Context-specific Knowledge Research Articles

Professional development of sport psychology practitioners: From systematic review to a model of development

A clear model of professional development (PD) has the potential to enhance educational and training programs and promote effective, competent, and ethical practice. Scholars have explored facets of the PD of sport psychology practitioners (SPPs) using theoretical frameworks borrowed from counseling psychology. Yet, given the emergence of a sport-specific body of work on this topic, it appears timely to take stock of existing context-specific knowledge. In the present study, we aimed to systematically review the extant literature focused on SPP’s PD to identify specific characteristics and organize this knowledge in an accessible and structured manner in the form of a process model of PD. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we identified 1147 research records in the databases SportDiscuss, PsychArticles, PsychInfo, ProQuest, and PubMed. We subsequently screened and assessed the records for eligibility (i.e., empirical studies published in English that focus on developmental characteristics of SPPs, including a clear developmental stage) reducing the sample of articles that fitted our inclusion criteria to 34 qualitative manuscripts. Finally, we critically explored these manuscripts by engaging in a reflexive thematic analysis and created four developmental phases (i.e., introduction, exploration, solidification, and fulfillment). SPPs’ transition through these phases is seemingly facilitated by four processes (i.e., reflection, supervision, connections and networking with peers, and learning by doing), which also support the completion of the tasks associated with nine developmental elements (i.e., purpose, confidence and anxiety, focus, awareness, adaptability, independence, philosophy/congruence, professional identity, and the individual). We present the interaction of these developmental phases, elements, and processes in the form of a sport psychology-specific process model of PD. We discuss the implications of this model and its potential contribution to future research, supervision, and training programs. Yet, we also acknowledge how a focus on Anglophone and Western cultural contexts and a lack of methodological transparency are limitations of the extant literature.

The Impact of Clinical Experience in Advanced Practice Nursing Education-A Cross-Sectional Study of Norwegian Advanced Practice Nurses' Perspectives.

An Advanced Practice Nurse (APN) is a specialized nurse who has acquired context specific knowledge, complex decision-making skills, and clinical competencies. Previously in Norway, APN education programs had a prerequisite of a minimum of two years of clinical nursing experience. Recently, the government decided to abandon this prerequisite. The objectives of this study were to assess APN's and APN students' (1) perspectives on the impact of clinical nursing experience on various aspects of nursing practice, (2) perspectives on the association between APN students' previous clinical experience and the ability to achieve the learning outcomes in the education program, and (3) attitudes towards clinical nursing practice as a prerequisite before entry to APN education programs. An observational, cross-sectional design. APN and APN students were invited to respond to a researcher-developed questionnaire. A snowballing sampling method was used. The questionnaire included 24 questions scored on a five-point Likert scale, and two questions with text responses. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and text responses with thematic analysis. In total, 1767 APNs (92.9%) and APN students (7.1%) responded. Between 93.6 and 98.2% of the respondents (n = 1767) agreed that clinical nursing experience leads to experience with communication, collaboration, basic procedures, medical equipment and documentation, and to the development of situation awareness, increased awareness on own role in teams, the ability to provide person-centered nursing, an independent nursing identity, and feeling of security. Over 90% of the respondents agreed that students' previous clinical experience was associated with the ability to achieve the learning outcomes in the APN program. In addition, 93.7% of the respondents agreed that clinical nursing experience should be a prerequisite before entry to APN programs. Advantages of clinical experience were reported as 'Professional identity', 'Intuitive grasp', 'Integration of technical skills', and 'See the whole picture'. Disadvantages were reported as 'Prejudice and bad habits', 'The importance of relevant experience', and 'Recruitment issues'. This study adds insights into the impact of clinical nursing experience as a prerequisite to APN education programs. The results indicate that clinical nursing experience is an essential contributor to the development of nursing competence and a nursing identity. This study was not registered.

