The use of email‐facilitated interviewing with higher functioning autistic people participating in a grounded theory study

This paper explores the inclusive potential of computer‐mediated communication (CMC) for a ‘hard to reach’ group of research participants, specifically people at the higher functioning end of the autistic spectrum. Drawing on the literature pertaining to the fields of autism, CMC and research methods, as well as the first author’s experience of using email as a means of conducting interviews, the paper will discuss the epistemological, methodological and practical issues raised by the use of this method of collecting data from higher functioning autistic people, as well as its suitability in the context of a study guided by grounded theory.     

Back to the future? From pragmatic approaches in the social sciences to the development of the patchwork theory

The debate on the function of the social sciences in complex societies, and more generally of the role of knowledge, leads necessarily to a discussion on pragmatism. The gap between theoretical approaches and empirical research still exists and has even widened, in part as a result of the use and abuse of social science knowledge in politics and by the media. However, the academic system is equally to blame for this. Mutual ignorance and scholastic fights are barriers against openness, creative and imaginary thinking. The structures and the practices of the academic system reinforce this trend. Pragmatism aims at overcoming these cleavages by looking at commonalities between different approaches rather than by disputing their validity. It aims at a comprehensive understanding of the process of knowledge production and at the productive use of results. Defining itself in this tradition, the patchwork theory goes beyond the traditional pragmatic approaches: it catches part of the reality of social phenomena from a certain perspective that allows for an overview without having the full picture. Methodologicall, the approach guided by patchwork theory emphasizes the relevance of stakeholders’ knowledge and citizen science, and calls for public participation and democratic access to the production and use of knowledge in a discursive manner.     

From guest‐motif to lost homeland and re‐found exile: the development of a paradigmatic motif in the assimilatory process in Russian‐Jewish literature

Jews were strangers when they started to live within the borders of Tsarist Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, and they continued to be outsiders even when the integration, acculturation and assimilation process went on. The guest‐motif is an essential element of the home and exile dichotomy, often quoted in general terms, but rarely investigated closer in the texts. This motif may represent a special interest in Russian‐Jewish literature as one of the more emblematic topics of literature on assimilation that became a paradigm. The panoramic overview of the motif includes prose works by Iakov Rombro, Grigory Bogrov, Aleksandr Kipen, David Aizman, Andrei Sobol, Lev Lunts, Isaak Babel, Vladimir Jabotinsky and Friedrich Gorenshtein.     

South Africa: conceptualising a politics of human‐oriented development

This paper presents one example of the process whereby a writer like C. Louis Leipoldt absorbed living oral Afrikaans history and converted it into written Afrikaans documentation. This example serves to illustrate a larger process which he applied to the construction and composition of a sequence of four historical novels dealing with analogous material in English. The purpose is to record some of the problems and implications of a Leipoldt editing project, which is still in progress, and to formulate some of the related aspects of interpreting historical fiction as historical source material. The paper proposes that one of the traumatic events of South African literature is the shift from oracy to literacy, and that many South African writers have displayed a special guardianship of this shift in terms of literary procedures which follow different norms than those of the cultural historian.     

Parental involvement in the development of a culture‐based school curriculum

This study focuses on parental involvement in Sámi schools when developing a culturally sensitive school curriculum. The research recognizes a number of competing and complementary interests that play a role when constructing structures and policies in curriculum development. Two Sámi schools in Sweden with 115 pupils, their parents and 27 teachers were included in a longitudinal three‐year study. Interviews, school visits, videotapes and document analysis were used to gather information. The results indicate the invisible existence of culture‐based school practice and curriculum texts. The lack of contact among homes, schools and community culture was obvious. Parents and teachers expressed an interest in developing a culture‐based local curriculum through a process of reflecting on and creating an education incorporating the past, the present and the future. The study showed that parents, pupils and teachers experienced increased awareness in culture‐based schoolwork. The study pointed to a desire for cooperation between home and school in the development of a culture‐based school curriculum and a school practice supported by a culturally responsible teacher.     

Does the composition of financial services in a community relate to an Individual’s savings account ownership?

