Explanatory Domain Research Articles

Human stories about self-neglect: told, untold, untellable and unheard narratives in safeguarding adult reviews

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to update the core data set of self-neglect safeguarding adult reviews (SARs) and accompanying thematic analysis. The initial data set was published in this journal in 2015 and has since been updated annually. The complete data set is available from the author. The second purpose is to reflect on the narratives about adult safeguarding and self-neglect by focusing on the stories that are told and untold in the reviews.Design/methodology/approachFurther published reviews are added to the core data set, drawn from the national SAR library and the websites of Safeguarding Adults Boards (SABs). Thematic analysis is updated using the domains used previously, direct work, the team around the person, organisational support and governance. SAR findings and recommendations are also critiqued using three further domains: knowledge production, explanation and aesthetics.FindingsFamiliar findings emerge from the thematic analysis and reinforce the evidence-base of good practice with individuals who self-neglect and for policies and procedures with which to support those practitioners working with such cases. SAR findings emphasise the knowledge domain, namely, what is actually found, rather than the explanatory domain that seeks to answer the question “why?” Findings and recommendations appear to assume that learning can be implemented within the existing architecture of services rather than challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about the context within which adult safeguarding is situated.Research limitations/implicationsA national database of reviews completed by SABs has been established (www.nationalnetwork.org.uk), but this data set remains incomplete. Drawing together the findings from the reviews nonetheless reinforces what is known about the components of effective practice, and effective policy and organisational arrangements for practice. Although individual reviews might comment on good practice alongside shortfalls, there is little analysis that seeks to explain rather than just report findings.Practical implicationsAnswering the question “why?” remains a significant challenge for SARs, where concerns about how agencies worked together prompted review but also where positive outcomes have been achieved. The findings confirm the relevance of the evidence-base for effective practice, but SARs are limited in their analysis of what enables and what obstructs the components of best practice. The challenge for SAR authors and for partners within SABs is to reflect on the stories that are told and those that remain untold or untellable. This is an exercise of power and of ethical and political decision-making.Originality/valueThe paper extends the thematic analysis of available reviews that focus on work with adults who self-neglect, further reinforcing the evidence base for practice. The paper analyses the degree to which SARs answer the question “why?” as opposed simply to answering the question “what?” It also explores the degree to which SARs appear to accept or challenge the context for adult safeguarding. The paper suggests that SABs and SAR authors should focus explicitly on what enables and what obstructs the realisation of best practice, and on the choices they make about the stories that are told.

Identifying the Explanatory Domain of the Looping Effect: Congruent and Incongruent Feedback Mechanisms of Interactive Kinds

Abstract Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mechanisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders.

A theoretical framework to improve the quality of manually acquired data

We present a framework for organisations to prevent errors in data entry. It states that data entry errors can be prevented by a strong intention of data producers to enter data correctly and by a high task-technology fit. Two empirical studies support the framework and demonstrate that a high task-technology fit is relatively more important than the data producers’ intention. The framework refines the theory of planned behaviour, and extends the explanatory domain of the task-technology fit construct. The empirical evidence underlines the importance of the task-technology fit construct, an often-neglected construct in information systems research.

The conceptual critique of innateness

AbstractIt is widely recognized that the innate versus acquired distinction is a false dichotomy. Yet many scientists continue to describe certain traits as “innate” and take this to imply that those traits are not acquired, or “unlearned.” This article asks what cognitive role, if any, the concept of innateness should play in the psychological and behavioural sciences. I consider three arguments for eliminating innateness from scientific discourse. First, the classification of a trait as innate is thought to discourage empirical research into its developmental origin. Second, this concept lumps together a number of different biological properties that ought to be treated as distinct. Third, innateness is associated with the outmoded folk biological theory of essentialism. In response to these objections, I consider two attempts to revise the concept of innateness which aim to make it more suitable for scientific explanation and research. One proposal is that innateness can be defined in terms of the biological property of environmental canalization. On this view, a trait is innate to the extent that it is developmentally buffered against a range of different environments. Another proposal is that innateness serves as an explanatory primitive for cognitive science. This view holds that there exist a sharp boundary between psychological and biological explanations and that to identify a trait as innate means that it falls into the latter explanatory domain. This essay ends with some questions for future research.