An ongoing discussion about validity and quality in action research


 This article unfolds a discourse on action research, illustrating its multifaceted perspectives, and engaging with the persistent debate about its validity and quality. Drawing on insights from a keynote presentation given by Kathryn Herr and Gary Anderson, renowned scholars in the field, at ICAR 2022, the article describes six possible positions within action research, from full insider to complete outsider, illuminating the potential for collaboration and transformation at each level of insider-outsider involvement. The article underscores the importance of establishing credibility, trustworthiness, and validity within action research, despite the scepticism it is often met with. It acknowledges the marginalisation of action research in academia and other organisational contexts and calls for its recognition as a rigorous methodology capable of generating context-specific knowledge and fostering change. This article serves as a critical examination of the unique dynamics of action research, its potential for impact, and the ongoing discourse surrounding its validity and quality.

MCI-HyperNet: A multiple contextual information-based adaptive weight learning network for controllable image reconstruction

Contemporary deep learning methods for image reconstruction have shown promising results over classical methods. However, they are not robust to image alterations due to deviations in the imaging conditions at test time. The training process does not account for explicit variations in the contextual information about the imaging task, such as image control parameters and input settings that could hold a causal relationship to the visual content of the reconstructed image. In this work, we propose dynamic weight prediction (DWP) networks to learn the contextual settings and the relationships between them. This model-based meta-learning approach would offer two valuable capabilities in a single network - (i) scalability to multiple input settings and (ii) tunability to continuously varying control settings with the knowledge of a few settings. The proposed network, MCI-HyperNet, is a controllable image reconstruction network with DWP sub-networks conditioned on multiple contextual settings. The proposed approach strikes a balance between reliable context-adaptive weight learning and context-agnostic weight learning to obtain robust image reconstructions. We have extensively experimented with our network for accelerated MRI reconstruction considering the essential research directions provided in the fastMRI challenge results. The proposed method exhibits (i) superior reconstruction quality with improvement margins of ∼0.5 dB in PSNR and ∼0.01 in SSIM over adaptive reconstruction methods for cardiac MRI and multiple brain MRI contrasts, (ii) better scalability to multiple anatomies, contrasts, and under-sampling mask patterns with accuracy improvement margins of ∼0.2 dB in PSNR and ∼0.005 in SSIM over joint training and context-specific models for knee MRI, and (iii) generality to 40 arbitrary acceleration factors over joint training when trained on just five acceleration factors. Our model can learn multiple contrast sequences through continual learning without catastrophically forgetting old MRI sequences. Furthermore, our method is benchmarked for reconstruction quality against other MRI reconstruction architectures trained for a specific contextual setting. Besides, an interpretability analysis using a relational knowledge distillation measure shows that our model exhibits superior context-specific and relational knowledge across contexts over jointly trained models. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/sriprabhar/MCI-HyperNet.

Far from the generalised norm: Recognising the interplay between contextual particularities and principals’ leadership in schools in low-socio-economic status communities

Focusing on the interplay between community context and principals’ leadership, this study contributes knowledge of the situated dimensions of school leadership. Based on qualitative content analysis of the statements of 20 principals leading schools in low-socio-economic status communities in a highly segregated Swedish city, we address the research questions: (1) Which context-related characteristics of low-socio-economic status schools emerge, and what challenges do they entail? and (2) How do such characteristics and challenges affect and contribute to shaping the principals’ leadership? The findings indicate four community-context characteristics, which also characterise or affect the schools’ student and parent base and, in some respects, also the staff of the schools: high mobility, comprehensive linguistic and cultural diversity, comprehensive knowledge diversity, and extensive problem complexity. The analysis reveals that these characteristics entail work-related challenges with implications of both quantitative and qualitative nature, contributing to shaping a leadership that is present, gatekeeping, sheltering, collaborative, and compensatory and aimed at maintaining a resilient organisation. Considering the findings, the importance of recognising the particularities of context and the context-specific knowledge required is highlighted, as well as the potential value of tailored context-sensitive training and support for principals from local education administrations and universities.

