How the Water Draws Us in—Exploring the Biophilic Connection of Humans and Water with Photography

The incorporation of visual forms of expression has become common in qualitative research over the past two decades, with participant-employed photography being most prevalent. Visual methods such as photovoice have been used in community-based studies and with individuals to explore their lived experiences, particularly because of their participatory nature. Despite widespread support for visual approaches in existing research, there has been insufficient attention paid to how photography can enhance understanding of the phenomenon under study. Additionally, the existing literature is somewhat bereft of discussion of what individuals think about their participation in studies that incorporate participant-employed photography, or researchers' perspectives of carrying out this type of research. In this article, we describe a photovoice study carried out with young adult women affected by serious illness and provide examples of participants' photographs to illustrate how participant-employed photography can enhance the depth of research data. Specifically, the examples highlight how the photographs enriched participants' verbal descriptions of their lived experiences, which generated a better understanding of their personal embodied realities. We also discuss the young adult women's inclusion of previously taken photographs and reflections on their participation in the study. Finally, we examine the need to consider the intended audience of photographs, and specific ethical and methodological considerations for researchers contemplating the incorporation of participant-employed photography. In doing so, we provide insight into the advantages and challenges of photo-methods, which can inform other researchers contemplating the incorporation of participant-employed photography into social research.

This study was conducted with the aim of creating a new introductory course emphasizing the development of technological literacy for elementary school pre-service teachers. This study also aimed to investigate elementary school pre-service teachers’ attitudinal transition toward elementary school technology education (ESTE) and its implementation. An introductory ESTE program within Practical Arts Education was developed through a procedure consisting of preparation, development, and improvement. The program was implemented among 127 elementary school pre-service teachers for 7 weeks in South Korea. The learning contents based on the ESTE research and national curriculum included (1) technology learning units in the Practical Arts textbooks, (2) technology and invention, (3) drawing and design, (4) wood products, (5) basic electricity and electronics, and (6) integrative science, technology, engineering, and mathematics/science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics education. These contents were delivered via an instructor’s lecture, hands-on activities on technological design, and cooperative learning. A pre- and post-test on the study participants’ attitudes toward ESTE and on their knowledge, competency, and anxiety in relation to the six learning contents were conducted. The research results indicated a stable improvement in the study participants’ attitudes toward ESTE, their level of knowledge about ESTE, and their competency to teach ESTE. The developed program also decreased their anxiety in relation to teaching ESTE. The study findings may provide useful insights into the professional development of elementary school teachers in connection with ESTE, and into the implementation of technology education in the elementary school setting.

Links between young adults’ romantic relationships and experiences in the family of origin were assessed in two qualitative studies. Study 1 employed a sample of individuals in relatively new dating relationships, whereas participants in Study 2 were in longer–term relationships. In both studies, participants were given an unstructured task which required them to talk about their current dating relationship. The majority of participants in both studies reported links between family experiences and functioning of the dating relationship. Themes which emerged across studies concerned the perceived effects of the quality of relationships within the family of origin, and the nature of relations with members of the partner’s family. In addition, other family themes emerged which were largely specific to either new or established relationships. The results are discussed in terms of congruence and compensation hypotheses, and in terms of the mechanisms which may underlie the links between family experiences and romantic relationships.

