Phenomenological Psychology in Practice and Research: A Global Perspective on a Human Science

Phenomenology is a philosophical movement, and more recently, an approach taken by healthcare professionals around the world in their work with patients, and by social scientists in their research about human phenomena (Creswell, 2011; Viney & King, 2003). In this paper, I will explore this approach in the field of psychology specifically. I will focus on how phenomenology has been used to enhance the clinical practice of psychology, and in qualitative research in psychology to better understand and promote well-being. I will suggest that the phenomenological approach in psychology leads to a more open-minded and rigorous practitioner and researcher who is attentive to multiple parameters of human experiences. My paper is structured into four sections. In the first section, I describe the history of this philosophical perspective and how it has been taken up by psychologists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I then describe the use of the phenomenological approach in the practice of clinical psychology, focusing on work in this area by Kunz (1998/2006) and Giorgi (1970/2009/2013). Then, I highlight how this approach has informed qualitative research in psychology, and provide a few examples. Finally, I will highlight the global significance of this perspective, and how Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, influenced researchers, practitioners, and scholars throughout the worl

What's in a grade? The multidimensional nature of what teacher-assigned grades assess in high school

Historically, teacher-assigned grades have been seen as unreliable subjective measures of academic knowledge, since grades and standardized tests have traditionally correlated at about the 0.5 to 0.6 level, and thus explain about 25–35% of each other. However, emerging literature indicates that grades may be a multidimensional assessment of both student academic knowledge and a student's ability to negotiate the social processes of schooling, such as behavior, participation, and effort. This study analyzed the high school transcript component of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002) using multidimensional scaling (MDS) to describe the relationships between core subject grades, non-core subject grades, and standardized test scores in mathematics and reading. The results indicate that when accounting for the academic knowledge component assessed through standardized tests, teacher-assigned grades may be a useful assessment of a student's ability at the non-cognitive aspects of school. Implications for practice, research, and policy are discussed

Why Tenth Graders Fail to Finish High School: A Dropout Typology Latent Class Analysis

A large percentage of the students who drop out of K-12 schools in the United States do so at the end of high school, at some point after grade 10. Yet we know little about the differences between different types of students who drop out of the end of high school. The purpose of this study is to examine a typology of high school dropouts from a large nationally representative dataset (ELS:2002) using latent class analysis (LCA). We found three significantly different types of dropouts; Quiet, Jaded, and Involved. Based on this typology of three subgroups, we discuss implications for future dropout intervention research, policy, and practice

Multilaboratory Comparison of Pneumococcal Multiplex Immunoassays Used in lmmunosurveillance of Streptococcus pneumoniae across Europe

Surveillance studies are required to estimate the impact of pneumococcal vaccination in both children and the elderly across Europe. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends use of enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) as standard methods for immune surveillance of pneumococcal antibodies. However, as levels of antibodies to multiple serotypes are monitored in thousands of samples, a need for a less laborious and more flexible method has evolved. Fluorescent-bead-based multiplex immunoassays (MIAs) are suitable for this purpose. An increasing number of public health and diagnostic laboratories use MIAs, although the method is not standardized and no international quality assessment scheme exists. The EU Pneumo Multiplex Assay Consortium was initiated in 2013 to advance harmonization of MIAs and to create an international quality assessment scheme. In a multilaboratory comparison organized by the consortium, agreement among nine laboratories that used their own optimized MIA was assessed on a panel of 15 reference sera for 13 pneumococcal serotypes with the new WHO standard 007sp. Agreement was assessed in terms of assay accuracy, reproducibility, repeatability, precision, and bias. The results indicate that the evaluated MIAs are robust and reproducible for measurement of vaccine-induced antibody responses. However, some serotype-specific variability in the results was observed in comparisons of polysaccharides from different sources and of different conjugation methods, especially for serotype 4. On the basis of the results, the consortium has contributed to the harmonization of MIA protocols to improve reliability of immune surveillance of Streptococcus pneumoniae

Position paper: The potential role of optical biopsy in the study and diagnosis of environmental enteric dysfunction

Environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) is a disease of the small intestine affecting children and adults in low and middle income countries. Arising as a consequence of repeated infections, gut inflammation results in impaired intestinal absorptive and barrier function, leading to poor nutrient uptake and ultimately to stunting and other developmental limitations. Progress towards new biomarkers and interventions for EED is hampered by the practical and ethical difficulties of cross-validation with the gold standard of biopsy and histology. Optical biopsy techniques — which can provide minimally invasive or noninvasive alternatives to biopsy — could offer other routes to validation and could potentially be used as point-of-care tests among the general population. This Consensus Statement identifies and reviews the most promising candidate optical biopsy technologies for applications in EED, critically assesses them against criteria identified for successful deployment in developing world settings, and proposes further lines of enquiry. Importantly, many of the techniques discussed could also be adapted to monitor the impaired intestinal barrier in other settings such as IBD, autoimmune enteropathies, coeliac disease, graft-versus-host disease, small intestinal transplantation or critical care

Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, Body Mass Index, and Cytokine Polymorphisms: A Pooled Analysis from the InterLymph Consortium

BACKGROUND: Excess adiposity has been associated with lymphomagenesis, possibly mediated by increased cytokine production causing a chronic inflammatory state. The relationship between obesity, cytokine polymorphisms and selected mature B-cell neoplasms is reported. METHOD: Data on 4979 cases and 4752 controls from nine American/European studies from the InterLymph consortium (1988–2008) were pooled. For diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), follicular lymphoma (FL) and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma (CLL/SLL), joint associations of body mass index (from self-reported height and weight) and 12 polymorphisms in cytokines IL1A (rs1800587), IL1B (rs16944, rs1143627), IL1RN (rs454078), IL2 (rs2069762), IL6 (rs1800795, rs1800797), IL10 (rs1800890, rs1800896), TNF (rs1800629), LTA (rs909253), and CARD15 (rs2066847) were investigated using unconditional logistic regression. BMI-polymorphism interaction effects were estimated using the relative excess risk due to interaction (RERI). RESULTS: Obesity (BMI≥30kg m(−2)) was associated with DLBCL risk (OR=1.33, 95%CI 1.02–1.73), as was TNF-308GA+AA (OR=1.24, 95%CI 1.07–1.44). Together, being obese and TNF-308GA+AA increased DLBCL risk almost two-fold relative to those of normal weight and TNF-308GG (OR=1.93 95%CI 1.27–2.94), with a RERI of 0.41 (95%CI −0.05,0.84, P(interaction)=0.13). For FL and CLL/SLL, no associations with obesity or TNF-308GA+AA, either singly or jointly, were observed. No evidence of interactions between obesity and the other polymorphisms were detected. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that cytokine polymorphisms do not generally interact with BMI to increase lymphoma risk but obesity and TNF-308GA+AA may interact to increase DLBCL risk. IMPACT: Studies using better measures of adiposity are needed to further investigate the interactions between obesity and TNF-308G>A in the pathogenesis of lymphoma