Confidence and the effectiveness of creative methods in qualitative interviews with adults

ABSTRACT

This paper examines two contrasting creative methods; a drawing task and a LEGO building task used in a study exploring the gap between policy and practice in widening participation to higher education across two different types of university in England. These creative methods were used within 16 semi-structured interviews in seven universities to attempt to explore deeper understandings of everyday policy and what they mean in practice and to make comparisons across types of institutions. This paper examines the role that creative confidence played in the effectiveness of both methods through exploring the successes and failures of each arguing that understanding these barriers can improve the successful use of these methods, especially with adults. When these barriers are overcome, the paper also demonstrates how creative methods encouraged more reflective discussion of everyday issues, increased levels of rapport, and shared engagement in the interview process.     

Blame the Parents? Challenges for Parent‐Focused Programmes for Families of Gang‐Involved Young People

Parent‐focused interventions are a potentially effective tool for preventing and reducing gang involvement, although the challenges of delivering such services are considerable. Drawing from data collected over 26 months for the ethnographic study, Youth Gangs in an English City, including interviews with parents of gang‐involved young people, we identify potential obstacles. These include: psychological barriers to the participation of parents relating to perceived denial, stigma and blame; and possible counter‐productivity of interventions. Strategies to minimise these are discussed.     

The Community Well-Being Questionnaire: Theoretical Context and Initial Assessment of Its Reliability and Validity

The article presents the theoretical contextand the elements that underlie the developmentof the community well-being questionnaire. Italso discusses the reliability and validity ofthe questionnaire's scales by presentingresults from two studies carried out in urbanareas in the U.K., Ireland and Greece. Thescales assess satisfaction with the builtenvironment, environmental quality and services and facilities. They also measure personal safety, informal interaction,community spirit, income sufficiency, decisionmaking process and place attachment. Analysesshowed that they have high internal and goodtest-retest reliability. They also performwell, when subjected to factorial validity andconstruct validity assessments.     

Characterizing optimality among three-decision procedures for directional conclusions

Jones and Tukey (2000) proposed three-decision procedures for directional conclusions in statistical inference, considered as an alternative to the conventional usage of one- and two-tailed significance testing. Moreover, implicit in their suggestions was to consider a procedure to be optimal in case indefinite results were minimized among all procedures with a given control of error. First, we argue by example that this characterization of optimality is not very fruitful when formalized into the strong sense of uniform minimization. Next, imposing a further regularity condition on the comparative class of procedures, we relate the suggested characterization to optimality criteria from test theory (UMP unbiasedness). Similarly, we also consider characterizing optimality in terms of maximizing correct decision rates and minimizing incorrect decision rates. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the three considered characterizations with respect to exponential families of distributions.     

Competing Failure Risk Analysis Using Evidence Theory

Safety systems are important components of high-consequence systems that are intended to prevent the unintended operation of the system and thus the potentially significant negative consequences that could result from such an operation. This presentation investigates and illustrates formal procedures for assessing the uncertainty in the probability that a safety system will fail to operate as intended in an accident environment. Probability theory and evidence theory are introduced as possible mathematical structures for the representation of the epistemic uncertainty associated with the performance of safety systems, and a representation of this type is illustrated with a hypothetical safety system involving one weak link and one strong link that is exposed to a high temperature fire environment. Topics considered include (1) the nature of diffuse uncertainty information involving a system and its environment, (2) the conversion of diffuse uncertainty information into the mathematical structures associated with probability theory and evidence theory, and (3) the propagation of these uncertainty structures through a model for a safety system to obtain representations in the context of probability theory and evidence theory of the uncertainty in the probability that the safety system will fail to operate as intended. The results suggest that evidence theory provides a potentially valuable representational tool for the display of the implications of significant epistemic uncertainty in inputs to complex analyses.     

Environmental hazard and migration intentions in a coastal area in Ghana: a case of sea flooding

Recently, there has been significant debate about whether ‘environmental migration’ can constitute a form of adaptation to environmental change, as opposed to forced or flight migration. The Foresight Report on Migration and Environmental Change (2011) suggested environmental factors are one driver of migration, as well as political, social, economic and demographic drivers, and that—under the right conditions—migration can be a form of adaptation to changing climatic conditions. However, this is dependent on migrants having adequate social and financial capital to undertake beneficial types of migration; it further argues that environmental change may result in ‘trapped populations’ whereby people who lack the necessary resources to re-establish livelihoods elsewhere may be left exposed to increasingly severe environmental shocks and stresses in situ. Research on the climate-migration nexus in West Africa has largely focused on out-migration from the semi-arid Sahel with more limited evidence about how sea flooding interacts with migration flows. This paper attempts to help fill this knowledge gap. Using data from a representative survey of households across three coastal communities in Ghana’s Volta River Delta, this paper concludes that exposure to sea flooding may not be a primary cause of out-migration as other community, economic and political factors influence migration intentions and decisions. Thus, it is important for planned adaptation interventions to be strengthened in situ to enable households, particularly farming households, sustain their livelihoods.