The aim of this hermeneutic-phenomenological study was to explore how 26 music students experienced their artistic practice in and adapted to the intensive care environment. The students participated in a standardized training and performance program, offering patient-tailored music interventions for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) at two hospitals in Denmark. Each intervention comprised three components: (1) briefing on the patients’ physical and mental condition, (2) intervention, (3) debriefing by the primary investigator, the participant(s), and a nurse. A total of 33 semistructured one-to-one interviews and 135 in vivo observations were conducted during the study, and two semistructured focus-group interviews were carried out afterwards. The analysis revealed five themes concerning artistic practice: (1) Openness to the unknown setting; (2) Heartfelt music with a simple and intimate expression; (3) Sensitivity to the room, bringing artistic awareness to the forefront; (4) Human connectedness through music; and (5) Expanding one’s musical identity. Overall, the participants’ personal, professional, and artistic awareness was further developed, and a nuanced and sensitive attention emerged, achieving artistic flow in the patient’s room. The participants’ values and attitudes entailed trust, honesty, commitment, openness, compassion, and situational awareness while maintaining artistic integrity. A deepened meaning of musical identity arose, discussed here in relation to George Herbert Mead’s theories of the social self . Higher music education (HME) institutions may consider further developing programs for music students that reflect these values and attitudes along with artistic and reflective practices to enhance the role of music in healthcare, thereby contributing to enhanced wellbeing and a sense of cohesion.

Improve Teaching or Research? SoTL Method Does Both

Background: A patient who has experienced or has been infected with the corona virus has received various kinds of inappropriate responses from the community, family, and health workers. The emergence of negative stigmas from the community towards COVID-19 patients makes the patient's psychological state disturbed.
 Objectives: The purpose of this study was exploring the experience of the self-concept of someone who has experienced COVID-19.
 Methods: Participants in this interpretative phenomenology study were 10 participants who had met the criteria in this study. The research data obtained in the form of statements expressed by the participants are searched for keywords then compiled and grouped based on categories that have the same meaning, then the categories obtained will be arranged to get sub-themes, and for the last one the sub-themes will be compiled again. Become the theme of the research results. The themes that have been obtained in the analysis process will be validated against the initial transcript. If it is appropriate then these themes can be used as answers to research questions. The implementation of this research uses data analysis techniques Interpretative Phenomenology Analysis (IPA) in the analysis process. The participant in this study was someone who had experienced and managed to recover from COVID-19 and had returned to his activities in the community in Gondoharum Village. The selection of participants in this study used a purpose sampling technique according to the criteria that had been selected by the researcher. The criteria that have been set in the study are people who have experienced COVID-19, people who have recovered from COVID-19, Indonesian Citizen, willing to be a participant, and willing to be interviewed and recorded during the research process.
 Results: This theme provides an overview of the meaning of the feeling of being shunned by participants due to being positive for COVID-19. This theme answers from the lived relationship in phenomenological research. The theme of “Feeling isolated due to negative stigma from society” includes Families keeping their distance when communicating and People are afraid to interact and stay away.
 Conclusion: The high positive number of COVID-19 in Indonesia has led to the emergence of a negative community stigma towards patients exposed to COVID. Stigma appears in social behavior such as ostracizing patients who have recovered, refusing and ostracizing because they are considered carriers of the virus.

The aim of this PhD research was to examine what happens when mischievous street theatre performers are deliberately agonistic in the public realm in the United Kingdom. The PhD practice-based research is contextualised by Chantal Mouffe’s political theory of agonism, and the instances in which she applies agonism to art practice (2001-2013). The research is led by the question How can mischievous and participatory performance facilitate politicised dissent? In this research, art practice is a method of research, and central to the methodology of argumentation using both theory and practice. The art practice takes the form of guerrilla street theatre.<br> The art practice adapts L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel <i>The Wonderful Wizard of Oz</i> because of the opportunities Oz presents to initiate and facilitate public discussions about power and conflict through the structure of a journey. In this version, Lion [the doctoral researcher Antoinette Burchill], Tinman, and Scarecrow become exiled leaders who want to return home to Oz. In order to be allowed back, they must learn how to be fair and just leaders. The only way the characters can gain this information is by asking those they meet on their journey for advice. Therefore, public participation is a vital aspect of the performance. Each character leads with the quality the Wizard gave them with in Baum’s original novel: Lion with courage, Tinman with heart, and Scarecrow with brains. Consequently, each character interprets the advice they receive from participants with a particular bias. This ensures that conflict is a potential component of every performance. Baum’s motif of the yellow brick road as a journey full of obstacles and challenges is adapted to suit strolling guerrilla street theatre in the public realm.<br> The guerrilla street performances were planned and developed in Spring-Summer 2015, the performances took place over one day in Hackney and London Fields, East London in August 2015. The film clips are titled as Episodes in order to emphasis the iterative nature of the street performances. Only Episodes with ethical approval from participants are included in the Collection.<br> Episodes 4, 8, 9, 11, and 13 were explored through argumentation, analysis and reflections on performance in Antoinette Burchill’s doctoral thesis. The practice is archived as it holds a value for other researchers, especially those examining the difficulties and complexities of agonistic art practices. <br>The License for all items is CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. If you wish to negotiate a different license to aid your research, please contact Antoinette Burchill directly.