This study extends research on financial inclusion by exploring the composition of financial services within communities. Using propensity-score-adjusted probit regression, we explored associations with savings account ownership using restriscted-access, cross-sectional data from the 2015 National Financial Capability Study with merged financial services and community demographic data. Living in communities where the density of banks and credit unions outnumbered that of alternative financial services was associated with lower-income households’ greater probability of owning a savings account, all else being equal. These results have implications for efforts aiming to improve financial inclusion.     

Studying cognitive development in sociocultural context: The development of a practice‐based approach

This paper sketches the development of a research framework for analyzing the interplay between culture and cognitive development in cultural practices and the methodological tensions that gave rise to the framework. The framework consists of three components geared for analyzing intrinsic relations between culture and cognitive development. The first focuses on the analysis of individuals' goals as they take form in everyday practices. The second is concerned with the shifting relations between cognitive forms and cognitive functions in individuals' efforts to accomplish those goals. The third focuses on the appropriationandspecialization of forms structured in one practice to accomplish emergent goals in another. Applications and progressive refinements of the framework are discussed in analyses of practices of economic exchange in a remote group in Papua New Guinea, number play in middle and working class children in Brooklyn, New York, and candy selling in Northeastern Brazil.     

The riddle of things: Activity theory and actor‐network theory as approaches to studying innovations

This article compares cultural‐historical activity theory (AT) and actor‐network theory (ANT) as approaches to studying technical innovations. The concept of nature and society production in the ANT and the concept of activity in the AT have much in common as attempts to transcend the dualism between subject and object, nature and society. The symmetrical (ANT) and the dialectical (AT) interpretations of the concept of mediation are compared. It is suggested that the historically developed, artifact‐mediated structure of human activity is instrumental in studying interaction and coevolution of social and material entities. Three limitations of the concept of generalized symmetry, or symmetrical mediation, become evident when the concept is used in empirical studies of innovation: First, it does not supply any criteria for defining the nature and scope of actors in a heterogeneous network. Second, it leads to an asymmetrical, Machiavellian analysis of innovation in which the contribution of designers, users, and nonhuman entities remains marginal. Third, it does not provide any explanation for the intentionality and competence of humans. It is suggested that these problems can be solved if the innovation network is studied as a network of activity systems. Nonhuman entities are included in the analysis as historically developed arrays of tools and raw materials of the activity systems. This approach is elaborated by analyzing an unsuccessful innovation process, the production of ethanol from wood through the use of cellulose‐degrading enzymes. It is suggested that instead of applying the symmetrical semiotic language proposed by ANT in the analysis, a dialogue that utilizes the historically developed resources and languages of different thought communities is needed.     

The use of population‐level data to advance interdisciplinary methodology: a cell‐through‐society sampling framework for child development research

The authors argue that population‐level data should be used to advance interdisciplinary research about community effects on early development. These data permit the identification of neighborhoods in which development patterns deviate from predictions based on local socioeconomic status (SES). So‐called ‘off‐diagonal’ places signal where researchers are likely to discover processes that either deflect the risks of low SES or dampen the salutary impact of favorable SES. Since such neighborhoods will be best understood relative to nearby ‘on‐diagonal’ neighborhoods where macro‐economic and/or public policy factors are constant, the authors present a methodology for illuminating these regional clusters. The method is deployed in British Columbia, Canada, where a team has collected developmental observations from two censuses of kindergarten children (n = 82,632). The article discusses how these clusters can be used to coordinate sampling decisions among academics representing the range of disciplines needed to study child development from cell‐through‐society, as is recommended in the literature.     

Russian Jews in exile from Bolshevik Russia: the case of Lev Shestov as an example of Russian‐Jewish existential compromise

Lev Shestov (born Leib Jehuda Shvartsman in Kiev in 1866) was a product of his times and entangled cultural roots. His destiny became closely related to the Russian Diaspora in Europe (he fled Bolshevik Russia in 1920). He was also linked to the local (especially French and German) intellectual life. However, being a Jew made Shestov stand out from the purely Russian emigration, for although he connected himself first and foremost with Russian culture, he could not be integrated without reservations into the purely Russian Diaspora. On the other hand mapping him in relation to the diverse Russian‐Jewish émigré milieu in Europe is not a straightforward task because his attitude to his Jewish roots was rather ambivalent. The case of self‐identification, in varying degrees, was similarly ambiguous with many Russian Jews who left Russia after the revolution. Shestov’s activities in emigration were diverse. Apart from teaching he published regularly in the outlets of the émigré press as well as in major French literary journals and gave lectures in Germany (in particular, addressing such different audiences as the Union of Russian Jews and the Nietzschean Society). In brief, his way of coping with the experience of exile was to become a multicultural conductor of sorts. This article aims to analyse Shestov’s life path in the framework of the Russian‐Jewish Diaspora in Europe at the time in the context of both cultural and ethnic repudiation and appropriation. This in turn should shed some new light on the cultural life of this Diaspora.     

