Learning to manage and share data: jump-starting the research methods curriculum

Researchers’ responsibilities towards their research data are changing across all domains of social scientific endeavour. Government, funders and publishers expect greater transparency of, open access to, and re-use of research data, and fears over data loss call for more robust information security practices. Researchers must develop, enhance and professionalise their research data management skills to meet these challenges and to deal with a rapidly changing data sharing environment. This paper sets out how we have contributed to jump-starting the research methods training curriculum in this field by translating high-level needs into practical guidance and training activities. Our pedagogical approach involves applicable, easy-to-digest, modules based on best practice guidance for managing and sharing research data. In line with recent findings on successful practices in methods teaching, we work on the principle of embedding grounded learning activities within existing narratives of research design and implementation.     

Significant Conversations or Reduced Relational Capacity? Exploring Couple and Family Therapists' Expectations for Including a Client Feedback Procedure

Little information exists on the specific reflective processes that precede therapists' choice of including or not including a structured feedback procedure in their established practice. In the present study, we aim to describe and explore experienced couple and family therapists' expectations for how the comprehensive therapy feedback procedure Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change might influence their practices. Through a thematic analysis of six focus group interviews, two main themes were elicited. The first main theme involved values embedded in current practice, with the following subthemes: (1) balance between the therapist's expert knowledge and the client's experience‐based knowledge; and (2) making time to build alliances. The second main theme concerned the presumed influence on current practice, with the following subthemes: (1) ‘Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change will disturb the therapist's capacity to stay present’; (2) ‘Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change will shape conversations’; and (3) ‘Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change will contribute to increased qualitative depth’. We discuss these results in relation to the notion of Systemic Therapy Invention of Change as a ‘third party in the room’. We also discuss the results in relation to implications for collaborative practices, and for client and therapist autonomy.     

Science, Power, Bodies: The Mobilization of Nature as State Formation

Abstract This paper brings together recently developed perspectives in science studies and the historical sociology of state formation. It focuses on how scientific and government practices together construct the relationalities, identities, natures, and material environments of the bodies that constitute the modern state. The paper argues that the modern state is an effect of these practices, a techno-scientific political formation in which political government and scientific practice are woven together in a heterogeneous yet definitive network.     

Learning about ourselves through considering others: an examination of German students' cross-national learning

The paper examines the research and findings in relation to cross-national learning, which provide the background to an evaluation of a collaborative module run by German and English academics. A discussion of language and the need to engage the German audience in their own language is outlined, highlighting some of the difficulties inherent in translation and ensuring concepts are accurately conveyed, before examining the earlier literature in relation to cross-national learning. Drawing from this we outline how the module was developed and designed, with the core material being case studies which were used as vehicles to explore differences and similarities in social work systems—not merely in terms of practice, but also in relation to legislation and organisation. Of particular interest were reflections and comments from German social work students about the potential benefits of cross-national learning for their own practice in Germany. We conclude that the use of case studies enables greater student engagement and that the findings of earlier studies in relation to their use is confirmed, along with clear evidence that such approaches enable deeper reflections about students' own social work practice and systems.     

Open door environments as interactional resources to initiate unscheduled encounters in office organizations

ABSTRACT

In this article, we show how a common type of material environment in office organizations, namely offices with doors left open, enables and sustains the initiation of unscheduled, informal encounters. Using video recordings of naturally occurring interactions, we identify and describe a recurrent practice whereby visitors, mainly through their embodied conduct as they approach the doorway, are recognized by their recipients as initiating an encounter. We unpack the systematic practices and resources involved and analyze a series of variations through which co-workers deal with three interactional problems: obtaining the office occupant’s attention, negotiating availability, and negotiating entitlement. The article (1) demarcates a set of practices typical of unscheduled encounters in office organizations; (2) sheds new lights on how shared and fractured visual spaces can be used as resources to produce complex organizational meanings; and (3) proposes an approach of organizational activity and knowledge as inherently interactional, embodied and material.     

Opening our eyes,changing our practices: learning through the transnational lifeworlds of teachers

This article examines the inclusion of a culturally relevant curricular practice of social identity papers within teacher education in the USA that incorporates the transnational lifeworlds of teachers. Using tenets of feminist interdisciplinary frameworks, we highlight how this curricular practice allows teachers and teacher candidates in urban and rural contexts to examine transnational lifeworlds and their influence on culturally relevant practices in relation to notions of oppression and privilege. We focus on linguistic border crossings and both/and perspectives of teacher’s social identities. More research is needed to better understand the construction of teacher’s social identities within and across transnational lifeworlds and the ways it impacts their practices and student’s academic and social achievement.     

Embodiment,care and practice in a community kitchen

This article explores activist practices in a community kitchen based in the south of the United Kingdom with a dual focus on social and environmental justice. It draws on these practices to develop further feminist, and specifically ecofeminist, concepts of care ethics by arguing that embodiment is an essential element in lived relationships of care. Moreover, we show that these embodied components enable learning that can disrupt settled understandings of social and environmental injustices, including negotiating tensions relating to class and race. We demonstrate how this disruption combines with imaginative processes to stimulate critical political analysis of the relationship between local contexts of need and broader socio‐political structures and power relations. Crucially, we work towards illuminating how care ethics and social practice combine to stimulate and inform political action.     

