Context-dependent Knowledge Research Articles

Reimagining Initial Certification as a Process That Begins During Residency to Support Continuous Development Across Training and Practice.

In the United States, initial board certification remains focused on a high-stakes knowledge examination after completion of training. A more contemporary view supports a program of assessment that includes multiple types and sources of data with an emphasis on direct workplace observation to get the best picture of an individual's performance. In this article, the authors reimagine initial certification as a continuous assessment for learning that begins in residency, focuses on both knowledge acquisition and its application, and interdigitates intentionally with the first cycle of maintenance of certification to advance learning and smooth the transition from training to practice. A more expanded view of competence, as a 3-layered construct (canonical, contextual, and personalized), supports this proposal. Canonical competence (context-independent knowledge)-best assessed through examinations of knowledge-is most heavily weighted and assessed during medical school but remains critical throughout one's career. Contextual competence (context-dependent knowledge) is best assessed in the workplace and is key during residency and fellowship as trainees navigate a myriad of clinical work environments. Personalized competence, representing the totality of one's unique areas of expertise, is best demonstrated during the practice years when deliberate practice experience supports the growth of personalized expertise and discoveries that advance the field. Shifting initial board certification from relying on an anxiety-provoking, high-stakes, often single moment in time standardized examination to a nuanced approach that is part of an individual trainee's program of assessment offers a more just and robust decision about readiness for unsupervised practice. Such a model would also sow the seeds of meaningful individualization of learning needs that begins in training, continues through practice, and lays the foundation for improving the quality of care for patients within a given practice as well as shifting the current contiguous phases of training and practice into a true continuum.

P08.05.A A LONGITUDINAL CASE STUDY OF PATIENTS' EXPERIENCES IN THE INITIAL PHASE OF A BRAIN CANCER PATHWAY - AIMING TO IMPROVE PATIENT CARE

Abstract BACKGROUND A brain cancer diagnosis is life-transforming and involves accelerated diagnostics and treatment and care involving multiple settings and healthcare professionals. Patients are confronted with an uncurable cancer disease but also face progressive neurological and cognitive deficits over time, adding to the uncertain and stressful situation. Knowledge of patients' experiences during their hospital stay in the initial diagnostic phase is sparse. This study aimed to explore patients' experiences at the hospital during the diagnostic workup, the brain surgery, and the post-operative period until discharge and to describe what matters to patients when diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. MATERIAL AND METHODS We used a descriptive longitudinal single-case study design to produce in-depth, context-dependent knowledge and capture real-life situations in patients' day-to-day care experiences from admission to discharge across three different departments throughout the initial diagnostic phase. To explore patients' views directly in the actual situations unfolding in practice, we followed one patient at a time and did 180 hours of field observation and 16 semi-structured interviews. We analyzed field notes and interviews by applying systematic text condensation. RESULTS An overarching theme, "A fast transition", was identified, describing the patients' experiences in the two central themes; "From feeling fine to an unknown journey" and "Patient involvement determined by system factors". Within the two themes, six subthemes emerged from the data: Overwhelming uncertainty and fear, Putting life on hold, An unfamiliar dependency and Being unprepared and side-lined, The significance of close relatives, and Managing care needs and demands. CONCLUSION The results add to understanding patients' experiences during the initial diagnostic phase. While part of the findings are a fact of life for patients diagnosed with a brain tumour, others point to specific areas for improvement. Small changes in care delivery can enhance patient involvement by proactively informing patients about their care plan, ensuring the presence of relatives during information giving and identifying patients' care needs and preferences. Establishing a patient and public involvement group in 2023 will provide more knowledge gaps for future research.

Medical competence as a multilayered construct.