Explanatory Domain and Indicator for Integration Public Skill Training Institute with Private Training Center for Automotive Industry Trainees

The Delphi technique was used to explore the domain and indicators that contribute towards the integration program Public Skills Training Institute (PSTI) and Private Training Centre (PTC) for automotive industry trainess. Domain analysis and indicators of the fourth round of the eleven (n=11) expert panel found that only twelve domain PSTI programmes are integrated with PTC namely (1) Governance; (2) The framework of qualifications; (3) Standard of competence; (4) Supplier of skill standards; (5) Delivery; (6); (7) industrial relations; (8) The experience of industrial work; (9) The twinning program; (10) community service program; (11) The curriculum-based industrial visits; and (12) Educational entrepreneurship. The contribution of this reserach is significant to realized by stake holders to strengthen the impelmentation of TVET training syatem in the country. In conclusion, this study is important to support PSTI, PTC and industry is to produce of skilled workers with high incomes and the desires to become a develop nation by 2020.

Evolution evolves: physiology returns to centre stage

Denis Noble, Eva Jablonka, Michael J. Joyner, Gerd B. Muller and Stig W. Omholt University of Oxford, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, Oxford, UK Tel Aviv University, Cohn Institute for the History andPhilosophyof Science and Ideas, Ramat Aviv, Israel Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA University of Vienna, Department of Theoretical Biology, Vienna, Austria Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Medicine, Trondheim, Norway

Can We Build Behavioral Game Theory?

The way economists and other social scientists model how people make interdependent decisions is through the theory of games. Psychologists and behavioral economists, however, have established many deviations from the predictions of game theory. In response to these findings, a broad movement has arisen to salvage the core of game theory. Extant models of interdependent decision-making try to improve their explanatory domain by adding some corrective terms or limits. We will make the argument that this approach is misguided. For this approach to work, the deviations would have to be consistent. Drawing in part on our experimental results, we will argue that deviations from classical models are not consistent for any individual from one task to the next or between individuals for the same task. In turn, the problem of finding an equilibrium strategy is not easier but rather is exponentially more difficult. It does not seem that game theory can be repaired by adding corrective terms (such as consideration of personal characteristics, social norms, heuristic or bias terms, or cognitive limits on choice and learning). In what follows, we describe new methods for investigating interdependent decision-making. Our experimental results show that people do not choose consistently, do not hold consistent beliefs, and do not in general align actions and beliefs. We will show that experimental choices are inconsistent in ways that prevent us from drawing general characterizations of an individual’s choices or beliefs or of the general population's choices and beliefs. A general behavioral game theory seems a distant and, at present, unfulfilled hope.

Distinguishing ecological from evolutionary approaches to transposable elements

Considerable variation exists not only in the kinds of transposable elements (TEs) occurring within the genomes of different species, but also in their abundance and distribution. Noting a similarity to the assortment of organisms among ecosystems, some researchers have called for an ecological approach to the study of transposon dynamics. However, there are several ways to adopt such an approach, and it is sometimes unclear what an ecological perspective will add to the existing co-evolutionary framework for explaining transposon-host interactions. This review aims to clarify the conceptual foundations of transposon ecology in order to evaluate its explanatory prospects. We begin by identifying three unanswered questions regarding the abundance and distribution of TEs that potentially call for an ecological explanation. We then offer an operational distinction between evolutionary and ecological approaches to these questions. By determining the amount of variance in transposon abundance and distribution that is explained by ecological and evolutionary factors, respectively, it is possible empirically to assess the prospects for each of these explanatory frameworks. To illustrate how this methodology applies to a concrete example, we analyzed whole-genome data for one set of distantly related mammals and another more closely related group of arthropods. Our expectation was that ecological factors are most informative for explaining differences among individual TE lineages, rather than TE families, and for explaining their distribution among closely related as opposed to distantly related host genomes. We found that, in these data sets, ecological factors do in fact explain most of the variation in TE abundance and distribution among TE lineages across less distantly related host organisms. Evolutionary factors were not significant at these levels. However, the explanatory roles of evolution and ecology become inverted at the level of TE families or among more distantly related genomes. Not only does this example demonstrate the utility of our distinction between ecological and evolutionary perspectives, it further suggests an appropriate explanatory domain for the burgeoning discipline of transposon ecology. The fact that ecological processes appear to be impacting TE lineages over relatively short time scales further raises the possibility that transposons might serve as useful model systems for testing more general hypotheses in ecology.

Hierarchy of idea-guided action and perception-guided movement.

The ideomotor theory of voluntary behavior assumes that the selection and control of a concrete goal-directed movement depends on imagining its direct perceptual consequences. However, this perception-guided assumption neglects the fact that behavioral control entails a hierarchical mechanism wherein conceptual expectations – action goals – can modulate lower level perceptuo-motor representations. In this paper, we focus on the hierarchical nature of voluntary behavior by distinguishing between perceptual representations of images that relate to attainment of concrete movement goals and conceptual representations of ideas that pertain to attainment of action goals. We review the dominant ideomotor principle of the direct perceptuo-motor relation and examine its limitation in the light of the proposed hierarchical view of voluntary behavior. Finally, we offer a revision of the ideomotor principle that allows extension of its explanatory domain from perception-guided movement to conceptual, idea-guided action.

