Methodological Opportunities Research Articles

Health consequences of harmful chemicals in foods: insights from the WHO Global Burden of Foodborne Disease Study

Abstract Foods can be an important source of human exposure to harmful chemicals. Contamination can occur at any stage of the food chain; with chemicals that occur naturally or by anthropogenic pollution in the environment and during production processes from farm level to the kitchen of the consumer. The variety of chemicals in foods is broad and associated with a wide range of adverse health effects. Where toxicological risk assessment of chemicals in foods serves the purpose of protecting populations from exposure levels constituting a health concern, burden of disease methodology provides a quantitative snapshot of the current impact of chemicals on disease occurrence and population health. This allows for the comparison across hazards, health effects and foods and eventually prioritized allocation of resources to maximize health benefits. Following the advice by the World Health Organization Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference group (WHO/FERG), WHO published in 2015 the first estimates of the global burden of foodborne disease. More than 400,000 deaths and 33 million disability-adjusted life years were estimated due to unsafe foods in 2010; the largest proportion due to foodborne pathogens, as the contribution of only 3 chemical hazards (dioxins, aflatoxin B1 and cassava cyanide) was included. WHO, once more under the advice by the re-established WHO/FERG (2021-2025), is currently working to update the 2010 estimates. Besides applying updated data and methodological improvements in managing data gaps and time series analysis, WHO’s ambition is to consider a wider range of chemicals and associated health effects for the year of 2020. In this presentation, we will share insights on the WHO estimates of the global burden of foodborne chemicals, and explore the methodological opportunities and challenges that estimating the burden of foodborne chemicals provides for informing policies.

Mail art methods and the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease

ABSTRACT Building on geographic scholarship around disability and drawing on a programme of arts-based research, we bring attention to the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease. Seeking creative methodological opportunities, we invited families to send us postcards as a means of sharing experiences and reflections. We contextualize the emergence of the postcard as a modality of communication, situating our work within a wider epistolary and artistic tradition, before examining the opportunities postcarding might produce for geographic and broader qualitative research, noting the forms conduciveness to multimodality and recent calls for more engagement with the medium. We detail our own practices of participatory postcarding and the questions, challenges, and hopes such raised. Analysing the postcards received, we discuss how such helps understand the shifting social and cultural geographies of rare disease, reflecting on themes of (in)accessibility and exclusion, changing domestic geographies, and the importance of, and challenges associated with, family-based identities and communities in the context of rare disease. Such highlights opportunities for disability geography to engage in cross-cutting conversations and agenda-building with the nascent area of family geographies, along with further geographic inquiry into the spaces and worlds of rare disease.

Literature review on perception and evaluation criteria of soundscapes among sighted and visually impaired individuals

The sound and its qualities are important of the quality of built environments. The concept of soundscape, rooted in user's subjective perception of context, plays a crucial role in peoples' overall assessment of their surroundings. This study attempts to discern the similarities and differences in soundscape perception and evaluation between sighted and visually impaired users through a literature review. The results suggest that visually impaired people perceive soundscapes as having the additional role of helping to understand spatial boundaries and providing information about the external environment. The soundscape assessment protocols were adapted both to take account of this feedback and to compensate for their inaccessibility (e.g., questionnaire format and potential hazards associated with soundscapes). The review output also suggested that visually impaired people orient their impressions more towards their expectations. Particularly, the impact of event-based sounds, characterized by spatial and semantic features, extends to influencing their experiences and behaviors within a given space. Despite distinctions, there exist commonalities in their perception of certain acoustic features between visually impaired and sighted individuals, such as sounds from nature having a positive effect on both groups and mechanic sound noted as negative. This review ends by listing research gaps and methodological opportunities.

Making Archives in Place: adopting a creative exchange approach in heritage research

ABSTRACT This paper provides a reflexive account of creative exchange in critical heritage studies research. It does so by recounting the methodological opportunities and challenges of researching on a large interdisciplinary heritage programme. We tested this creative exchange approach when undertaking fieldwork with a museum and a history society in the UK’s Clay Country in Cornwall, which resulted in a public-facing output: a short film titled ‘Archives in Place’. We argue that this creative exchange approach enabled us to cross-fertilise our heritage research themes of ‘transformation’ and ‘profusion’, and we illustrate how new insights were revealed through examples taken while we were recording, analysing and editing the short film. By means of conclusion, we encourage heritage researchers to critically engage with methods and to have confidence in experimenting with creative methodologies which have the potential to open up new perspectives for heritage studies.