The conceptualisation of medical competence is central to its use in competency-based medical education. Calls for 'fixed standards' with 'flexible pathways', recommended in recent reports, require competence to be well defined. Making competence explicit and measurable has, however, been difficult, in part due to a tension between the need for standardisation and the acknowledgment that medical professionals must also be valued as unique individuals. To address these conflicting demands, a multilayered conceptualisation of competence is proposed, with implications for the definition of standards and approaches to assessment. Three layers are elaborated. This first is a core layer of canonical knowledge and skill, 'that, which every professional should possess', independent of the context of practice. The second layer is context-dependent knowledge, skill, and attitude, visible through practice in health care. The third layer of personalised competence includes personal skills, interests, habits and convictions, integrated with one's personality. This layer, discussed with reference to Vygotsky's concept of Perezhivanie, cognitive load theory, self-determination theory and Maslow's 'self-actualisation', may be regarded as the art of medicine. We propose that fully matured professional competence requires all three layers, but that the assessment of each layer is different. The assessment of canonical knowledge and skills (Layer 1) can be approached with classical psychometric conditions, that is, similar tests, circumstances and criteria for all. Context-dependent medical competence (Layer 2) must be assessed differently, because conditions of assessment across candidates cannot be standardised. Here, multiple sources of information must be merged and intersubjective expert agreement should ground decisions about progression and level of clinical autonomy of trainees. Competence as the art of medicine (Layer 3) cannot be standardised and should not be assessed with the purpose of permission to practice. The pursuit of personal excellence in this level, however, can be recognised and rewarded.

Middle East–South Asia Relations: Transregional Minilateralism Cemented with Bilateralism

The politico-economically uneven structure, fragile inter-state affairs and weak regionalism of the Middle East make it difficult to explain its interactions with South Asia within a single theoretical pattern. Neither interregionalism nor multilateralism could illuminate these interactions individually. This study merges recently popularized interaction schemes of minilateralism and bilateralism on a transregional basis to provide an eclectic and flexible conceptual framework to explain the patterns of Middle East–South Asia inter-state affairs. It argues that regardless of its weak regionalism and intra-regional power games, the Middle East, with these trendy interaction schemes, could still develop effective inter-state relations with South Asia. The study utilizes the empirical analysis method to interpret various levels and types of interactions between actors of various capabilities. In addition, it also uses case studies to produce a deeper context-dependent knowledge of Middle Eastern – South Asian actors.

Higher education in the crisis period: A comparative analysis of the Ukrainian experience of online or blended TEFL during the pandemic and the war

The article is dedicated to the problem of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) in higher education during the crisis period by an example of a Ukrainian experience of teaching during the pandemic and the war. In the beginning, the research focused only on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the TEFL at tertiary schools in Ukraine. However, after the outbreak of the war on the territory of Ukraine on 24th February 2022, it became clear that the experience could be extrapolated to the conditions of other crises, in particular, to the conditions of armed aggression. This article uses mixed quantitative and qualitative comparative methods to analyze the survey results of educators' attitudes toward online and blended learning. The blind questionnaire was held in May 2021 and then repeated in February 2023. The participants (n=70, n = 69) were representatives of about 50 higher education institutions (HEI) from all over Ukraine. The research is a case study with context-dependent knowledge; however, it may be with some reservations relevant to other countries under similar conditions. The instrument included 10 questions related to the participant's previous experience of online teaching, reflections on the most difficult elements of online teaching, advantages and disadvantages of online teaching, and types of learning activities that can easily be adapted and transferred into online mode of learning. The questionnaire also covers the role of a teacher in online learning, the overall assessment of the experience of online learning and preferences of the mode of teaching which the teachers would like to preserve. The structure of the questionnaire included 4 multiple-choice single-answer questions and 6 multiple-choice multiple-answer questions. Answers from the two polls of respondents were then compared using Fisher's correlation coefficient to prove the statistical significance of the received data. The results of the questionnaire have shown that the majority of participants (61 %; 42%) think that implementation of blended learning is the best option to use in the universities, thus presenting a need to the higher education system of Ukraine to develop and introduce blended learning curricula.

Women’s entrepreneurship in the GCC: a literature analysis from a socio-cultural perspective

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the crucial role of socio-cultural factors in the entrepreneurial experiences of women in the Gulf region.Design/methodology/approachA focused qualitative systematic analysis of 65 published articles was conducted to present existing approaches to studying women's entrepreneurship in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and identify the key socio-cultural factors impacting women's entrepreneurial realities.FindingsIt was found that gender roles, family influence, social networking and religion are among the most significant factors influencing the entrepreneurial experiences of women in the GCC.Research limitations/implicationsIt was found that the region's prevalent social norms, vis-à-vis how gender roles are defined and practiced, greatly influence the lived experiences of women entrepreneurs. The role of family support (or lack thereof) and the access to networking opportunities to start and grow ventures significantly affect women's entrepreneurial successes. The findings also point to the overarching ideological and practical guidance, Islam is believed to offer, on how life in general and businesses, in particular, should be conducted.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on women's entrepreneurship in the Gulf by promoting context-dependent knowledge. In particular, the findings highlight the importance of critical and nuanced evaluation of existing theories of gender and entrepreneurship. The examination can help policymakers develop more effective and inclusive entrepreneurship policies in the region.