Is historical institutionalism bunk?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Mark Blyth, Henry Farrell, and Abe Newman for their bountiful patience. Notes 1 I would not characterize my approach as unfriendly to historical institutionalism. I explicitly rely on HI scholarship to articulate national preferences over regulatory standards (Drezner, 2007 Drezner, D. W. 2007. All Politics is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]: 41–43). My revisionist approach parts ways with HI in thinking of regulatory institutions as an independent source of state power. 2 It should be noted, however, that there is not a lot of institutional politics to this resistance. While Mosley cites the embeddedness of financial interests into the political system, either a pluralist account (Frieden, 1991 Frieden, J. 1991. Invested Interests: The Politics of National Economic Policies in a World of Global Finance. International Organization, 45: 425–51. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) or an argument about the structural dependence of the state on capital (Przeworski and Wallerstein, 1988 Przeworski, A. and Wallerstein, M. 1988. Structural Dependence of the State on Capital. American Political Science Review, 82: 11–29. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Johnson 2009 Johnson, S. 2009. The Quiet Coup. The Atlantic, May [Google Scholar]) would have provided a similar prediction. 3 The omnipresence of the European Union in this special issue is another potential source of concern about the explanatory domain of the historical institutionalist approach. It would be useful in future work to see HI scholarship focus more on emerging markets – as will be discussed below. 4 Susan Sell's essay in this issue is agnostic on the question of regulatory capacity, but her extant work on intellectual property rights suggests that both unembedded domestic actors and states with weak regulatory capacities can still have profound effects on international market regulation (Sell, 2003 Sell, S. 2003. Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Prakash and Sell, 2004 Prakash, A. and Sell, S. 2004. Using Ideas Strategically: The Contest Between Business and NGO Networks in Intellectual Property Rights. International Studies Quarterly, 48: 143–175. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 5 Quoted in Tobias Buck, “EU Wants Rest of World to Adopt Its Rules,” Financial Times, February 18, 2007. 6 This is not inconsistent with a market power approach either. China's market size is growing, but remains appreciably smaller than either the United States or the European Union (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2008 Brooks, S. and Wohlforth, W. 2008. World Out of Balance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 7 Gardiner Harris, “Journal Retracts 1998 Paper Linking Autism to Vaccines,” New York Times, February 2, 2010.

Interrogating the Westermarck Hypothesis: Limitations, Problems, and Alternatives

Westermarck’s Hypothesis (WH) is widely accepted by evolutionary scientists as the best explanation for human incest avoidance. However, its explanatory shortcomings have been largely ignored and it has never been pitted against alternative biological hypotheses. Although WH may account for incest avoidance between co-reared kin, it cannot explain other forms of incest avoidance, and cannot account for the differential incidence of sibling-sibling, mother-son, father-daughter and other forms of incest. WH also faces problems adequately addressing phenomena within its explanatory domain. Neither of the studies generally considered to corroborate WH provides a genuine test of it, and the results of experiments thought to confirm WH are vitiated by methodological problems. The present article considers two alternatives to WH: the shared mother hypothesis (SMH) and the maternal phenotype-matching hypothesis (MPMH). SMH states that human infants imprint on their mother, and then treat as kin those individuals toward whom their mother behaves in akin-like or mate-like manner. MPMH states that humans unconsciously use the maternal phenotype as a visual template for estimating coefficients of relatedness, and that these estimates regulate altruistic and mating behavior. Both SMH and MPMH are able to account for the kibbutz and simpua marriage data, and entail additional epidemiological and experimental predictions. SMH and MPMH have greater explanatory power than WH.

Beyond Westermarck: Can Shared Mothering or Maternal Phenotype Matching Account for Incest Avoidance?