Ocean literacies: the promise of regional approaches integrating ocean histories and psychologies

The current concept of ocean literacy reflects a prerequisite for achieving ocean sustainability. Existing ocean literacy reflects a fundamentally western view of oceans that works in tension with ocean literacy goals. Although ocean literacy practitioners and researchers are, laudably, starting to incorporate Indigenous knowledges and perspectives from BIPOC communities, attention to historical change continues to be left out of ocean literacy, to the detriment of ocean literacy goals. This article points out that, given the reality that human-ocean relationships have changed over time, and differed among cultural groups in the past as well as in the present, ocean literacy needs to incorporate ocean history at a foundational level. Because there are historical differences in human relationships with oceans, it stands to reason that regional ocean literacies must be more effective than a universal and timeless ocean literacy framework. Following the logical efficacy of a regional approach to ocean literacy, this article further argues that regional ocean literacies should involve the systematic inclusion of emotional elements. Regional ocean literacies should be constructed through knowledge co-production, involving diverse types of expertise, knowledge and actors to produce context-specific knowledge and pathways towards a sustainable future. To fully exploit the potential of ocean literacy, there is a need for the UN Ocean Decade to work towards regional and place-based approaches that incorporate history as well as culture in an iterative and collaborative process involving diverse types of expertise, knowledge and actors.

Business Licencing Reform and Gender Equality: Evidence from Indonesia

Business environment reform targets inadequate business regulations, intending to remove constraints to business investment, enabling growth and job creation, and creating opportunities for international business to contribute to and benefit from this growth. Women-led businesses are likely to be disproportionately negatively affected by a poor business environment. However, there is a dearth of context-specific knowledge of the impact of business environment reform on gender equality. This paper offers new insights into this relationship through an in-depth analysis of the Pelayanan Terpadu Satu Pintu (PTSP) or one-stop shop business licencing reform in 2009, exploiting the variation in the extent of its implementation to examine how the effects vary, focussing on the gender of firm leadership. Our findings suggest that the reform is unlikely to have led to either unintended negative consequences for women-led firms, nor do we find any evidence of transformational change. Outside Jakarta, advances for women were achieved, while in Jakarta existing exclusions were maintained and arguably deepened. Stronger gender and inclusion outcomes would require further deepening and expanding the positive achievements identified, including general business environment improvements coupled with targeted support for sectors.

Environmental dynamics shape perceptual decision bias.

To interpret the sensory environment, the brain combines ambiguous sensory measurements with knowledge that reflects context-specific prior experience. But environmental contexts can change abruptly and unpredictably, resulting in uncertainty about the current context. Here we address two questions: how should context-specific prior knowledge optimally guide the interpretation of sensory stimuli in changing environments, and do human decision-making strategies resemble this optimum? We probe these questions with a task in which subjects report the orientation of ambiguous visual stimuli that were drawn from three dynamically switching distributions, representing different environmental contexts. We derive predictions for an ideal Bayesian observer that leverages knowledge about the statistical structure of the task to maximize decision accuracy, including knowledge about the dynamics of the environment. We show that its decisions are biased by the dynamically changing task context. The magnitude of this decision bias depends on the observer's continually evolving belief about the current context. The model therefore not only predicts that decision bias will grow as the context is indicated more reliably, but also as the stability of the environment increases, and as the number of trials since the last context switch grows. Analysis of human choice data validates all three predictions, suggesting that the brain leverages knowledge of the statistical structure of environmental change when interpreting ambiguous sensory signals.