Background: Little research on Latinx students studying abroad has explored the historic sensibilities they bring to their experiences abroad related to their bordered realities. Research Purpose and Question: This study explores the experiences of Latinx students in one Mexico study abroad class session through the lenses of border theory and Anzaldúan theory. The research question was: What are the experiences of Latinx students as they reflect on their unique participation in a heritage study abroad program, particularly their understanding of the metaphorical “in between” space at borders? Participants: The participants were nine Latinx students. Research Design: The study used a qualitative research design. Findings: Our data analysis revealed two primary findings. First, the students were heavily engaged in nepantla (living in the liminal in-between) as part of the study abroad process. Second, the students experienced connection as nepantleras. The students’ expressions of nepantla were experiences of self-awareness around their guilt and grief. Their nepantlera connection was with themselves; their language, culture, and identity; the group; and their families, in spirit and in the flesh. Conclusions and Recommendations: As the students allowed themselves to talk about, reflect on, and process their feelings, they were planting the seeds for transformation and healing. Because of their facultad (gift of awareness) as nepantleras (bridge builders), we observed the students create bridges not only for their conflicting feelings, but also for their families’ interactions and experiences, all of which were painful and challenging for them. Gaining experiences of connection and strengthening their connectionist facultad provided the students with the opportunity to internalize and embody community building while their facultad gave them an awareness to begin their personal transformations. We argue gaining the lived experience of building community through a connectionist facultad has the potential for the students in this program to create transformative spaces and experiences with their families and their local communities. For K–12 and U.S.-based higher education, our findings support the implementation of ethnic studies and critical multicultural curricula not only to attend to guilt that may be experienced by Latinx youth, but also as a remedy for the disconnect many feel toward their heritage. For directors and researchers of study abroad, we suggest examining both the demographics of the countries where students study and the demographics of the participants in the study abroad group to determine how this influences the students’ feelings and interactions and to guide program development.

There has been, in the past two decades, more scholarly attention for how rights-holders understand human rights norms, and how these understandings interact with pre-existing notions of (social) justice. This attention for rights-holders’ lived experiences can be linked to the growing influence of socio-legal and legal anthropological perspectives, as well as to that of emancipatory research methods, such as participatory action research. What these perspectives and methods have in common is their interest in how people experience and express their rights in practice, and how they give meaning to them. Remarkably little attention, however, has been paid to the question of how we try to understand this process of meaning-making. The dominant modes of engagement tend to (a) emphasize the spoken or written word, and (b) presume—the possibility of—an accessible verbal narrative. The shortcomings of engaging exclusively on the basis of verbal language becomes clear when considering the lived experience of certain particularly vulnerable groups, such as displaced people who are coping with ongoing violence and trauma or who have been forced into silence for years. Not everyone can speak freely about their lived experience or can tell a coherent story about it, and adopting an—exclusively—word-driven engagement strategy may reproduce existing power relations. Based on preliminary fieldwork with refugees from Syria in the Shatila refugee camp, we argue that a performative ethnography rooted in collaborative making and artistic practice is a promising way to engage with and understand how people make sense of their lived experience, as it allows research participants to express themselves using those (skilled and artistic) practices most familiar to them. We reflect on how a practice-driven mode of engagement may shed a different light on how people make sense of questions related to justice and their rights.