Last‐Mile Delivery: A Process View, Framework, and Research Agenda

ABSTRACTThe expansion of e‐commerce has increased scholarly interest in Business‐to‐Customer (B2C) last‐mile delivery (LMD). LMD occurs in a unique logistical context and presents many new, evolving challenges worthy of scholarly investigation. While most LMD studies emerged after 2018, existing literature reviews predate the “boom.” Current reviews have focused at the macro‐level, considering LMD secondarily within broad topics like omni‐channel or micro perspectives that address granular issues like transportation within LMD. The majority of studies have focused on analytical models that investigate different concerns compared to conceptual and empirical studies. Our study examines an up‐to‐date sample of 104 articles in LMD literature from a process, meso‐level perspective. We develop a framework, classifying studies around pre‐delivery, delivery, and post‐delivery activities that produce valuable insights linking these activities. We synthesize the prior literature and offer a research agenda that incorporates different stakeholder perspectives and identifies methodological opportunities. The analysis reveals several areas of future research that were validated and enhanced by practitioner interviews.

Revisiting research on the governance of interorganizational relationships

This essay re-examines the literature on the governance of interorganizational relationships, focusing on the insights of alliance research using transaction cost economics. Despite substantial progress, challenges arise because research has not devoted attention to some mechanisms of governance (i.e., administrative controls and supporting legal institutions) compared with others (i.e., incentives). Parties can develop bespoke collaborative agreements that mix and match various mechanisms of governance along these dimensions, rather than accessing a typical bundle commonly associated with a discrete organizational form. This conclusion challenges the iconic governance continuum and surfaces new methodological opportunities for this research stream. The essay also challenges what we think we know by identifying a variety of omitted variable problems that often crop up in governance research (e.g., focusing on the cooperative context of collaboration while not attending to the competitive context, excluding critical administrative structures when studying the interplay between contracts and trust, assuming transactional attributes are exogenous rather than endogenous to a search process, failing to account for shifting institutional supports for collaboration, etc.). By clarifying what we know and do not know about alliance governance, the essay identifies some pathways for developing more reliable, cumulative knowledge on interorganizational relationships.

Christianity and Anthropogenic Climate Change: A Broad Overview of the Catholic Church’s Response and Some Reflections for the Future

Religions play a key role in shaping our worldviews, values, and behaviours and this includes our interactions with the environment. Fuelled by the development of the technocratic paradigm, Christianity has historically received a bad reputation for perpetuating anti-environmental views. Nonetheless, the development of ecotheological strands and the emergence of faith-based organisations focusing on climate justice have aided in producing the much-needed environmental reformulations. As such, this paper seeks to provide a broad overview of the role of Christianity in shaping worldviews, from those hindering environmental action to more contemporary ecotheological approaches discussing climate change, particularly Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’. Christianity’s preparedness to navigate climate change will be theorised in relation to empirical evidence and the work of European faith-based organisations, as well as the methodological opportunities that the field of ecolinguistics can offer to inform effective communication.

Transfer of Ideas and Exile Sociability in Paris, 1830–1848: A Localized Intellectual History

In the 1830s and the 1840s, Paris was a gathering place for numerous political exiles from different nationalities, including Germans, Italians and Poles. The French capital offered them the opportunity to publish, debate and transnationally exchange ideas with one another in ways that were impossible in their home countries. This article develops a research perspective on these exiles that connects intellectual history with urban history and migration history. It proposes a localized intellectual history that studies how political thought emerges in interactions enabled by specific geographical contexts, in this case the Parisian urban landscape and metropolitan culture. The article first argues why the proposed connection between intellectual, urban and migration history needs to be made. Subsequently, three case studies are used to explore the methodological opportunities of this localized intellectual history: the salon of Marie d’Agoult, the Collège de France and the editorial offices of the German exile newspaper Vorwärts. While the three places largely differ in the kinds of sociability that they offered, the intended public and, by extension, the ways in which they stimulated the formation and exchange of ideas, they appear to be connected by the people who frequented them. It will be argued that focussing on these places enables us to study the process of intellectual transfer and how it is informed by the characteristics of very local geographies, which serve as junctions in the transnational contexts in which modern political ideas, such as nationalism itself, are produced.