Westermarck's Hypothesis (WH) is widely accepted amongst evolutionary scientists as the best explanation of human incest avoidance. Although WH may account for incest avoidance between co-reared kin, it cannot explain other forms of incest avoidance, and therefore, cannot account for the differential incidence of sibling-sibling, mother-son, father-daughter and other forms of incest. WH also face problems adequately accounting for phenomena within its explanatory domain. Neither of the studies widely thought to corroborate WH (the Israeli kibbutz and Taiwanese simpua marriage studies) provides a genuine test of it, and the results of experimental thought to confirm WH are vitiated by methodological problems. The present paper considers two alternatives to WH: the shared mother hypothesis (SMH) and the maternal phenotype-matching hypothesis (MPMH). SMH states that human infants imprint on their mother, who then treat as kin those individuals towards whom their mother behaves in a kin-like or mate-like manner. MPMH states that humans unconsciously use the maternal phenotype as a visual template for estimating coefficients of relatedness, and that these estimate regulate altruistic and mating behavior. Both SMH and MPMH are able to account for the kibbutz and simpua marriage data, and entail additional epidemiological and experimental predictions. SMH and MPMH have greater explanatory power than WH, and MPMH has greater explanatory power than SMH.

Unification achieved: William Cullen's theory of heat and phlogiston as an example of his philosophical chemistry

William Cullen, lecturer in chemistry at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, spent many years formulating his own theory of heat and combustion, the most developed version of which appears in a little-known set of lecture notes of 1765. Cullen's theory is of particular interest to historians of chemistry as an example of his ideal of ‘philosophical chemistry’, an autonomous branch of natural philosophy distinct from the mechanical philosophy, with its own general laws and explanations of phenomena justified by observation. The theory assimilated Joseph Black's recent discovery of fixed air as well as Cullen's investigations of the generation of heat in chemical operations. It was formulated just one year before British chemists' sudden identification of new ‘airs’ was dramatically to change the field of phlogiston theory. The theory differs in important ways from any version yet discussed. It successfully brought both heat and elective attraction within its explanatory domain. It set out a causal hierarchy which reversed the usual pattern evinced in earlier sets of lecture notes, subordinating the mechanical to the chemical in the form of Cullen's theory of elective attraction. The paper argues that Cullen was attempting to bring the study of heat as well as combustion within the bounds of his ‘philosophical chemistry’ by means of his single unifying theory.

Theoretical Integration, Cooperation, and Theories as Tracking Devices

The theoretical problem of integrating evolution, heredity, development, and cognition has a long pedigree with a complicated history. Many of these fields were considered the subjects of one science in the 19th century (Maienschein 1987). Leading theoretical biologists of the age wrote large, expansive treatises that biologists now can read only with equal measures of wonder and incredulity: wonder at their wide and deep learning and incredulity at their peculiar visions of biological integration. Think of Herbert Spencer (1900, pt 2: 367): “Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from a relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” Or consider Ernst Haeckel (Gastraea theory), Hans Driesch (entelechies), August Weismann (biophors, ids, idants), and even Charles Darwin (use inheritance, pangenesis). None of these ideas were especially crazy in their time, but they drove integration projects that are quite different from ours. Historically, each of these special subjects has been a contender for the role of primary theory from which an understanding of all biological phenomena would flow. To take but a few examples, Dobzhansky (1973: 125) gave us “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” on behalf of Darwin’s theory. De Vries gave us his Mutationstheorie and Johannsen his pure line theory as alternative explanations of the root cause of hereditary change. Both were intended originally to replace natural selection as theoretically primary. Driesch gave us entelechies of individual development as a fundamental philosophical principle for the biological sciences. James Mark Baldwin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Francisco Varela, Rupert Riedl, and Donald Campbell, in very different ways, put cognition in the center of theoretical concern for general biological science, evolution in particular. Thinking about integration from the point of view of any of these specialties has traditionally depended on a notion of unification by explanatory theory reduction: explanations flow from a fundamental primary theory to phenomena that are organized at the surfaces, so to speak, of those phenomena considered central for the primary theory—for example, trait heredity and organism development in the light of evolution in Darwin’s day, or population change and the development of hybrids in the light of Mendelian heredity circa 1905, recapitulation and phylogeny in the light of ontogeny in Haeckel’s, de Beer’s, and Gould’s days (Haeckel 1866; de Beer 1930; Gould 1977), learning as coequal to inheritance and selection as a force in evolution. In the 20th century, phenomena have tended to be organized hierarchically, in terms of the composition of matter from the smallest to the largest units, so that there is a general expectation and drift of reductionism toward lower levels of compositional organization—to the behavior of smaller and smaller bits of matter—as the primary concern of fundamental theory. In biology, this reductionist drift led theorists from organisms to organs and tissues, to cells, and on to molecules as the foci of theoretical interest. Genes, the “molecules of life,” have been the focus of biological reductionism for nearly all of that century. A different model of integration centers on cooperation and communication among theoretical and phenomenal equals, rather than on imperialism and competition for primacy and fundamentality, which reduces or replaces one theory by another or trivializes one explanandum as epiphenomenal to another. An explanatory domain can become integrated when its bumps, twists, and turns are smoothly traversable, but we need not achieve integration by leveling the domain and making it conceptually homogeneous, just as nation-states can be unified by the smooth flow of goods, services, people, and ideas across their borders rather than by the obliteration of local and regional differences making flow irrelevant.