Abstract 79: The Impact of COVID-19 on HPV Immunization Programs in Countries With High Cervical Cancer Burdens: Global and National Perspectives

Abstract Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on HPV immunization efforts within low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). This is a cause for concern as LMICs account for the global burden of deaths attributable to cervical cancer; yet the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 on HPV immunization programs have not been well described in the literature. Our study explored COVID-19 specific challenges in HPV vaccine introduction and scale-up in LMICs through interviewing stakeholders with context specific knowledge in cervical cancer prevention efforts within LMICs. Methods: This qualitative study involved a stakeholder analysis coupled with semi-structured in-depth interviews with n=31 global stakeholders (i.e. academic institutions, global immunization partners) and national stakeholders (i.e. ministry of health officials, non-governmental organizations). Purposive sampling was used to select participants with content knowledge and experience in HPV vaccine programming. Data was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Inductive codes were categorized into broader themes describing challenges HPV vaccination programs faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: Five broad themes emerged from the analysis: HPV vaccine prioritization, funding considerations, supply chain challenges, HPV vaccine delivery platforms and catch-up dosing, and vaccine hesitancy. The amplified focus of COVID-19 vaccines resulted in decreased prioritization and funding towards HPV vaccination efforts. In certain settings, HPV vaccines were found to be the least prioritized antigen. Decreased demand, coupled with global supply chain shortages due to COVID-19, resulted in sizeable challenges for HPV vaccine introduction and scale-up. Nearly all stakeholders described how anti-COVID-19 vaccine sentiments magnified hesitancy towards HPV vaccines. Particularly revealing, were delivery challenges as a consequence of school closures. This resulted in stakeholders’ acknowledgment of the need to establish alternative delivery platforms and strategies for catch-up dosing. Conclusion: Understanding how emerging infectious disease outbreaks impact HPV vaccination efforts in countries with high cervical cancer burdens is critical. Increasing HPV vaccine prioritization within countries, developing strategies to overcome existing shortfalls, along with addressing vaccine hesitancy will be key in generating momentum towards HPV immunization programs. Citation Format: Dominique Guillaume, Due-e-Nayab Waheed, Mieke Schlieff1, Kirthini Muralidharan, Alex Vorsters, Rupali Limaye. The Impact of COVID-19 on HPV Immunization Programs in Countries With High Cervical Cancer Burdens: Global and National Perspectives [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Symposium on Global Cancer Research; Closing the Research-to-Implementation Gap; 2023 Apr 4-6. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2023;32(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 79.

Ensuring milk quality: Contextualizing the knowledge of Kenyan small-scale milk traders who connect farmers with low-income consumers

There is relatively scarce data about milk traders in the Global South. In Kenya, small-scale mobile milk traders play a vital role for food sovereignty by connecting remote rural and peri-urban dairy farmers with low-income urban consumers. However, these traders are often accused of selling milk of low quality. This study, from 2014 to 2020, aims to offer insights into the lives of mobile milk traders and how they are challenged by newly introduced milk regulations despite their context-specific knowledge to ensure affordable quality milk. Specifically, this research shows how mobile milk traders’ run their businesses and how regulations regarding milk handling and transport determine who can and who can not continue a livelihood in the dairy sector and who can and can not afford to buy milk.

Youth athletes at Swedish sports high schools with an athletics specialism emphasise environmental support for injury risk management: a focus group study

In this study, we examined knowledge and understanding of sport-related injuries among youth athletics (track and field) athletes and assessed their needs in managing any health problems. Qualitative data were...

The Impact of Local Versus Nonlocal Professional Development Programs for Teachers: Evidence From China’s National Teacher Training Project

Based on qualitative and quantitative data collected from an investigation of the flagship National Teacher Training Project (NTTP) in China, this study compares the impacts of teacher professional development (PD) programs located at different distances from the participants’ workplaces. The study argues that local and nonlocal programs play different roles in teacher PD. While local programs are conducive to teachers’ mastery of context-specific knowledge and skills that are directly connected to subject teaching, nonlocal programs are crucial for teachers’ continuous professional development in the long term. The two types of programs are supplementary to each other, and teachers need access to both types of programs.