Enhancing Attention’s Explanation Using Interpretable Tsetlin Machine

Explainability is one of the key factors in Natural Language Processing (NLP) specially for legal documents, medical diagnosis, and clinical text. Attention mechanism has been a popular choice for such explainability recently by estimating the relative importance of input units. Recent research has revealed, however, that such processes tend to misidentify irrelevant input units when explaining them. This is due to the fact that language representation layers are initialized by pre-trained word embedding that is not context-dependent. Such a lack of context-dependent knowledge in the initial layer makes it difficult for the model to concentrate on the important aspects of input. Usually, this does not impact the performance of the model, but the explainability differs from human understanding. Hence, in this paper, we propose an ensemble method to use logic-based information from the Tsetlin Machine to embed it into the initial representation layer in the neural network to enhance the model in terms of explainability. We obtain the global clause score for each word in the vocabulary and feed it into the neural network layer as context-dependent information. Our experiments show that the ensemble method enhances the explainability of the attention layer without sacrificing any performance of the model and even outperforming in some datasets.

Teleconsultations and their implications for health care: A qualitative study on patients’ and physicians’ perceptions

BackgroundDigitization in everyday medical practice has gained importance along with the drive to expand teleconsultations arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous qualitative research on teleconsultations has focused on synchronous communication between patients and clinicians. This study aims to explore physicians’ and patients’ perspectives on the adoption of teleconsultations between primary care and the referral cardiology department. MethodsParticipants were recruited for semi-structured interviews between September 2019 and January 2020. The interviews were audio-recorded and pseudonymized. The transcribed interviews were stored, coded, and content analysis was performed in MAXQDA. ResultsA total of 29 participants were interviewed. Patients and physicians merged in their views on ‘process’ issues, i.e., those concerning a better prioritization of patients and an improved collaborative practice, albeit with possible technological constraints. Physicians recognized that teleconsultations presented an educational opportunity for managing patients’ health problems. Our findings suggest that not all patients would require equally intensive collaborative activities across the health system. The barriers described included difficulties using the system (technical issues) and concerns about workload as a consequence of the disruption of traditional clinical routines. Increasing the range of collaborative strategies available to health care providers may require a broader assessment of the way that care processes are structured between levels of care. Patients revealed strong support for teleconsultation on the grounds of interprofessional collaboration and avoidance of unnecessary hospital visits. ConclusionsThe implementation of teleconsultations between levels of care may be facilitated when patients, caregivers and physicians see the added value of this service, that adequate resources are put in place and that there is flexible implementation. This work adds an in-depth understanding of participants’ perceptions of this intervention in a case study. Obtaining context-dependent knowledge will help program leaders better understand how to establish telemedicine services as a real-world sustainable option.

Dealing with Emergency Remote Teaching: The Case of Pre-Service English Language Teachers in Turkey

Education has been offered in the form of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) worldwide since March 2020 due to the spread of Covid-19. This compulsory transition has often been marked by disregard of the technological infrastructure of educational institutions, digital literacy skills of teachers and students, and their access to technology. A growing body of research discusses challenges faced in ERT; however, further studies are needed to arrive at validated conclusions to inform formal language teaching and learning. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study aimed at adding context-dependent knowledge to the literature by reporting on the case of university students majoring in language teaching. For this reason, the perceptions of a group of 67 pre-service English language teachers on ERT practices at a Turkish state university were explored. Data were collected through an interview form developed by the researchers and a focus group interview. The data were analysed inductively using content analysis. Half of the participants reported that specific skills were conducive to doing tasks in an ERT environment. They not only reported a variety of challenges related to the perceived ineffectiveness of learning, technical insufficiency, and inappropriateness of the learning environment, but also acknowledged contributions to their personal and academic development. That is, they found ERT flexible, time-saving, and favourable for learners who felt more confident in virtual classrooms, and some considered ERT as an opportunity for self-actualisation. Nonetheless, the majority favoured face-to-face education over ERT appreciating the enhanced effectiveness of in-class education. In sum, the study emphasises the need to support learners and teachers by providing instructions and strategies on how to organise learning and teaching. Moreover, schools, policy makers, and governmental authorities may need to provide ERT-tailored programmes and an infrastructure in terms of technical equipment to meet the requirements of education delivered in ERT and to realise effective language learning in virtual environments. Broadening the knowledge base concerning ERT in language teacher education, this study advises to address drawbacks of ERT and to take advantage of its opportunities.