Transmissibility and the role of the phonological component

Determining the structure of the phonological component is crucial in understanding the predictive power of theories of transmissibility like Evolutionary Phonology. This article argues for a highly restricted, innatist phonological component. It discusses two testable predictions: the 'straitjacket' effect limits functionally well-motivated phenomena in arbitrary ways, the 'functional ignorance' effect means that some functionally well-motivated phenomena never occur. A restricted phonological component means that the explanatory domain of Evolutionary Phonology (and theories of transmissibility more generally) is i-language external phenomena, such as typological frequency.

What was classical genetics?

I present an account of classical genetics to challenge theory-biased approaches in the philosophy of science. Philosophers typically assume that scientific knowledge is ultimately structured by explanatory reasoning and that research programs in well-established sciences are organized around efforts to fill out a central theory and extend its explanatory range. In the case of classical genetics, philosophers assume that the knowledge was structured by T. H. Morgan’s theory of transmission and that research throughout the later 1920s, 30s, and 40s was organized around efforts to further validate, develop, and extend this theory. I show that classical genetics was structured by an integration of explanatory reasoning (associated with the transmission theory) and investigative strategies (such as the ‘genetic approach’). The investigative strategies, which have been overlooked in historical and philosophical accounts, were as important as the so-called laws of Mendelian genetics. By the later 1920s, geneticists of the Morgan school were no longer organizing research around the goal of explaining inheritance patterns; rather, they were using genetics to investigate a range of biological phenomena that extended well beyond the explanatory domain of transmission theories. Theory-biased approaches in history and philosophy of science fail to reveal the overall structure of scientific knowledge and obscure the way it functions.

Self-Categorization, Status, and Social Influence

The domain of social influence is central to social psychology, and is claimed as a core aspect of the explanatory domain of two important theories: self-categorization theory and the theory of status characteristics and expectation states. In this paper we contrast predictions derived from each theory about the relative influence of group members who differ both on shared category membership and on status characteristics. In the first of two experiments, participants were asked to decide which of four people were most likely to know the correct answer to a task; shared group membership, relative group status, and relevant/irrelevant expertise were varied. We found both status and in-group identity effects. A second experiment provided evidence about the importance of perceptions of relative competence and similarity, as related to shared identity and status, in the influence process.

Symbolic Interaction and Transformation of Class Structure: The Case of China

So far, research on the shaping and change of class stratification has remained a territory for Marxist and Weberian scholars and, to a lesser degree, for functionalist scholars. The outcome in the explanatory domain is the production of a tremendous amount of knowledge concerning the relevance of structural conditions and power. Unfortunately, however, the significance of meaning as an independent explanatory variable has been neglected. This article attempts to tackle the neglected dimension empirically, using a revised macro‐level symbolic interactionist approach. Its objectives are twofold: to reveal the crucial impact of meaning on the radical change of class structure in the context of China's economic reform and to demonstrate the potential of symbolic interactionism for studying macro‐level sociological phenomena such as class stratification.

Précis ofFrustration Theory: An Analysis of Dispositional Learning and Memory

This is a précis of a book on frustration theory, whose explanatory domain includes a family of phenomena that have been summarized by the terms dispositional learning and memory-systems that ordinarily have a long-term historical etiology, and in which the learning is relatively reflexive and the memory implicit and not strongly episodic. The book is an attempt, in the context of stimulus-response learning theory, to present in some detail an animal-based model of frustration as it is applied to a limited-but still large-number of these experimentally established phenomena (perhaps the largest number organized by any one such theory). These bear some resemblance to equivalent phenomena in humans, to which the descriptive terms arousal, suppression, persistence, and regression have been applied. An explicit caveat is that this is a book on one particular theory of frustration and not a book on frustrationtheories. Whereas it does address other theories of frustration, its main purpose is to review a line of theorizing and experimental research that has evolved over some 40 years: an analysis of the status of the concept of frustration in learning theory.

Frustration theory--many years later.

The role of frustration in learning theory, in the invigoration of behavior and in the development of learned persistence and discrimination learning, is conceptualized. This and other phenomena are facets of the larger explanatory domain of what has come to be known as frustration theory, a theory that has guided the author's own research--from behavioral to developmental to psychobiological --until the present time and has had some influence on the research of other investigators. This is a commentary on the 1st of several published theoretical papers on frustration theory.