Quantitative studies indicate that the proportion of users of non-technological contraceptive methods in Lithuania is significantly higher than in most Western countries but the proportion of users of hormonal contraception is lower. Analyzing 30 semi-structured interviews with 19–34-year-old childless men, the article explores the connection between contraceptive practices and perceptions of masculinity. The author argues that contraceptive practices can function as a means of enacting normative masculinity and influencing the development of romantic relationships. Study participants who used withdrawal as their primary method of contraception associated it with increased sexual pleasure and their ability to control their bodies. When withdrawal was considered to be less reliable than other means of contraception it signified later stages of romantic relationships in which the risk of pregnancy was not as disturbing as in their early phases. Casual sexual encounters and initial stages of romantic relationships were linked to the use of male condoms. On the one hand, some study participants’ idea that a man should always have a condom can be interpreted as a reflection of hegemonic male sexuality in Lithuania: men were always expected to be ready for sexual encounters. On the other hand, compared to other technological methods, male condoms were easy to obtain and their popularity was self-explanatory. However, some study participants saw the use of condoms as inhibiting sexual pleasure, therefore, they associated the later stages of their romantic relationships with other contraceptive methods. Western academic research on contraception also confirms this tendency. Yet somewhat negative attitudes towards the use of the pill are characteristic of the Lithuanian context. Those men who regarded the use of the pill to be detrimental to woman’s health prioritized the health of their partner/wife and chose condoms even in the long-term relationships. Since caring for one’s own woman functions as one of the most important features of normative masculinity, contraceptive practices perceived in this way also enabled the researched men to enact the ideals of hegemonic masculinity.

Recruiting rural and underserved participants in behavioral health interventions is challenging. Community-based recruitment approaches are effective, but they are not always feasible in multisite, diverse community interventions. This study evaluates the feasibility of a rapid, multisite approach that uses rural clinic site coordinators to recruit study participants. The approach allows for rural recruitment in areas where researchers may not have developed long-term collaborative relationships. Adults with diabetes were recruited from rural Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) clinics. Recruitment feasibility was assessed by analyzing field notes by the project manager and health coaches, and 8 in-depth, semistructured interviews with clinic site coordinators and champions, followed by thematic analysis of field notes and interviews. Forty-seven rural sites were contacted to obtain the 6 sites that participated in the study. On average, sites took 14 days to commit to study participation. One hundred and twenty-one participants were acquired from letters mailed to eligible participants and, in some sites, by follow-up phone calls from site coordinators. Facilitators and deterrents affecting study recruitment fell into 4 broad categories--study design, site, site coordinator, and participant factors. The rapid multisite approach led to quick and efficient recruitment of clinic sites and participants. Recruitment success was achieved in some, but not all, rural sites. The study highlights the opportunities and challenges of recruiting rural clinics and rural, underserved participants in multisite research. Suggestions are provided for improving recruitment for future interventions.