Reasoning on Multirelational Contextual Hierarchies via Answer Set Programming with Algebraic Measures

AbstractDealing with context-dependent knowledge has led to different formalizations of the notion of context. Among them is the Contextualized Knowledge Repository (CKR) framework, which is rooted in description logics but links on the reasoning side strongly to logic programs and Answer Set Programming (ASP) in particular. The CKR framework caters for reasoning with defeasible axioms and exceptions in contexts, which was extended to knowledge inheritance across contexts in a coverage (specificity) hierarchy. However, the approach supports only this single type of contextual relation and the reasoning procedures work only for restricted hierarchies, due to nontrivial issues with model preference under exceptions. In this paper, we overcome these limitations and present a generalization of CKR hierarchies to multiple contextual relations, along with their interpretation of defeasible axioms and preference. To support reasoning, we use ASP with algebraic measures, which is a recent extension of ASP with weighted formulas over semirings that allows one to associate quantities with interpretations depending on the truth values of propositional atoms. Notably, we show that for a relevant fragment of CKR hierarchies with multiple contextual relations, query answering can be realized with the popular asprin framework. The algebraic measures approach is more powerful and enables, for example, reasoning with epistemic queries over CKRs, which opens interesting perspectives for the use of quantitative ASP extensions in other applications.

Global impacts of fertilization and herbivore removal on soil net nitrogen mineralization are modulated by local climate and soil properties.

Soil nitrogen (N) availability is critical for grassland functioning. However, human activities have increased the supply of biologically limiting nutrients, and changed the density and identity of mammalian herbivores. These anthropogenic changes may alter net soil N mineralization (soil net Nmin ), that is, the net balance between N mineralization and immobilization, which could severely impact grassland structure and functioning. Yet, to date, little is known about how fertilization and herbivore removal individually, or jointly, affect soil net Nmin across a wide range of grasslands that vary in soil and climatic properties. Here we collected data from 22 grasslands on five continents, all part of a globally replicated experiment, to assess how fertilization and herbivore removal affected potential (laboratory-based) and realized (field-based) soil net Nmin . Herbivore removal in the absence of fertilization did not alter potential and realized soil net Nmin . However, fertilization alone and in combination with herbivore removal consistently increased potential soil net Nmin. Realized soil net Nmin , in contrast, significantly decreased in fertilized plots where herbivores were removed. Treatment effects on potential and realized soil net Nmin were contingent on site-specific soil and climatic properties. Fertilization effects on potential soil net Nmin were larger at sites with higher mean annual precipitation (MAP) and temperature of the wettest quarter (T.q.wet). Reciprocally, realized soil net Nmin declined most strongly with fertilization and herbivore removal at sites with lower MAP and higher T.q.wet. In summary, our findings show that anthropogenic nutrient enrichment, herbivore exclusion and alterations in future climatic conditions can negatively impact soil net Nmin across global grasslands under realistic field conditions. This is an important context-dependent knowledge for grassland management worldwide.

SECONDARY SCHOOL EDUCATORS’ ENACTMENT STRATEGIES OF THE FRENCH INTEGRATED CURRICULUM CONTENT

<p>This article presents an action research on Lesotho educators’ enactment strategies of the French integrated curriculum content. Essentially, the aim of this article was to explore the concept of content in order to establish whether enactment strategies used by educators on content favour successful attainment of goals. Convenience sampling was used in selecting seven participants. Four methods of data generation, namely, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, document analysis, observations, and reflective activities, were used. Action research was effected in two phases: Phase One findings demonstrated educators’ dominant use of savoir (factual enactment strategies) at the expense of savoir-faire (social enactment strategies) and savoir-être (habitual enactment strategies). This seemed to present a hurdle, as content was not aligned with goals. Phase Two results, through the intervention of action research, saw educators maintaining a balance among savoir, savoir-faire and savoir-être, thereby aligning content with goals prescribed in the curriculum and therefore augmenting greatly the chances of attaining these goals. The article consequently recommends a revision of the policy, in which the use of the three propositions of content would be advocated to encourage teaching of schooled knowledge, context-dependent knowledge, as well as knowledge that is deemed essential by the educator as required by the prevailing context.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0620/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Collaborative learning in the production of diagnostic imaging: detailing group practices