Lost lessons?: the Experience of a time-limited home-school support project

This article reports on an evaluation of an innovative, but time-limited, home-school support project, designed to improve the behaviour of young children in danger of school exclusion. It concludes that, although valued by the families and schools involved, the effective operation of the initiative was hampered by problems of communication, by its single agency location and by the short-term nature of its funding. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hip‐hop Imaginaries: a Genealogy of the Present

In this article, I track the emergence of Hip‐hop imaginaries in the enunciatory present, focusing on three disparate scenes: democratic change in Bolivia, cultural resistance in Hawaii, and the foundations of Hip‐hop that emerged from New York City. I position Hip‐hop as a mode of cultural expression that gives resistant form to marginalized existences abjected from dominant society through political and economic exclusion. I trace the origins of Hip‐hop in New York in order to show how the idea of existential resistance provides a useful interpretive framework in which to theorize the relationships between cultural resistance and political change. I utilize this framework by looking at Hip‐hop in two disparate locations, first analyzing the music of Hawaiian Hip‐hop group Sudden Rush and contextualizing it within the contemporary Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement. Second, Bolivia’s newly emergent Hip‐hop scene amidst a turbulent culture of political protest provides a useful contrast to that of Hawaii’s. In the end, I argue that Hip‐hop imaginaries in Hawaii and Bolivia demonstrate inter‐related strategies of national and cultural decolonization which carry distinct political implications.     

Investigating the Effects of Pre‐school Provision: Using Mixed Methods in the EPPE Research

The Effective Provision of Pre‐school Education (EPPE) project is a longitudinal study of young children between the ages of 3 and 7 years. Research began in 1997 and both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to explore the effects of pre‐school education on children’s attainment and social/behavioural development at entry to school, and of any continuing effects on such outcomes at the end of Key Stage 1 (age 7). The sample included over 3,000 children and 141 pre‐school centres drawn from six different types of providers. In addition, a home sample of children who had not attended a pre‐school centre was included. In order to identify the processes that might influence centre effectiveness, observational data were collected and centre managers interviewed. In‐depth case studies of 12 more effective centres were used to explore and illuminate the processes, particularly in relation to pedagogy, associated with better child outcomes. A mixed method approach was adopted to simultaneously answer both confirmatory and exploratory questions, to support user engagement and provide triangulation. The paper argues that the mixed method approach supported the development of stronger research inferences.     

Using peer‐interviewing methods to explore place‐based disadvantage: dissolving the distance between suits and civilians

Collaborative and participatory research methods reflect ideals to undertake research in consultation and partnership with communities and to advance community empowerment and capacity. They offer ethical and practical approaches for conducting research addressing socioeconomic and health disparities particularly in marginalised or vulnerable communities. Peer‐interviewing is one such participatory strategy employed in studies involving hard‐to‐reach populations. However, while the value of peer‐interviewing for researchers is noted in the methodological literature, there are few discussions that critically examine the benefits and challenges of using peer‐researcher approaches, either for the interviewers themselves or the communities they represent. This study reports the findings from a qualitative study that explored the experiences of peer‐interviewers who were involved in undertaking community surveys of residents in the socioeconomically disadvantaged neighbourhoods in which they lived. We discuss the benefits and challenges that participants reported from their involvement.     

Sweden and the United States: is the challenge of an aging society leading to a convergence of policy?

The aging of the population is one of many forces behind a current reconstruction of welfare benefits in both Sweden and the United States. While both countries represent ideological polarities regarding social policy, they are struggling to meet their welfare goals with limited resources, and both are adopting similar strategies, for example, decentralization, targeting, and an increased emphasis on privatization and evaluation. This paper summarizes some of the differences between Sweden and the United States and describes some of the forces at work that are lessening the differences between the two countries in strategies and policy regarding care services for elderly people.