Biographical interviews and imagined futures essay writing: users of two methods in conversation

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a conversation between users of two research methods, biographical interviews and imagined futures essay writing. A dialogue form is used to discuss these methods and their potential to be combined. The value of comparing research methods is discussed, and then the two methods are described and points of connection and contrast are explored. Although one method emphasises looking back while the other looks forward, the two have much in common, including the exercise of imagination, and discussion of individual agency and structural constraint. Both involve the construction of narratives that help understanding of people’s lives as individual trajectories set in broader social and historical contexts. The two methods are quite different but complementary, and possibilities for their combination in one project are identified. The article ends by reflecting on the benefits and drawbacks of using dialogue to consider how research methods sit alongside each other.     

Managing Memphis: governance and regulation in sterile spaces of play

Designed for the express purpose of encouraging consumption-intensive capital accumulation, the physical and symbolic reconstitution of select parcels of America's urbanscape into spectacular, multifaceted environments has heralded a new epoch in the material [re]formation of urban America. Yet, on daring to venture behind the corporatist veil of urban regeneration, one is soon confronted with an array of social injustices instantiated through the brutalizing praxis of the neoliberal public/private institutional amalgams that regulate, manage, and govern today's entrepreneurial cityscapes. Our focal points in this paper are the policies and practices of social governance through which both valorized and pathologized urban bodies are made visible, regulated and managed, as they contribute toward materializing the differentiated (and indeed differentiating) new urban landscape. We concentrate our argument on one North American city, Memphis, and specifically the efforts by private and public institutions to regulate and manage the Memphis cityspace, and realize the goal of reinventing the city (both materially and symbolically). Through dissecting the Memphis scenario, we discuss, and expose: the ‘lean and mean’ (Smith, 1998) urban geographies of aggressive place management and marketing; and, the various narratives underpinning the discursive constitution of belonging and difference within the revanchist metropolis.     

Vaccine scares

Vaccination has been one of the great success stories. It has eradicated smallpox; it has greatly reduced polio and measles; it has hugely improved the health of children and adults throughout the globe. But when a single study linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism some parents refused to have their children vaccinated. Despite scientific refutation, a major public scare, lasting for years, has resulted. Nick Andrews looks at what went wrong.     

Ideological Language and Social Movement Mobilization: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Segregationists' Ideologies

The current "cultural turn" in the study of social movements has produced a number of concepts formulating the cultural–symbolic dimension of collective actions. This proliferation, however, has resulted in some confusion about which cultural–symbolic concept is best applied to understanding cultural processes involved in social movements. We articulate a new definition of ideology that makes it an empirically useful concept to the study of social–movement mobilization. It is also formulated as autonomous of concepts such as culture and hegemony and of other cultural–symbolic concepts presently used in the movement literature to explain participant mobilization. We demonstrate the usefulness of our ideology concept by analyzing letters written to Martin Luther King, Jr. from segregationists opposed to the integration of American society. The analysis indicates that the letter writers particularized segregationist culture, creating ideologies that fit their structural, cultural, and immediate circumstances, and that the ideologies they constructed thereby acted to mobilize their countermovement participation. The particularizing resulted in four differentiated ideological versions of segregationist culture. The empirically acquired variety of ideological versions is inconsistent with the role attributed to cultural–symbolic concepts in the social–movement literature and requires theoretical clarification. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications for social–movement theory of the variety of segregationist ideologies.     

Successful Aging in the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging: Applying the MacArthur Model Cross–Nationally

Wide variation in the experience of aging is increasingly recognized and models for identifying groups based on how "successfully" individuals are aging have taken many forms. This study used the criteria developed in the MacArthur studies on successful aging to identify subgroups with higher, intermediate, or lower levels of function, and to compare them across a range of other domains. Data were drawn from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ALSA) in Adelaide, Australia, which is a population–based, bio–psycho–social study of a cohort of 1947 adults aged 70 years or more. Six waves have been conducted, between 1992 and 2000. At waves 1 and 3, an extensive personal interview and self–complete questionnaires were administered and objective physical and psychological functioning assessed. Eight–year mortality was also examined. Results showed risk and protective effects of successful aging for physical functioning and performance, lifestyle, cognition, affect, and personality. The findings confirm that people age with differing degrees of success and those aging most successfully not only live longer, but also experience a better quality of life. The MacArthur model proved useful for this cross–national comparison of determinants and outcomes of "successful" aging.     

Robust likelihood inference for public policy

Issues of public policy are typically decided by non‐specialists who are increasingly informed by statistical methods. In order to be influential, inferential techniques must be widely understood and accepted. This motivates the author to propose likelihood‐based methods that prove relatively insensitive to the choice of underlying distribution because they exploit a peculiarly stable relation between two standard errors and a 95% coverage probability. The author also notes that bootstrap and jackknife estimates of variance can sometimes be strongly biased. In fact, symbolic computations in R suggest that they are reliable only for statistics that are well approximated by averages whose distributions are roughly symmetric. The author thus proposes to transform the classical likelihood ratio into a statistic whose variance can be estimated robustly. He shows that the signed root of the log‐likelihood is well approximated by an average with a roughly symmetric distribution. This leads to Cox‐Tukey intervals for a Student‐like statistic and to simple confidence intervals for most models used in public policy.     

Representative Bureaucracy, Organizational Strategy, and Public Service Performance: An Empirical Analysis of English Local Government

The theory of representative bureaucracy suggests that organizationsperform better if their workforces reflect the characteristicsof their constituent populations. The management literatureimplies that the impact of representative bureaucracy is contingenton organizational strategy. Our empirical evidence on Englishlocal government is inconsistent with the basic theory of representativebureaucracy but supports a moderating effect of organizationalstrategy. Representative bureaucracy is negatively associatedwith citizens' perceptions of local authority performance. However,organizations pursuing a prospector strategy are able to mitigatethis negative relationship.     

Private Residential Care for Older Persons: Local Impacts of Care in the Community Reforms in England and Wales

The 1990 National Health Service and Care in the Community Act, implemented in 1993, had as a prime objective the creation of social care markets. Prior to these reforms, private residential homes had enjoyed almost guaranteed state financial support for the care of residents, but since then, residential homes have had to compete amongst each other for a finite number of clientsfunded by limited local budgets. The withdrawal of guaranteed state support and the introduction of a marketplace have had negative impacts on many residential home businesses. Indeed, many homes are facing financial difficulties. This paper considers the actions and attitudes of proprietors under the new conditions, based on a three-stage survey in Devon. The private residential sector illustrates that local social care markets have the potential to produce negative outcomes that are far from ideal and, to some extent, the paper highlights a market failure. As a case study this research also demonstrates the value of undertaking locality-based detailed studies over time to investigatethe impacts of policy change.