Abstract: Considering collaborative work is a growing phenomenon, understand how groups learn effectively is critical. This research aimed to identify and detailed the practices performed in the processes of diagnostic imaging that support continuous learning in groups of radiologists. It is a multiple case study that presents practical and context dependent knowledge about group practices in the specific radiology and imaging environment. Data were collected through semi-structured observations and interviews, with members of three groups belonging to different radiology and diagnostic imaging organizations. The results of this study show how a learning culture, integration and cooperation, an adequate physical environment, the support of the leadership and the technological support when combining attendance-based and virtual activities guarantee the organizational learning in the groups and individual of the radiologist, creating transformative and disruptive paths. It concludes the use of appropriate practices facilitates the learning of the groups.

Transitions in the representation and implementation of a language-learning project within a multicultural context

The paper explores the involvement of teachers, children, and parents in a project based on learning a second language (L2) within a multicultural context. The study accounts for the participants’ transitions across school and family and aims to analyze their representations about the implementation and the adaptation of the project. The investigation involves three classes of primary schools—1st and 2nd levels—and two kindergarten classes, for a total of 15 teachers, 169 children aged 3–7 years old, and their families, living in French-speaking areas of Switzerland and representing 20 different nationalities. By combining different data sources (teachers’ and parents’ interviews, ethnographic observations of children’s activities), we explore how participants have implemented an educational program through various adaptations in their transition from a traditional way of teaching/learning L2 to a new model inspired by the Narrative Format. Through an inductive approach and a qualitative analysis of data, we present the main evidences of these transitions, detecting the conditions that facilitate the acquisition of languages and accounting for arguments connected to the heterogeneous, conditional, and context-dependent knowledge within and outside the school.

Enhancing context knowledge repositories with justifiable exceptions

Dealing with context dependent knowledge is a well-known area of study that roots in John McCarthy's seminal work. More recently, the Contextualized Knowledge Repository (CKR) framework has been conceived as a logic-based approach in which knowledge bases have a two layered structure, modeled by a global context and a set of local contexts. The global context not only contains the meta-knowledge defining the properties of local contexts, but also holds the global (context independent) object knowledge that is shared by all of the local contexts. In many practical cases, however, it is desirable to leave the possibility to “override” the global object knowledge at the local level: in other words, it is interesting to recognize the pieces of knowledge that can admit exceptional instances in the local contexts that do not need to satisfy the general axiom. To address this need, we present in this paper an extension of CKR in which defeasible axioms can be included in the global context. The latter are verified in the local contexts only for the instances for which no exception to overriding exists, where exceptions require a justification in terms of facts that are provable from the knowledge base. We formally define this semantics and study some semantic and computational properties, where we characterize the complexity of the major reasoning tasks, among them satisfiability testing, instance checking, and conjunctive query answering. Furthermore, we present a translation of extended CKRs with knowledge bases in the Description Logic SROIQ-RL under the novel semantics to datalog programs under the stable model (answer set) semantics. We also present an implementation prototype and examine its scalability with respect to the size of the input CKR and the amount (level) of defeasibility in experiments. Finally, we compare our representation approach with some major formalisms for expressing defeasible knowledge in Description Logics and contextual knowledge representation. Our work adds to the body of results on using deductive database technology such as SQL and datalog in these areas, and provides an expressive formalism (in terms of intrinsic complexity) for exception handling by overriding.