Public Awareness and Practice of Responsible Gambling in Macao

Responsible gambling (RG) is a relatively new concept to the Macao gambling industry. Although recent studies reported a heightened public awareness of RG, the prevalence of disordered gambling is still high. This discrepancy may suggest an existing gap between RG awareness and gambling practices, pinpointing aspects that need to be improved by different RG stakeholders. The gap may be attributable to people’s limited knowledge toward practices favoring RG. To explore means for enhancing the RG campaign, we studied Macao residents’ interpretation and adoption of RG practices. In Study 1, a random community sample was collected to assess the extent to which common RG practices were adopted. Results suggested that there was a fair proportion of gamblers not adhering to them and gambling disorder tendency was related to the adoption of RG practices. It implied a successful promotion of RG practices may reduce gambling problems. In Study 2, focus group discussions were conducted to explore how RG was conceptualized. Twenty-five participants (including 11 casino employees) took part in four focus group interviews. All participants were aware of RG but their knowledge of RG practices was limited. Very few of them were able to identify major practices such as putting constraints on gambling amount and time and the application for self-exclusion. We argue that future RG promotion needs to be more specific and behavior-oriented and it should also address various procedural concerns on how RG practices can be implemented.     

Leaving Care with “Cultural Baggage”: The Development of an Identity within a Transnational Space

Abstract

The transition from care is a critical phase for care leavers in general, and even more complex for those who have arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied minors and belong to an ethnic minority group. The aim of this article is to examine unaccompanied minors' experiences of leaving care, and to explore the experience in relation to perceptions about ethnicity and culture within a transnational space. Interviews were completed with 11 care leavers who had been received in Sweden as unaccompanied minors. The results show that these young people have to deal with multiple adjustments. Conquering obstacles as care leavers involves not only resolving general issues such as reintegration into society, but also adjustment to perceived and created views of how to become Swedish. From the young people's point of view, this seems to be necessary to make a successful transition from care into adulthood.     

Norwegian Working Fathers in Global Working Life

This article examines the impact that global working life has on working fathers’ practices and family life. The internationalization of working life implies that different traditions and practices encounter and challenge each other. The focus is on mothers’ and children's experiences with work–family life and their perceptions of fathers working in global companies. Using a case study approach, we explore how working conditions in global knowledge work organizations affect fathers’ work practices and family life. The findings indicate that working conditions in global working life are gendered and not conducive to the development of the Norwegian fatherhood ideal of the working father. This is due to global and flexible working conditions, which imply long working hours, extensive travel and jetlag‐related problems. Global working conditions produce a traditional masculinity practice, what Connell terms ‘transnational masculinity’, which infringes upon fathers’ practice of being present.     

A Model for Managed Migration? Re‐Examining Best Practices in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program

This paper situates Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) within the policy and scholarly debates on “best practices” for the management of temporary migration, and examines what makes this programme successful from the perspective of states and employers. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative study of temporary migration in Canada, this article critically examines this seminal temporary migration programme as a “best practice model” from internationally recognized rights‐based approaches to labour migration, and provides some additional best practices for the management of temporary labour migration programmes. This paper examines how the reality of the Canadian SAWP measures up, when the model is evaluated according to internationally recognized best practices and migrant rights regimes. Despite all of the attention to building “best practices” for the management of temporary or managed migration, it appears that Canada has taken steps further away from these and other international frameworks. The analysis reveals that while the Canadian programme involves a number of successful practices, such as the cooperation between origin and destination countries, transparency in the admissions criteria for selection, and access to health care for temporary migrants; the programme does not adhere to the majority of best practices emerging in international forums, such as the recognition of migrants’ qualifications, providing opportunities for skills transfer, avoiding imposing forced savings schemes, and providing paths to permanent residency. This paper argues that as Canada takes significant steps toward the expansion of temporary migration, Canada’s model programme still falls considerably short of being an inspirational model, and instead provides us with little more than an idealized myth.     

Emotional Labor and Health Care

We examine the literature on emotional labor and health care to demonstrate the potential for emotional labor research to inform how social and medical scientists think about health care and how examining healthcare contexts has contributed to the scientific understanding of emotional labor processes. In doing so, we first review the key terms and definitions that are used within the emotion management perspective and evaluate the ways in which power differences have remained largely implicit features of research on emotional labor in healthcare settings. Finally, we explore how the increasing economic rationalization of health care may be influencing the emotional experiences of today's healthcare professionals and the implications of this trend for future research on emotional labor and the health and well-being of care providers and their patients.     