Семантико-мировоззренческие аспекты ноосферного взаимодействия в формирующемся многополярном мире в условиях разворота на Восток

The article’s relevance is defined through the necessity, become mature, to rethink the world order functioning on “Western gauges” and to solve a complex of external and internal tasks in mutual connection of blocks of historical and chronological, cultural and educational, and semantic-worldview character. This article touches upon the problem of forming the multi-polar world and defining the Russia’s positions in it in terms of turn to the East. The article’s goal is to substantiate semantic-worldview vision of perspectives of interaction in it. Basic tasks included developing the noosphere approach considered as methodological basis, means semantic-worldview aspects, substantiating on this basis the idea of noosphere interaction and perspectives of its forming. It’s ascertained, that finding by Russia the national identity, allowing to take worthy place in forming multi-polar world, bases on noosphere approach. Necessity to appeal to it is strengthen in critical periods of civilizational development, being the only possible way to solve deep global contradictions. Based on this approach, the Russian authors developed noosphere teaching into paradigm of noosferism (A.I. Subetto), noosphere development (Y.V. Safroshkin), semio-sphere (Y.M. Lotman etc.), “digito-sphere” (O.A. Lavrenova). One else methodological opportunity is semantic-worldview approach (Arabist N.N. Vashkevich), getting especial relevance in the context of Russian-Arabic interaction and of reformatting the world centers of influence. Synthesis of the approaches considered serves as basis for forming the idea of noosphere interaction, which goal is revival of the Russian ethnos and its further development in the interests both of the country and of the forming multi-polar order.

Tailoring responsible research and innovation to the translational context: the case of AI-supported exergaming

We discuss the implementation of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) within a project for the development of an AI-supported exergame for assisted movement training, outline outcomes and reflect on methodological opportunities and limitations. We adopted the responsibility-by-design (RbD) standard (CEN CWA 17796:2021) supplemented by methods for collaborative, ethical reflection to foster and support a shift towards a culture of trustworthiness inherent to the entire development process. An embedded ethicist organised the procedure to instantiate a collaborative learning effort and implement RRI in a translational context. Within the interdisciplinary setting of the collaboration and with the support of a technoethicist, we successfully identified relevant, project-specific challenges and developed a roadmap with derived actions, thus meaningfully integrating RRI into the development process. We discuss the methodological procedure in terms of its effectiveness and efficiency, the allocation of responsibilities and roles, particularly regarding potential frictions in the interdisciplinary context with embedded ethics, and the challenges of the translational context. We conclude that the responsibility-by-design standard effectively established a productive workflow for collaborative investigation and work on ethical challenges. We reflect on methodological difficulties and propose possible avenues to our approach.

Doing sonic urban ethnography: Voices from Shanghai, Berlin and London

Matters of sound and listening are increasingly being attended to across the social sciences and humanities, reflecting what has been termed a ‘sonic turn’ since the early 2000s. In urban ethnographic research, scholars are starting to pay attention to the role of sound in social relations, in expressions of identity and senses of belonging, as well as in processes of othering. In this paper, we explore the theoretical and methodological opportunities of sonic urban ethnography, that is, an urban ethnography that foregrounds sound and listening in theoretical and methodological ways. We argue that the promise of sonic urban ethnography lies in its ability to interrupt the predominant focus on text and the visual by developing expanded practices of listening for alternative ways of knowing and engaging with the urban. We share four empirical vignettes from Shanghai, Berlin and London that illustrate, in their different ways, the power exercised through sound in the urban environment. Our discussion of the empirical cases highlights three key ‘lessons’ for doing sonic urban ethnography.

‘Currying Identities’: A Literary Re-Crafting of South-Asian Identities through Diasporic Women’s Cookbooks

Food has been an enduring presence in the construction of collective identities of migrant communities. From honing cooking techniques and selecting ingredients and tools to developing cultures of consumption and appreciation, diasporic communities seem to hold food as one of the primary markers of identity. Women writers from the diaspora not only emblematized their identities by writing about food but also opened feminist methodological opportunities for writing resistance. These ‘culinary fictions’ have since been mined to delve into the gendering of migrant identities. The genre of cookbooks shares a significant overlap with ‘culinary fiction’ in terms of its scope by stabilizing ‘authentic’ identities. However, it surgically punctures the romantic appeal of food imagination, shifting its focus instead to the labor that produces the sensory stimulation of culinary memory. This article uses this overlap and this gap as incentives to read select cookbooks published in the heydays of culinary fiction. Reading cookbooks against the metrics of labor provides a certain intimacy of engagement that offers entry into complex negotiations of uncertain migrant identities. Affective labor and its postcolonial entanglements have been used as catalysts in the article to read into the multilayered understanding of the politics of women writing about food in the diaspora. To this extent, it will challenge the stabilized ways of reading culinary identities and open food writing to more robust negotiations of gendered writings of food.