“Sharing Is Caring”: Participatory Storytelling and Community Building on Social Media Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

While most health communication studies tend to adopt an information-based approach to unpacking the communication issues around COVID-19, scant attention has been paid to the emerging narratives from local communities as a way of sensemaking, self-representation, and creative responses to the pandemic. Especially locally driven narratives that convey positive emotions and exhibit remarkable resilience of the great majority are underexamined. To narrow this gap, this study analyzed a Facebook-based, participatory storytelling program to reveal how local communities (co-)construct humanized narrative accounts of lived experiences and context-specific knowledge about pandemic responses. Data collection involved qualitative content analysis of 245 user-generated stories, associated with comments and engagement from the group members, for a 6-month period. Results show that open and participatory storytelling on social media affords a pathway of performing togetherness even though individuals narrate their lived pandemic experiences differently. Such performing togetherness somewhat facilitated virtual community building. This study contributes to the health communication literature with a refreshing perspective of understanding the grounded, participatory storytelling as a vehicle of collective sensemaking and community spirit-lifting.

Strengthening health systems and peacebuilding through women’s leadership: a qualitative study

BackgroundActive and protracted conflict settings demonstrate the need to prioritise the peace through health agenda. This can be achieved by reorienting attention toward gender diverse leadership and more effective governance within health systems. This approach may enable women to have a greater voice in the decision-making of health and social interventions, thereby enabling the community led and context specific knowledge required to address the root causes of persistent inequalities and inequities in systems and societies.MethodsWe conducted a qualitative study, which included semi-structured interviews with 25 key informants, two focus group discussions and one workshop with humanitarian workers in local and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), United Nations (UN) agencies, health practitioners, and academics, from Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Latin America. Findings were then applied to the peacebuilding pyramid designed by John Paul Lederach which provides a practical framework for mediation and conflict resolution in several conflict-affected settings. The purpose of the framework was to propose an adapted conceptualisation of leadership to include women’s leadership in the health system and be more applicable in protracted conflict settings.ResultsFive interrelated themes emerged. First, perceptions of terms such as gender equality, equity, mainstreaming, and leadership varied across participants and contexts. Second, armed conflict is both a barrier and an enabler for advancing women’s leadership in health systems. Third, health systems themselves are critical in advancing the nexus between women’s leadership, health systems and peacebuilding. Fourth, across all contexts we found strong evidence of an instrumental relationship between women’s leadership in health systems in conflict-affected settings and peacebuilding. Lastly, the role of donors emerged as a critical obstacle to advance women’s leadership.ConclusionContinuing to empower women against social, cultural, and institutional barriers is crucial, as the emerging correlation between women’s leadership, health systems, and peacebuilding is essential for long-term stability, the right to health, and health system responsiveness.

Coproduction In Conservation Paleobiology: Lessons Learned from the Historical Oyster Body Size Project

Over the past decade, many conservation biology researchers and practitioners have turned to knowledge co-production, which prioritizes collaboration between academic and non-academic partners, to increase the impact of science in conservation practice and policy. Co-production promises to produce context-specific knowledge that better aligns with conservation practitioners’ needs and concerns. Here, we argue that the conservation paleobiology community could similarly build collective capacity to engage more effectively in shared “learning spaces” where actionable knowledge is produced. We draw from our experiences with the Historical Oyster Body Size project and lessons learned from other fields to identify key attributes of actionable geohistorical knowledge and the meaningful co-production processes that produced it. Familiarity with these concepts will benefit conservation paleobiologists who aspire to help develop longer lasting, fairer, and more equitable solutions to complex conservation problems presented by a changing world.