SHOPFLOOR CULTURES: The Idioculture of Production in Operational Meteorology

Each workplace operates within a cultural context in which local features of interaction influence how employees conceptualize their workplace self. Building on small-group research, I argue that understanding these idiocultures as action arenas helps to specify how group knowledge, practices, and beliefs are expressed and affect occupational identity. To demonstrate the power of microcultures, I analyzed local offices of the National Weather Service (NWS) through ethnographic methods. I focused on the Chicago office, demonstrating how its culture, which emphasizes autonomy and resistance to authority, shapes the staff's images of scientific practice and the contours of being a scientist. The culture is revealed in their joking relations as well as in other office traditions. I then compared this culture with that of Flowerland, a spin-up office established in the 1990s. These two offices use their cultures to differentiate themselves, creating distinct work practices. As all work groups have local cultures, giving greater attention to small-group dynamics helps us understand how workers define themselves, how cultures differ, and how the effects of these differences shape the experience of work.     

Health Care and Female Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse: Health Professionals' Perspectives

The present study explored health professionals' experiences with adult survivors of child sexual abuse in New Zealand. Face-to-face, semistructured interviews of up to an hour took place with 13 health professionals. The participants were asked about training, screening practices, their response to disclosures, and advice to other health professionals. A model—transition to ethical practice—emerged from the data, where delivering more sensitive health care to child sexual abuse survivors sits on a continuum from lack of awareness of child sexual abuse to delivery of care where all patients are comfortable. We recommend making sensitive care for all as the standard care of practice and providing training for health professionals on how to deal with disclosures.     

Work as affective care: Visiting parents’ experiences of paid work abroad

This article offers the concept of ‘work as affective care’ to explore the entanglement between financial and affective in transnational life. This is discussed in relation to practices of paid work by nonmigrant older parents during visits to their adult children abroad, an understudied dimension in the visiting friends and relatives, transnational family, and ageing scholarship. Drawing on ethnographic research with Brazilian transnational families, the article makes two distinct contributions. First, it emphasizes the broader repertoire of activities performed during visits, namely paid work outside the family household. Second, it underscores a temporal dimension to visits, namely prolonged stays. The discussion reveals a financial dimension to care where paid work acts as a form of affective care across places and generations. While often described positively, the intersections between financial and affective goals are not always harmonious, and material and affective needs can prove difficult to reconcile.     

There are two sides to every story: young people’s perspectives of relationship issues on social media and adult responses

This paper reports on a recent research project undertaken in the UK that investigated how young people negotiate their identities and relationships online, including how they experience interventions by adults. Drawing on qualitative interviews with young people in two schools and a voluntary youth organisation in England, we argue that young people engage rather successfully in practices of self-governance. Our findings based on this sample of young people’s agentic practice and care for their peers challenge some dominant perceptions of young people’s online practices as risky and/or harmful to themselves and/or others. Furthermore we found a lack of evidence concerning the effectiveness of, and need for, interventions orientated around surveillance and zero tolerance.     

Reshaping tradition? Women negotiating the boundaries of tradition and modernity in Hong Kong and British families

In debates on social change and personal life, modernity has generally been conceptualized in opposition to tradition, though some have pointed to the persistence of traditional values and practices within modern family relations. In this paper we seek to extend these debates beyond their largely Eurocentric context. Drawing on a comparative qualitative study of women and social change in Britain and Hong Kong, we argue for an understanding of the traditional and the modern that takes account of the ways in which tradition is reshaped in the context of modernity. The accounts of young adult women and their mothers in Hong Kong and Britain reveal varied interpretations of family obligations and practices in relation to normative ideals of family life in each context. We consider how configurations of family life deemed ‘modern’ are inflected by the differing traditions and histories of Hong Kong and British society and argue that these differences are not only cultural, but also attributable to the material conditions under which family relationships are forged and negotiated.     

‘Bring down the controlled movements!’ – exploring the possibilities of and limitations on achieving embodied agency in ballet and fashion

This paper explores the subtleties of exercising embodied agency within two contexts shaped by ideals and norms: ballet and fashion. Here, we focus on how dancers and models rehearsing offstage towards onstage performances negotiate their potential and limitations for achieving agency over and over. Whereas a ‘turn to embodiment’ has occurred within organization studies, less is known about how embodied agency is choreographed and practised between visible front stages and ‘hidden’ offstages, or in relation to the various human and non-human agents present in the field. The empirical material of this paper is derived from two separate ethnographic studies. By combining insights from the two contexts, we make a joint effort to explore a complex phenomenon in more detail. This paper develops our micro-level understanding of embodied agency as a relational endeavour, and offers insights into the surprisingly ‘a-mobile’ discussion of embodied practices within organization studies.     

Implications of Recent Research on Eastern European Adoptees for Social Work Practice

Social workers engaged in preparing and supporting families that adopt non-infants and sibling groups from Russia and other Eastern European countries need to be well-versed in: (1) the issues that affect this population of adoptees and adopters; and (2) the recent research on both. They also need to expand the model of adoptive families that drives their work. The authors identify three areas of risk to successful older-child adoptee and adoptive family functioning, explore the consequences of detrimental adoption policies and practices on the micro and macro-levels, and make recommendations for needed changes. The changes the authors identify are framed through an investigation of recent research on international adoptees and their adoptive families. The authors use adoptive parents’ own words to make the issues they discuss more concrete. Implications for social worker training and practice, and expanded roles for social workers, are identified.