Re-thinking rurality: Towards a new research approach and rural-urban spatial gradient establishment in Serbia

The research on the rural-urban gradient in Serbia has been reinvigorated following the debate on rural bias. Rural-urban classification is essential in observing spatial, demographic, socio-economic, and environmental processes. There is no consensus regarding the definition of rural and rurality and it should not be observed separately from urban issues. In Serbia, it is still a matter of dispute. Rural is most often observed through the urban–rural dichotomy and “left behind” for decades. This paper strives for a new theoretical understanding of the rurality in Serbia by introducing rural heterogeneity and ‘continuing’ rurality, considering the transformative phase they are affected by. It induces a process of rethinking what rurality in Serbia is and offers an innovative methodological approach for rural delineation and settlement classification based on three main pillars: settlement patterns, functional patterns, and local relevance. The analysis is conducted on the lowest administrative level in Central Serbia. Five types of settlements are identified: two urban, and three characterized by rural features. The combination of abstractions and the methodological opportunities introduced by rethinking rurality offers geographers and practitioners a powerful methodological tool for the understanding of rural transformations and transitional spatial forms, which underpins planning and policy-making in Serbia.

Positionings Towards the ‘Work-Dogma’ from the Margins: Making Sense of Vulnerabilities and Inequalities in the Interview Situation

The norm of wage labor imposes itself on the unemployed as a material, legal and symbolic-discursive order. As ‘deviants’ from the norm, unemployed people are often confronted with pejorative judgments or social exclusion in everyday life. This paper asks how differently positioned unemployed people living in precarious circumstances position themselves in relation to the norm of employment and critique its accompanying social order. Based on the experiences with 25 interviewees, the paper argues that the social inequalities and power relations associated with the work-dogma permeate the research situation itself. This epistemic tension provides a methodological opportunity to place the interview situation and the mutual address between researcher and interviewee at the center of the analysis. Inspired by <i>Situational Analysis</i> (Clarke) and <i>Interpretative Subjectivation Analysis</i> (Bosančić), a heuristic is developed that focuses on inequalities and vulnerabilities in the research situation. The analysis of the interview dynamics reveals different modes of self-positioning with respect to the wage-labor norm, ranging from an embarrassed subordination under discursively transported subject positions to forms of critical appropriation and affective rejection. By identifying different self-positionings that challenge the norm of employment, the paper situates itself in ongoing debates within critical sociology, feminist epistemology and social philosophy about possibilities of criticism from the margins, arguing for a pluralistic and relational understanding of subversive practices and articulations of critique.

Methodological opportunities for international students acquiring content and language integrated learning in a contemporary educational environment

Russian Federation has consistently ranked among the top ten countries in the world for the number of international students enrolled in secondary and higher education institutions to pursue a specialization. In this context, one of the most crucial and pressing problems of Russian pedagogy is the high-quality education. The current system, however, does not adequately address this issue, as seen by the high number of first-year international students that are expelled each year for not comprehending certain concepts in Russian language. In this regard, the goal of the study was to identify the challenges that prohibit international students from receiving a successful education in Russian universities' junior programs and to devise solutions to these challenges. Monitoring studies were carried out with the help of international students enrolled in the RUDN University's first-year programs for bachelor's, master's, and speciality degrees in order to achieve this objective. The data acquired show that the system of pre-university education for international students has to be modernized in terms of both the Russian language and specific academic areas. Subject-language integration as a learning strategy has enormous methodological promise for raising standards and effectiveness. Content and language integrated learning has a lot of methodological promise for enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of the current system. The author take into account and carefully analyze the technologies and guiding principles of this notion in relation to the duties of preparing international students for pre-university education. The theory and methodology of teaching the Russian language and specialized subjects in the Russian language to foreigners with a professional orientation are being developed by this research, which also helps to develop the conditions for maximizing the educational training of foreign students in Russian universities.

Association analysis of self-reported outcomes with a validated subset.

In health-science research, outcomes ascertained through surveys and interviews are subject to potential bias with respect to the true outcome status, which is only ascertainable with clinical and laboratory assessment. This measurement error may lead to biased inference when evaluating associations between exposures and outcomes of interest. Here, we consider a cohort study in which the outcome of interest is ascertained via questionnaire, subject to imperfect ascertainment, but where a subset of participants also have a clinically assessed, validated outcome available. This presents a methodological opportunity to address potential bias. Specifically, we constructed the likelihood in two parts, one using the validated subset and the other using a subset without validation. This work expands on that proposed by Pepe and enables inference with standard statistical software. Weighted generalized linear model estimates for our method and maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) for Pepe's method were computed, and the statistical inference was based on the standard large-sample likelihood theory. We compare the finite sample performance of two approaches through Monte Carlo simulations. This methodological work was motivated by a large cohort study of long-term childhood cancer survivors, allowing us to provide a relevant application example where we examined the association between clinical factors and chronic health conditions.