Walkie-Talkies, Wandering, and Sonic Intimacy

Annals of NeurologyVolume 71, Issue 3 p. A5-A5 Message from the EditorFree Access The neurological exam: Striking a nerve First published: 26 March 2012 https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.23562AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Although we are accustomed to drawing the ire of some readers, the Message from the Editor on the neurological exam generated a particularly large number of responses, both formal and informal.1 The more formal responses are now included in the correspondence section of this issue of Annals of Neurology, and we recommend them to you.2-4 We found them insightful and thought provoking, and we agree with some of the points raised. First, we want to reiterate that we love the neurological examination nearly as much as our own children, and like them, we recognize our healthy bias to exaggerate strengths and gloss over weaknesses. Our suggestion for more evidence is really a request to give the examination more opportunities to shine and to encourage its growth. Second, we disagree that studies of the neurological examination are necessarily poor. Yes, we have seen many poorly designed studies of specific elements of the exam—and more since the publication of the Message—but there are also many examples of elegant studies that teach us a lot about the examination. Third, we disagree that studies attempting to find new therapies are necessarily more important. We agree that studies of treatments may seem more exciting, and they are certainly necessary, but neglecting a subject that consumes so much time and energy is also inappropriate. Just as we talk about moving toward a future in which every patient is offered participation in a research study, could every student be offered participation in a study about how we teach the examination? Costs and risks of studies of the examination are also much lower, and often the research question can be framed to produce an important advance, regardless of the result. Fourth, we disagree that the neurological examination cannot be studied appropriately using the tools of clinical research. No question, the examination varies by setting, provider, and patient; components of the examination must be considered part of a much larger whole (including history, personality, and other parts of the exam); and gold standards are never perfect. Nonetheless, examination findings are data that we write down and communicate to others. As such, they need to be reproducible and meaningful. If a test is irreproducible in the hands of five master clinical neurologists evaluating the same patient, it's not a helpful test at least in that patient and probably many others. If five medical students can't agree on a finding, perhaps we need a better way to teach that part of the exam. We know this is a big problem for clinical trials; so why do we tolerate it in everyday care? Yes, other approaches to understanding the exam are more than welcomed, particularly given the tacit nature with which it is applied and interpreted, but there is plenty we can do with the tools of clinical research. Finally, we agree with the notion that not everything we do requires evidence from a controlled study. The examination has been honed through years of use and repeated practice. We can all relate compelling stories about when it defied expensive testing and saved a patient. Also, it is a very inexpensive and valuable alternative to laboratory and imaging tests. The stance should be to respect it unless there is evidence otherwise, distinct from our approach to therapies. We want to thank our critics for the great dialogue. This gave us an opportunity to question our own stance on the neurological examination and to reaffirm both our love for it and our love for data. S. Claiborne Johnston, MD, PhD, Stephen L. Hauser, MD Editors References 1 Johnston SC, Hauser SL. The beautiful and ethereal neurological exam: An appeal for research. Ann Neurol 2011; 70: A9– A11. Wiley Online LibraryPubMedWeb of Science®Google Scholar 2 Rothman S. Re: The beautiful and ethereal neurological exam. Ann Neurol 2012; 71:432. Wiley Online LibraryWeb of Science®Google Scholar 3 Zochodne DW. The Neurological Examination: A Misplaced Research Priority? Ann Neurol 2012; 71:432. Wiley Online LibraryPubMedWeb of Science®Google Scholar 4 Shamy M, Fedyk M. What Statistics Cannot Tell Us about the Neurological Examination. Ann Neurol 2012; 71: 434– 436. Wiley Online LibraryPubMedWeb of Science®Google Scholar Volume71, Issue3March 2012Pages A5-A5 ReferencesRelatedInformation

The objective of this study was to examine the perspectives of individuals living with spinal cord injury (N=14) concerning the changes that occur in personal relationships after the injury. A qualitative study was completed and a finer-grained analysis of data collected from a primary study took place. The primary study had a cross-sectional and retrospective design in which participants with an acquired spinal cord injury were interviewed. Data collection took place in five regions of Ontario, Canada. A modified grounded theory analysis was performed on data related to relationships that was extracted from a primary study. Many study participants believed that their relationships with others provided them with support to assist in their recovery; however, for some participants this support led to their feeling overassisted by their family and friends. Study participants also discussed the barriers they experienced that limited the formation of new relationships; some participants also discussed the strategies they employ to deal with these barriers. Finally, many participants discussed how their relationships with others helped them to view their own spinal cord injuries positively and to take on new life roles. The findings of this study indicate that occupational and physical therapists and other health professionals should assist individuals with spinal cord injury to continue to participate in their relationships. Directions for future research are also discussed.

If identity is a construct—and, more critically, a construct defined and developed through relationships with others in public and private spheres—then an understanding of the processes, mechanisms and platforms by which individuals disclose information about themselves is crucial in understanding the way identity, community and culture function, and the way individuals can intervene in the functioning of culture.