Triple Context-Based Knowledge Graph Embedding

Knowledge graph embedding aims to represent entities and relations of a knowledge graph in continuous vector spaces. It has increasingly drawn attention for its ability to encode semantics in low dimensional vectors as well as its outstanding performance on many applications, such as question answering systems and information retrieval tasks. Existing methods often handle each triple independently, without considering context information of a triple in the knowledge graph, such an information can be useful for inference of new knowledge. Moreover, the relations and paths between an entity pair also provide information for inference. In this paper, we define a novel context-dependent knowledge graph representation model named triple-context-based knowledge embedding, which is based on the notion of triple context used for embedding entities and relations. For each triple, the triple context is composed of two kinds of graph structured information: one is a set of neighboring entities along with their outgoing relations, the other is a set of relation paths which contain a pair of target entities. Our embedding method is designed to utilize the triple context of each triple while learning embeddings of entities and relations. The method is evaluated on multiple tasks in the paper. Experimental results reveal that our method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

Collaborative Learning at the Boundaries: Hallmarks within a Rehabilitation Context

The aim of the article is to shed light on how collaborative learning at the boundaries between professions plays out within a rehabilitation context. The study has an ethnographic design in the form of observation and interviews in two rehabilitation contexts. Findings showed that collaborative learning was stimulated when the professional groups made a concerted effort to acquire an overall perspective on the patient’s situation and requested and disseminated context-dependent expressions and knowledge about how the patient functioned. The “training” of patients on the ward served as an abstract boundary object amongst the staff functioning as a unifying resource in collaboration. The study exemplifies the learning potential when boundaries between professions become more open in an overlapping collaboration. This enables awareness of one’s own boundaries and of the fact that one had a wealth of shared knowledge. In addition, it entailed the learning of techniques and procedures from other professions, which augmented and developed one’s own professional repertoire.

Ad hoc categories and false memories: Memory illusions for categories created on-the-spot.

Three experiments were designed to test whether experimentally created ad hoc associative networks evoke false memories. We used the DRM (Deese, Roediger, McDermott) paradigm with lists of ad hoc categories composed of exemplars aggregated toward specific goals (e.g., going for a picnic) that do not share any consistent set of features. Experiment 1 revealed considerable levels of false recognitions of critical words from ad hoc categories. False recognitions occurred even when the lists were presented without an organizing theme (i.e., the category's label). Experiments 1 and 2 tested whether (a) the ease of identifying the categories' themes, and (b) the lists' backward associative strength could be driving the effect. List identifiability did not correlate with false recognition, and the effect remained even when backward associative strength was controlled for. Experiment 3 manipulated the distractor items in the recognition task to address the hypothesis that the salience of unrelated items could be facilitating the occurrence of the phenomenon. The effect remained when controlling for this source of facilitation. These results have implications for assumptions made by theories of false memories, namely the preexistence of associations in the activation-monitoring framework and the central role of gist extraction in fuzzy-trace theory, while providing evidence of the occurrence of false memories for more dynamic and context-dependent knowledge structures. (PsycINFO Database Record

Learning together and working apart: routines for organizational learning in virtual teams

PurposeResearch suggests that teaming routines facilitate learning in teams. This paper identifies and details how specific teaming routines, implemented in a virtual team, support its continual learning. The study’s focus was to generate authentic and descriptive accounts of the interviewees’ experiences with virtual teaming routines.Design/methodology/approachThis case study gathered concrete, practical and context-dependent knowledge about virtual teaming routines in a specific environment. The main source of data was narrative expert interviews with working members of the team.FindingsThis study illustrates how a mix of face-to-face and virtual routines can ensure organizational learning in virtual teams.Research limitations/implicationsThis case study is limited to one virtual team in the information industry. Future research could build on this research to study virtual teams in other industries.Practical implicationsThis research offers specific examples of teaming routines that managers of virtual teams might adapt in managing their own teams.Social implicationsGiven that the use of virtual teams is a growing phenomenon, understanding how to help those teams learn effectively is a critical issue.Originality/valueThis case study extends the research on teaming routines to virtual teams.

The Queer Utility of Narrative Case Studies for Clinical Social Work Research and Practice

The author uses a queer critical lens to analyze the marginalization of case study research in the evidence-based practice model of clinical social work. He argues that narrative case studies are necessary for the production of context-dependent knowledge about social work practice and asserts that the method offers particular utility in conducting queer inquiry. The method is explored in relation to its capacity to describe non-normative phenomena and the impact of normative cultural pressures on queer subjects. An abbreviated case study by the author is included to demonstrate these capacities.