Ecological Momentary Assessments in Sociology.

The proliferation of smartphone technology has afforded exciting new methodological opportunities within the social sciences. Ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) leverage this recent technological advancement by tracking the behaviors and perceptions of study participants as they are experienced in real time via smartphone devices in natural environments. Despite their longstanding theoretical interest in how the social environment influences a variety of personal outcomes, sociologists have been slower than many related disciplines to embrace EMAs as a viable methodology. This article promotes the use of EMAs by providing an historical overview of the methodology, highlighting several recent developments within sociology, and exploring future directions while clearly explicating inherent limitations to the EMA approach.

Governance mechanisms, accounting regulation, and corporate disclosure in the aftermath of Covid‐19: Novel research questions and methodological opportunities

AbstractResearch IssueIn this commentary, we sought to highlight research opportunities in terms of how governance mechanisms, accounting regulation, and corporate disclosure were affected by Covid‐19 (C19) and shaped the economic landscape in the post‐C19 period.Research InsightsThe outbreak of the C19 triggered significant researchers' interests in the fields of business and economics for two main reasons: first, to the economic and social consequences of the crisis, and the impact of various policy interventions enacted by governments and supra‐national institutions worldwide and, second, the availability of microdata on the spread of the pandemic and vaccines, complemented economic and financial data to assess the effects of policy interventions in curtailing the crisis.Theoretical/Academic ImplicationsWe envision two potential avenues for further study: first, research on the impact of C19 and policy interventions in areas of interest, and, second, using the C19 disruption as a “laboratory” to unravel research questions on how various characteristics of firms, governments, and regulatory bodies affect the response to systemic crises, assuming that pre‐existing characteristics are not related to the crisis event.Policy ImplicationsRelevant and rigorous research on the effects of C19 and the policy interventions is likely to be informative to governments, financial regulators, and supra‐national institutions facing future instances of systemic crisis.

The contribution of anthropology to the study of Open Dialogue: ethnographic research methods and opportunities.

When Open Dialogue diversifies internationally as an approach to mental healthcare, so too do the research methodologies used to describe, explain and evaluate this alternative to existing psychiatric services. This article considers the contribution of anthropology and its core method of ethnography among these approaches. It reviews the methodological opportunities in mental health research opened up by anthropology, and specifically the detailed knowledge about clinical processes and institutional contexts. Such knowledge is important in order to generalize innovations in practice by identifying contextual factors necessary to implementation that are unknowable in advance. The article explains the ethnographic mode of investigation, exploring this in more detail with an account of the method of one anthropological study under way in the UK focused on Peer-Supported Open Dialogue (POD) in the National Health Service (NHS). It sets out the objectives, design and scope of this research study, the varied roles of researchers, the sites of field research and the specific interaction between ethnography and Open Dialogue. This study is original in its design, context, conduct and the kind of data produced, and presents both opportunities and challenges. These are explained in order to raise issues of method that are of wider relevance to Open Dialogue research and anthropology.

Event-Oriented Organizational Behavior Research: A Multilevel Review and Agenda for Future Research

A large and growing body of organizational behavior (OB) research has adopted what can be termed an “event-oriented” perspective. Broadly speaking, this stream of research focuses on discrete, change-oriented events that occur at different hierarchical levels as well as the impact of such events on employee outcomes. This event-oriented OB research stands in contrast to the traditional focus on the enduring features of people and collectives. Although event-oriented OB research has become increasingly prominent and influential, a systematic and integrative review of this important domain has yet to be conducted. Event-oriented OB research has utilized a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, leading to a fragmented and disconnected literature. A synthesis of extant event-oriented OB studies is needed to obtain a more integrated and holistic view of this domain. In the present review, we propose a four-level framework to enhance our understanding of the types of events studied and synthesize insights from event-oriented OB studies. With this understanding and synthesis, we highlight promising theoretical and methodological opportunities for future research. In sum, our review facilitates a more systematic and refined understanding of events and can assist future event-oriented OB research by highlighting novel avenues for theoretical extensions and methodological improvements.