Supporting value co-creation through interaction during the pre-purchase customer journey: empirical evidence from B2B HR services

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the role of interaction in supporting value co-creation during pre-purchase customer journey stages when selling professional B-to-B services. First, value co-creation in professional service firms (PSFs) is reviewed, and, second, the role of interaction in the different stages of a customer’s pre-purchase journey is explored, specifically in the context of B-to-B human resource management services.Design/methodology/approachQualitative, semi-structured interview data was collected from potential B2B customers of a PSF in question, providing a broad coverage of prospective clients in architecture, engineering and IT sector.FindingsIn general, the findings of this study indicate that interaction plays a crucial role in pre-purchasing stages of a customer journey. In particular, these findings form understanding of how various interaction channels and content support PSF’s ability to co-create value with its prospects.Originality/valueThe existing research tends to concentrate on how value is created for existing customers, and far less attention has been paid to the perspective of prospects. This study contributes theoretically by providing novel insights into the current literature on value co-creation in PSFs by providing an understanding of how interactions in pre-purchase phases affect the co-creation of value from the perspective of prospects, which is a less researched viewpoint. Empirically, this study offers managers much-needed, context-specific knowledge of PSFs by comparing differences and pulling together similarities from each customer journey stage of PSF prospects.

Place-based research in small rural hospitals: an overlooked opportunity for action to reduce health inequities in Australia?

Rural Australians experience significant health disparities compared to their metropolitan counterparts.1 Research underinvestment in rural areas has resulted in a lack of rural context specific knowledge and this contributes to ongoing health inequity.1 Metropolitan hospitals are regularly observed to include research as part of their usual business with outputs exceeding >1000 peer-reviewed papers per year.2 In comparison, rural hospitals in Australia are overlooked as vectors of research generation, despite evidence of critical need.

A new characterization of discrete decomposable graphical models

Decomposable graphical models, also known as perfect directed acyclic graph (DAG) models, play a fundamental role in standard approaches to probabilistic inference via graph representations in modern machine learning and statistics. However, such models are limited by the assumption that the data-generating distribution does not entail strictly context-specific conditional independence relations. The family of staged tree models generalizes DAG models so as to accommodate context-specific knowledge. We provide a new characterization of perfect discrete DAG models in terms of their staged tree representations. This characterization identifies the family of balanced staged trees as the natural generalization of discrete decomposable models to the context-specific setting.

On the feasibility of technosocialism

Technological advances associated with computing power and the prospect of artificial intelligence have renewed interest on the economic feasibility of socialism. The question of such feasibility turns on whether the problem of economic calculation has fundamentally changed. In spite of the prospect of what King and Petty (2021) refer to as “technosocialism,” we argue that technological advances in computation cannot replace the competitive discovery process that takes place within the context of the market. We do so by situating the case for technosocialism in the context of the socialist calculation debate. Understood in these terms, technosocialism represents a restatement of the case for market socialism, which incorrectly framed the “solution” to economic calculation under socialism as one of computing data, rather than the discovery of context-specific knowledge that only emerges through the exchange of property rights. Therefore, the arguments put forth by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, and later Israel Kirzner and Don Lavoie, regarding the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism remains just as relevant today.

Populist peacemaking: Trump's peace initiatives in the Middle East and the Balkans

Abstract With the rise of populist leaders around the world, populism's impact on foreign policy and international affairs has come into focus. Adding to this literature, we propose the concept of ‘populist peacemaking’, in which key tenets of populism, in style and substance, are projected onto the sphere of international mediation. We offer an analytical framework for understanding populist peacemaking consisting of three features. Firstly, populist peacemaking is characterized by a rejection of the ‘peacemaking elites’ and their established rules and practices, including international norms, a refutation of context-specific knowledge, and a clean-slate approach that disregards past peacemaking attempts and alienates other international mediators. Secondly, populist peacemaking employs aggrandized rhetoric and symbolism that puts the mediator—rather than the conflict parties—in the spotlight, thus integrating domestic politics into peacemaking. Finally, populist peacemaking frames the process as representing the volonté générale, i.e. serving the interests of the ‘pure people’ in the conflict-affected context. We illustrate this phenomenon empirically with a case-study of United States' peacemaking efforts during the Trump era, tracing initiatives pursued by US envoys in the Israeli–Palestinian and Kosovo–Serbia conflicts. From this analysis, populist peacemaking emerges as a distinct phenomenon, not to be subsumed under the heading of ‘illiberal peacemaking’.