to have - a depression, it is incumbent upon a General Practitioner to assess any danger they may present to themselves (National Institute for Clinical Excellence, 2009; NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, 2002). Guidelines recommend this be done through ‘direct questioning’ of the patient (National Institute for Clinical Excellence, 2007) regarding their thoughts or activities relating to self-harm or suicide. Given that 'suicidal ideation' is itself not only classified as a ‘possible outcome’ of depression but also a key symptom of the condition, such a question has, in some cases, to be asked pre-diagnosis as part of diagnostic assessment. In this paper, examples of such questioning in three different consultations are explored in detail using Conversation Analysis (Sacks, 1992a; Sacks, 1992b; Silverman, 1997) with a view to describing some of the organised interactional methods employed by GPs, and patients, in negotiating this potentially highly ‘tricky’ activity. These observations are then used to highlight a range of issues pertinent to the formulation of ‘normative’ frames of ‘good practice with respect of handling such sensitive issues (Petit & Sederer, 2006; Tylee, Priest, & Roberts, 1996). References: American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington: American Psychiatric Association. National Institute for Clinical Excellence. (2007). Depression: Management of depression in primary and secondary care. clinical guideline 23 (amended). London: National Institute For Clinical Excellence. National Institute for Clinical Excellence. (2009). Depression: The NICE guideline on the treatment and management of depression in adults (updated edition). clinical guideline 90. Leicester: The British Psychological Society / The Royal College of Psychiatrists. NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination. (2002). Improving the recognition and management of depression in primary care. Effective Health Care, 7(5) Petit, J., & Sederer, L. I. (2006). Detecting and treating depression in adults. City Health Information, 25(1), 1-8. Sacks, H. (1992a). Lectures on conversation, vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, H. (1992b). Lectures on conversation, vol. 2. Oxford: Blackwell. Silverman, D. (1997). Discourses of counselling: HIV counselling as social interaction. London: Sage. Tylee, A., Priest, R., & Roberts, A. (1996). Depression in general practice. London: Martin Dunitz. World Health Organization. (1994). The ICD-10 classification of mental and behavioural disorders: Diagnostic criteria for research. Geneva: WHO

Vocabulary and Main Idea Reading Intervention Using Text Choice to Improve Content Knowledge and Reading Comprehension of Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This simultaneous replication single-case design study investigated a vocabulary and main idea intervention with an aspect of text choice provided to students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Five middle school students with ASD participated in two instructional groups taught by school-based personnel. Results were initially mixed. These results were followed by upward and stable trends, indicating a functional relationship between the independent and dependent variables. Social validity measures indicated that students appreciated the opportunity to make choices on text selection

Where the action is: towards a discursive psychology of “authentic” identity in soccer fandom

Objectives: Fandom underpins a wide range of foundational sporting activities. The corpus of psychological research on the topic remains, however, largely concerned with (a) producing of formal taxonomies of fans, and (b) making the analytic distinction between authentic “fans” and mere “spectators.” This work is premised on the classical - but problematic - social-cognitive assumption that identity itself both precedes and (largely) determines the manner in which it is communicated. As such, the core objective of this paper is to take provisional empirical steps towards a formal psychology of “authentic” sporting fandom that does not replicate this troublesome assumption. Design: A Discursive Psychological framework is used to explore how self-identified soccer fans make “robust” cases for the authenticity of their own fan-identities. Method: N=26 unstructured interviews are analysed to highlight the constructive and attributional techniques drawn upon by speakers when making cases, and the culturally-available knowledges and contextual reasoning procedures that these make apparent. Results: Three models for legitimating fan-identity are described: (a) longitudinal endurance, (b) logical choice-making and (c) emotional imperative. It is noted how key issues that inform social-cognitive analysis are actually assembled as members’ concerns in the service of persuasively accounting for particular claims in situ, and that this can facilitate a stronger understanding of the interrelation between sporting culture and social identity itself. Conclusions: Until a stronger description of public procedures for self-identification is advanced, analytic abstractions made for the sake of “clarity” can guarantee no relevance to the social psychological lives of everyday fans themselves

Informing radiography curriculum development: the views of UK radiology service managers concerning the ‘fitness for purpose’ of recent diagnostic radiography graduates

Recent years have seen significant changes in the way medical imaging services are delivered, rapid changes in technology and big increases in the number and ranges of examinations undertaken. Given these changes the study aimed to critically evaluate the fitness for purpose of newly qualified diagnostic radiography. The study employed a grounded theory approach to analyse the interviews of 20 radiology managers from a range of medical imaging providers across the UK. Four key themes emerged from the analysis. These were: curriculum content and structure review; diversification in the role of the radiographer; professionalism and coping and the reformation of career structures. The results indicate the role of the radiographer is now quite nebulous and challenge radiology managers and educators to design curricula and career structures which are better matched the role of the radiographer in the very rapidly changing technological, organisational and social contexts of modern society

Mountains, cones and dilemmas of context: the case of "ordinary language" in philosophy and social scientific method

The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this paper, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis press OLP to re-consider the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating