Lone Researcher Research Articles

Evaluation of bone thickness at infra-zygomatic crest region compared with cervical vertebrae maturation index.

Orthodontists should know variation in thickness of infrazygomatic crest region according to maturation status of patients. Therefore, it is of interest to evaluate the thickness of bone at infrazygomatic crest region and to correlate the thickness of bone with cervical vertebrae maturation index (CVMI) incorporating CBCT.A retrospective analysis of 120 patients' CBCT scans60 of them male and 60 female-was carried out. The thickness of the bone was determined at five locations. Using CBCT, the cervical vertebral maturation was created and the Hassel-Farmann index was used for analysis. A lone researcher conducted all of the measurements. Bone thickness of infrazygomatic arch at all five locations was found to increase as the maturation stage progressed from initiation stage to maturation stage. Then there was decrease in the bone thickness in completion stages compared to maturation stage. The thickness of bone at infrazygomatic arch is significantly correlated with CVM stages as determined by CBCT.

Teaching Ethnographic Methods for Cultural Anthropology: Current Practices and Needed Innovation

Historically, ethnographic methods were learned by cultural anthropology students in individual research projects. This approach creates challenges for teaching in ways that respond to the next generation’s calls to decenter anthropology’s White, heteropatriarchal voices and engage in collaborative community-based research. Analyzing syllabi from 107 ethnographic methods training courses from the United States, we find the tradition of the “lone researcher” persists and is the basis of ethnographic training for the next generation. There is little evidence of either active reflection or team-based pedagogy, both identified as necessary to meet career opportunities and diversification goals for the wider field of cultural anthropology. However, we also find that, by centering the completion of largely individual research projects, most ethnographic methods courses otherwise adhere to best practices in regard to experiential and active learning. Based on the analysis of syllabi in combination with current pedagogical literature, we suggest how cultural anthropologists can revise their ethnographic methods courses to incorporate pedagogy that promotes methodologies and skills to align with the needs of today’s students and communities.

A farewell to the lone hero researcher: team research and writing

Criminology have long celebrated the lone hero researcher. Doing and writing up research in solitude has been the key to academic success and institutional promotions. However, the social sciences in general have increasingly moved towards more collaborative ways of doing research, and co-authorship has become more common. In this study, we summarize and discuss the pros and cons of working in teams when doing qualitative research. Drawing upon our own experiences from Mexico and Norway, we argue for a radical approach to team research and co-authorship, which we describe as team writing. Most importantly, we suggest opening up to include stakeholders and community partners, thus challenging the borders between researchers and those researched. This is arguably particularly important for research done in the academic, geographical and topical periphery of criminology. Team research and writing answers some of the critique of power inequality, representativity and lack of diversity in contemporary academic research. We also believe that team research, and writing, can make criminological research more multifaceted, reflexive, and thus better.

Economics and community knowledge-making

ABSTRACT Knowledge-making is a social activity. In this essay, I discuss how the economics discipline may be becoming a bit more cognizant of this fact, even though it goes against a long habit of imagining objectivity to be something attainable by lone (traditionally male) researchers. One promising recent development is the increasing attention being paid to community checks on empirical work in the form of meta-analysis, pre-registered studies, and replication. Another is the recent effort towards professional diversity and inclusion undertaken by leaders of the American Economic Association. To illustrate the importance of these two initiatives, I give an example of how community checks and inclusion of an historically marginalized perspective have exposed biases in previous – supposedly ‘rigorous’ – empirical behavioral economics research. Yet the acknowledgement that knowledge-making is social needs to expand further, into influencing not only how work, but what we work on, and what we work for.

Intrapersonal and Inter-subjective Challenges of Researching Older and Vulnerable Males Convicted of Sexual Offences

ABSTRACT This article presents a sequence of reflexive observations based on my experiences as a lone researcher, conducting sensitive qualitative research with vulnerable adult male prisoners who were convicted of sexual offences. The data collection process was imbued with intrapersonal and inter-subjective challenges, including rapport building with participants, negotiating with gatekeepers, care for vulnerable participants and dealing with the emotional dissonance emanating from the management of unsolicited disclosures. The closed nature of the institution, security processes, hierarchical relations and aspects of the prisoner culture increased the complexity of the research process. It is argued that researching vulnerable groups in sensitive locations is replete with ethical and interpersonal tensions. Given that other researchers conducting sensitive research with hard to reach populations may encounter similar issues, this paper aims to capture in detail some of the difficulties and presents the main points of learning from the experience.

The long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher

As more geographers utilise ethnographic methods to explore pressing contemporary issues such as abandonment, precarity, and resilience, they enter into research environments often defined by social marginality and violence. There are emotional and psychological risks associated with embedded research in such contexts, however these challenges have largely been ignored in existing methodological literatures. A frank debate is needed about the emotional and psychological burden that ethnographic research can exact upon lone researchers and how these burdens interface with researcher identity and positionality. Drawing on a reflexive analysis of the author’s experience of fieldwork in South Africa, this paper highlights the emotional consequences of conducting ethnographic research with marginal groups in dangerous contexts. It specifically examines the ripple effect of exposure to traumatic events that culminated in the author’s diagnosis with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In so doing, the paper draws attention to the acute emotional and psychological consequences of ethnographic research, while also challenging prevalent professional attitudes within the neoliberal university that promote the downplaying or silencing of such repercussions. The paper concludes with a series of suggestions for how (early career) researchers, our discipline, and institutions might better promote and realise an ethic of collective care for field researchers.

Gendered Embodiment of the Ethnographer during Fieldwork in a Conflict Region of India

ABSTRACT Militarization and various forms of state repression are continuous factors shaping daily life and practices in Manipur. Within this context my paper grapples with the impossibility of preparing for ethnographic fieldwork in a conflict region. What does it mean to work as a lone woman researcher and to negotiate various subjectivities like gender, class, and caste during fieldwork in a conflict region? I unpack the experience of preparing for ‘fieldwork’ and what it entails by focusing on the gendered experience of power differentials and negotiations of various subjectivities. I explain how I negotiated my identity as a researcher in the field, what it entailed, and how my gender and marital status affected my interactions. I entered the field as an autonomous doctoral researcher but was reduced to dependency as a presumed unmarried woman. When I faced challenges working with a women’s collective on the issue of religion, it reoriented my study. Finally, I look at some ways in which I practiced self-care through seeking support from informal networks of friendships, support from my partner, journaling and giving time to myself to process the conflicting emotions I felt during fieldwork.

Lessons of a Failed Study: Lone Research, Media Analysis, and the Limitations of Bracketing

Failed research can function as the underbelly of all qualitative research projects that come to fruition. These shadow projects offer invaluable insights to future research and researchers alike. In this article, I trace a failed life history of sex offenders project from its conceptualization to its abandonment, after conducting a series of searches on the online National Sex Offender Registry database. Through the use of preliminary field notes and an analysis of media representations, I examine the role of bracketing of the topic, as a by-product of the phenomenological tradition, and other methodological issues such as physical and emotional vulnerability as a lone researcher, preconceptions harbored about “challenging” populations, and how a research setting can contribute to failed research.

White hats versus vendors: the fight goes on

Education Pro is a highly sensitive piece of software considering it is used only in schools. That’s because the package, from Impero Solutions, is deployed by around a quarter of Britain’s secondary schools to record and restrict their pupils’ Internet use – including their access to extremist Jihadi and neo-Nazi websites. So when in June security researcher Zammis Clark posted a proof-of-concept on GitHub showing how hackers could potentially seize the Pro data schools had on their students – without telling Impero first – he stirred up a storm. Far from thanking him, the vendor called in its lawyers, who gave Clark four days to remove his exploit and all references to it, or they would start legal action. He complied. From lone researchers to elite teams such as Google's Project Zero, bug hunters have one thing in common – they regularly clash with the vendors whose flaws they are revealing. Their running battles arouse strong emotions across the security community and sometimes lead to legal action. But why, after years of clashes, debates and rival manifestos, are we seemingly no nearer to finding the ‘right’ approach to bug disclosure? Tim Ring reports.

Subjective ratings of masker disturbance during the perception of native and non-native speech.

Collections of various types of speech errors have increased our understanding of the acquisition, production, and perception of language. Although such collections of naturally occurring language errors are invaluable for a number of reasons, the process of collecting various types of speech errors presents many challenges to the researcher interested in building such a collection, among them a significant investment of time and effort to obtain a sufficient number of examples to enable statistical analysis. Here we describe a freely accessible website http://spedi.ku.edu that helps users document slips of the tongue, slips of the ear, and tip of the tongue states that they experience firsthand or observe in others. The documented errors are amassed, and made available for other users to analyze, thereby distributing the time and effort involved in collecting errors across a large number of individuals instead of saddling the lone researcher, and facilitating distribution of the collection to other researchers. This approach also addresses some issues related to data curation that hampered previous error collections, and enables the collection to continue to grow over a longer period of time than previous collections. Finally, this web-based tool creates an opportunity for language scientists to engage in outreach efforts to increase the understanding of language disorders and research in the general public.

A Reflexive Autoethnography of Doctoral Supervision

This article traces elements of the learning of a doctoral student. It concerns attempts to bridge a number of gaps between supervisor and student in the process of studying for a PhD. In particular, it portrays differences in culture, gender, family, age, and experience and how those differences influenced the thinking of the student. A layered discourse of readings, misreadings, and rereadings is developed, drawing on the substantive literature on ‘lone motherhood’, on studies of doctoral supervision, and on anthropological insights into the nature of cultural differences. It is a case study in finding the ‘missing’ (or not yet known) person who is the lone mother and the lone researcher who ‘reveals’ herself to herself through interaction with her supervisors. The supervisors are also ‘rewritten’ in their situated self-understandings during this process.

Conducting global team-based ethnography: Methodological challenges and practical methods

Ethnography has often been seen as the province of the lone researcher; however, increasingly management scholars are examining global phenomena, necessitating a shift to global team-based ethnography. This shift presents some fundamental methodological challenges, as well as practical issues of method, that have not been examined in the literature on organizational research methods. That is the focus of this article. We first outline the methodological implications of a shift from single researcher to team ethnography, and from single case site to the multiple sites that constitute global ethnography. Then we present a detailed explanation of a global team-based ethnography that we conducted over three years. Our study of the global reinsurance industry involved a team of five ethnographers conducting fieldwork in 25 organizations across 15 countries. We outline three central challenges we encountered: team division of labour, team sharing and constructing a global ethnographic object. The article concludes by suggesting that global team-based ethnography provides important insights into global phenomena, such as regulation, finance and climate change among others, that are of interest to management scholars.

Conducting Global Team-based Ethnography: Methodological Challenges and Reflections

While ethnography has often been seen as the province of the lone researcher, increasingly management scholars are examining phenomena that are global in nature, necessitating a shift to global, team-based, ethnography. This shift presents some unique methodological challenges, as well as practical issues, that have not been examined in the literature on organizational research methods. That is the focus of this paper. We first outline the methodological implications of a shift from single researcher to team ethnography, and from single case site to the multiple sites that constitute a global ethnography. We then present a detailed explanation of a global, team-based ethnographic research project that we conducted over three years. Our study of the global reinsurance industry involved a team of five ethnographers conducting fieldwork in 25 organizations across 15 countries. We outline three central challenges we encountered; team division of labor, team sharing, and constructing a global ethnographic object, and the methodological implications of our approach to these challenges. The paper concludes by suggesting that global, team-based, ethnography can provide important understanding into global phenomena, such as regulation, finance, and climate change among others, that are of interest to management scholars. The specific challenges we faced, and the particular steps we took to address them, can provide helpful reflections for those seeking to conduct such research projects.

Commentary: Nobody loves a critic: Edmund A Parkes and John Snow's cholera

Science isn’t about being right. It is about convincing others of the correctness of an idea through a methodology all will accept using data everyone can trust. New ideas take time to be accepted because they compete with others that already have passed the test. New thinking needs a strongly favoured methodology and an iron-clad application if it is to triumph, replacing the old. Journal critics are the first line of defence against ideas and research projects that seem promising but have yet to be vetted, their methods analysed carefully. Despite the importance of that service, the critic’s role is typically disparaged because—let us be frank here— nobody likes critics. If they praise something they’re assumed to be sycophants and if they disparage published work they’re dismissed as merely grumblers. History is not kind to critics. Its writers typically dismiss where they do not simply ignore those whose careful reviews argue caution in the face of works destined to become, in the future, classics. Think, here, Prince Peter Kropotkin whose naturalist studies focused upon the limits of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the direction in which research based upon it would be best directed. Only today—more than 130 years later—is the importance of his critique being acknowledged. There are good critics, of course, even great ones. The best are not only prominent in their field but also stylish essayists whose careful insights educate the general and the professional reader alike. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin is a current example, an essayist who enfolds each review within an erudite recital of the state of the science being discussed. The result leaves the reader (and author) gasping: ‘I wish I had said that.’ As an example of a good critic unfairly dismissed by history think Edmund A Parkes, the British physician and researcher who reviewed John Snow’s famous 1855 opus, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. In a seven-page, approximately 7800-word essay, Parkes carefully considered and found wanting Snow’s argument that cholera (and plague, and typhoid fever) was solely waterborne. Although the myth of Snow’s brilliance insists his critics were wrong, a careful reading of Parkes’ concerns insists that the myth of Snow is overstated. Yes, cholera is a waterborne disease. But were we to read Snow’s work with attention but without foreknowledge we, too, would find its argument incomplete. This review of the 19th century debate over cholera has more than historical significance. It pits a simplistic, focused explanation against one that was broad and multifactorial. And, too, it demands attention be paid to the researcher’s methodologies and their sufficiency, not just results. Finally, it pits the myth of the lone researcher against the reality of science as a complex, communal, interactive process. In a time of rapidly evolving, epidemic zoonotics, the lessons of that earlier debate are as contemporary as the evolving state of the mutating coronavirus that so concerns us today.

Alone, Asian and Female: The Unspoken Challenges of Conducting Fieldwork in Dance Settings

This article explores the methodological and emotional challenges of conducting a multi-sited and multi-method ethnography in three diverse dance settings: sweaty dance clubs in the northwest of England, the muddy grounds of a festival site and the sands of Playa den Bossa, Ibiza. Despite overlapping academic and personal interests in these dance spaces, my connection to the field did not equip me for the fieldwork task. In plotting the transition from dance consumer to field researcher, I reflexively analyse how my personal anxieties about entering the field as a novice, lone female researcher have come to shape the research process. In addition to gender, the impact of less prominent facets of my identity, including my ethnicity and social class, are also considered. The article concludes by evaluating some of the retrospective advantages of entering the field as a lone researcher.

A pesquisa de enfermagem e a qualificação da assistência: algumas reflexões

A pesquisa de enfermagem e a qualificação da assistência: algumas reflexões

Paying for interviews? Negotiating ethics, power and expectation

The ethical dilemma of payment or compensation for participation in research remains a core concern for many scholars. Field class teaching is not exempt from these dilemmas and can provide subtly different challenges than those faced by the lone researcher, not least for work within the global South. Through reflections on two field class visits to Kenya, this paper explores issues of reciprocity, communication, trust, power and precedent in the negotiation of payment for participation. Critical reflections identify a number of weaknesses in the decisions made during field classes that are used to highlight the need to recognise and negotiate the tensions between collective and individual ethical negotiations within the context of conducting ethical research within a field class context.

Embarking on large-scale qualitative research: reaping the benefits of mixed methods in studying youth, clubs and drugs.

Qualitative research is often conceptualized as inherently small-scale research, primarily conducted by a lone researcher enmeshed in extensive and long-term fieldwork or involving in-depth interviews with a small sample of 20 to 30 participants. In the study of illicit drugs, traditionally this has often been in the form of ethnographies of drug-using subcultures. Such small-scale projects have produced important interpretive scholarship that focuses on the culture and meaning of drug use in situated, embodied contexts. Larger-scale projects are often assumed to be solely the domain of quantitative researchers, using formalistic survey methods and descriptive or explanatory models.In this paper, however, we will discuss qualitative research done on a comparatively larger scale-with in-depth qualitative interviews with hundreds of young drug users. Although this work incorporates some quantitative elements into the design, data collection, and analysis, the qualitative dimension and approach has nevertheless remained central. Larger-scale qualitative research shares some of the challenges and promises of smaller-scale qualitative work including understanding drug consumption from an emic perspective, locating hard-to-reach populations, developing rapport with respondents, generating thick descriptions and a rich analysis, and examining the wider socio-cultural context as a central feature. However, there are additional challenges specific to the scale of qualitative research, which include data management, data overload and problems of handling large-scale data sets, time constraints in coding and analyzing data, and personnel issues including training, organizing and mentoring large research teams. Yet large samples can prove to be essential for enabling researchers to conduct comparative research, whether that be cross-national research within a wider European perspective undertaken by different teams or cross-cultural research looking at internal divisions and differences within diverse communities and cultures.

Investigación & Reconstrucción de accidentes: La Reconstrucción práctica de un accidente de tráfico

The following article tries to show an approach to the work of a traffic accident investigator/reconstructionist, not only by a theorical perpective but also practical. Therefore, through the exposure of a specific case study, provides a picture of the real problems facing the researcher of an accident reconstructionist, whatever their dependence (police officer, member of varsity, expert , etc) which also must have the knowledge corresponding to the applicable regulations, such as auto mechanics or related to the dynamics of movement. It is currently under creation and deployment of multidisciplinary teams working together researchers from different disciplines, able to carry out reviews of higher quality at the expense of the figure of the lone researcher.

Using participatory research to challenge the status quo for women’s cardiovascular health

Cardiovascular health research has been dominated by medical and patriarchal paradigms, minimizing a broader perspective of causes of disease. Socioeconomic status as a risk for cardiovascular disease is well established by research, yet these findings have had little influence. Participatory research (PR) that frames mixed method research has potential to bring contextualized clinically relevant findings into program planning and policy-making arenas toward developing meaningful health and social policies relevant to primary prevention. In this article we provide an overview of a PR program that included two quantitative and one qualitative studies and then we discuss lessons learned. The PR process we found was empowering for lone mothers, and transformative for lone mothers and researchers. Further, PR as an approach to research opened spaces in practice and policy-making arenas to raise upstream issues relevant to the health of low income lone mothers. We conclude that while PR is an effective approach to social determinants research, as a time-intensive endeavor, and one that does not easily align with research tradition, researchers must consider the strengths and drawbacks of PR when planning to implement such an approach.