Predictors of utilisation of dental care services in a nationally representative sample of adults.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to identify the predictors of utilisation of dental care services in Ireland. PARTICIPANTS: The 2007 Irish Survey of Lifestyle, Attitudes and Nutrition is a cross-sectional study, conducted in 2006/2007 (n = 10,364), by interviews at home to a representative sample of adults aged 18 years or over. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Multivariate logistic regression was used to investigate the influence of socioeconomic, predisposing and enabling factors on the odds of males and females having a dental visit in the past year. RESULTS: The significant predictors of visiting the dentist in the past year were for males: having 3rd level education, employment status, earning 50,000 euros or more, location of residence, use of a car, brushing frequently, and dentition status. For females, the predictors were being between 25-34 or 55-64 years-old, education level, earning 50,000 euros or more, location of residence, use of a car, brushing frequently and dentition status. CONCLUSIONS: Predictors of the use of dental services vary by gender. Predictors common to both genders were education level, higher income, location of residence, use of a car, brushing frequently and dentition status. Many of the predictors of dental visiting in the past year are also related to social inequalities in health. These predictors may be useful markers of impact for policies designed to address inequalities in access to oral health services

Studies on the evaluation of quality in the Granny Smith apple

Quality is a complex property and cannot be measured directly. As present grading systems for apples are not entirely satisfactory, there is a need to establish simple quantitative methods for estimating apple condition that are relevant to consumer perception of quality

Knowledge production and disciplinary practices in a British University: A qualitative cross-disciplinary case study

Knowledge is a controversial matter in UK Higher Education (HE). The increasing regulation of universities’ research focus and outputs, and the balance of applied and pure research are highly contested. Funders and government call increasingly for research that is co-produced with non-academic partners, and that demonstrates impact beyond HE. Many academics also support these calls. Yet at grass-roots level, there are epistemological tensions such as researchers’ rights to academic freedom. Moreover, there is a lack of literature exploring current research practices from a cross-disciplinary perspective. This cross-sectional, qualitative case study aimed to explore researchers’ experiences to understand if, why and how, these pressures have changed disciplinary working practices and knowledge types, and what researchers think of these changes. The study took place in one research-intensive UK University using group interviews in four disciplinary areas. Data was analysed at a semantic level, using thematic analysis. The theoretical lens of “social realism” provided a philosophical basis to the research and aided understanding of the data. Researchers reported changes to working practices because of emphasis on research relevance, technological advances and pressures to work across disciplines. There was a broadening of knowledge types and a simultaneous narrowing of research topics in some disciplinary areas. Depending on the types of knowledge they worked with, researchers had different perspectives on peer-review, the right to absolute academic freedom and newer forms of research evaluation. There were differences in the data relating to discipline and academic rank. The conclusions advocate a social realist position, with four recommendations: maintenance of impact in the REF and the introduction and monitoring of the effect of “responsible metrics” to protect disciplinary research; the tailoring of professional learning opportunities regarding research practice to disciplinary contexts; future research in relation to Basil Bernstein’s work on the trajectory of singular and regional knowledge forms

Residential care, stigma and relational alienation: exploring the lived experience of children’s homes with young people and carers - an ethnographic study

This thesis questions both social meaning and lived experience of residential care for children, by drawing on data gathered during an ethnographic study of two local authority children’s homes. Theories of ‘social death’ are utilised to understand the social relationships of children and young people. Children’s homes continue to be a site of research and intervention in the UK and elsewhere. The established view of residential care in the UK is that it is the ‘last resort’ option for children in the care system, due to the preference for family-based accommodation. Recently, while there has been greater acknowledgement that residential care can be a positive choice for children, the sector continues to be a site of controversy. This is due to factors such as abuse scandals, poor outcome measures, placement breakdowns and cost effectiveness. A number of studies reveal that young people cite placement instability as a key factor which negatively affects their experience. Those in residential care are likely to experience the greatest upheaval in the care system. Drawing on the work of Ennew (2002), this thesis proposes that such factors combine to affect the personhood of children in residential settings due to the children’s home contrasting to normative ideals of what children ought to experience in the context of childhood. Data reveals that the absence of enduring relationships within children’s home is deeply problematic in terms of the social, psychological and symbolic status of children and young people. Findings also promote a critical stance to the individualising of children in care and the ability of the rights framework to compensate for wider losses. Building on Orlando Patterson’s (1982) work on social death the concept of ‘relational alienation’ is developed as an original theoretical contribution to knowledge, to comprehend the loss of relational life and personhood which children and young people experience in residential care. The thesis concludes with recommendations aimed at reducing the risk of social death for children in care and residential care

Nurturing Change: Processes and outcomes of workshops using collage and gesture to foster aesthetic qualities and capabilities for distributed leadership

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)This article reports findings from a study using arts-based and embodied (ABE) approaches to enhancing capacity for distributed leadership and explores the professional learning which took place as a result. The data reported in the article are from the UK research which formed part of the ENABLES (European Arts-Based Development of Distributed Leadership and Innovation in Schools) project led by the University of Hertfordshire, UK, co-funded by an Erasmus+ grant over a two-year period between 2019 and 2021. The article indicates why we see the professional learning as transformative and proposes a concept of aesthetic grounding to express the nature of change arising from the ABE approaches used. Aesthetic grounding has a generative and organic quality that introduces new elements and potential into participants’ future reflexive deliberations concerning their professional practice. Through enrihment of aesthetic grounding, there is potential for, but not certainty of, transformation of practice.Peer reviewe

Literary Language as a Tool for Design: An Architectural Study of the Spaces of Mervyn Peake's The Gormenghast Trilogy and 'Boy in Darkness'

The thesis discusses the relationship between the disciplines of literature and architecture. It opens up the potential of literary language to act as a design tool. In order to examine this hypothesis the literary spaces of Mervyn Peake's The Gormenghast Trilogy (1946-59) and 'Boy in Darkness' (1956) are examined as latent architectural spaces. The ensuing discussion poses questions regarding what an architectural language, practice or theory (in respect to the thesis) might be. The thesis questions traditional means of literary analysis, the importance of the author within the text and the related conventions. Spaces extracted from Peake's text form the basis for the analysis. This research uses architectural practice, in the form of maps, sectional drawing and model making, to analyse and render the spaces of the text and their architectural potential. The spatial renditions enable their literary counterparts to be analysed as architectural proposals. An understanding of scale and inhabitation provide the basis from which these spaces can be examined. The positions of author, character, reader and architectural-draughtsman as inhabitants of the text are used to examine the relationship between the self and the other within the text and the architecturally rendered forms. The concept of poetic inhabitation, derived from Bachelard, is extended to draw the apparently disparate aspects of the thesis together in order to argue for literary language to form a tool for architectural design. The thesis provides a position from which the questions are brought up and new avenues explored