Narrative Process Research Articles

Ubuntu as an emancipatory framework for teaching and learning in Social Work: A narrative literature review

Due to the fact that it focuses on collectiveness, togetherness, and justice for all, Ubuntu, embodies a transformed and Afro-sensed approach to the processes of teaching and learning. This is particularly vital for social work education because it locates the academic journey of a student within a critical, interactive, and socially engaged paradigm, which is aligned with the values of the wider African society. Through the lenses of Afrocentrism, emancipatory approach and narrative literature review processes, this article uncovers the nexus of Ubuntu and social work in teaching and learning, within a South African context. The discussions draw conclusions that the idea of people’s existence cannot be separated from those around them, thus social work students, exist as a significant part of others. Essentially, this article magnifies the traits of humanitarianism and positive communitarianism within the philosophy of Ubuntu, which can be useful for social work education. Social work teaching and learning need to be the reflection of such harmony, shared morality, oneness, and togetherness for the re-distribution of justice in communities. Most fundamentally, this article emphasises the importance of the philosophy of Ubuntu which needs not only to guide social work practice but also social work education through teaching and learning. How to reference using ASWNet style:Makhanya, T. B. & Mzinyane, B. M. (2023). Ubuntu as an emancipatory framework for teaching and learning in Social Work: a narrative literature review. African Journal of Social Work, 13(4), 179-187. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v13i4.1 Visit journal website: https://ajsw.africasocialwork.net

“Every Day has Enough of Its Own Torment”—A Narrative Study of Life’s Greatest Challenge Among Men in Late Adulthood

The purpose of this study was to investigate stories of life’s greatest challenge among men in late adulthood from a narrative and developmental perspective. The investigations focused on narrative processes and the content of challenge narratives in relation to satisfaction with life and generativity. Narrative processes were analyzed using existing frameworks (Eriksson et al. Identity 20:157–169, 2020). The study showed negative, neutral/vague, redemptive, and a combination of positive and negative emotional sequences, among which negative sequencing was the most common. An additional narrative theme, metareflections of challenges as part of life, involved the conclusion that hardship is simply part of what one may expect from life. Analyses of types of challenges revealed six categories and a secondary coding the adversity of the challenges. In contrast to expectations, redemptive sequencing was not associated with either higher satisfaction with life or generativity. The few differences that emerged in the subsequent analyses showed that participants whose challenges were coded as not expected and potentially disruptive had significantly lower satisfaction with life and lower mean age when the challenge occurred. In conclusion, the study demonstrated the saliency of the challenges’ timing and adversity. Negative framing was common in the challenge narratives of the men in late adulthood, without being negatively associated with satisfaction with life or generativity. The role of negative emotional sequencing in this study adds new perspectives to the emphasis on redemption and positive emotionality for well-being and generativity in later adulthood.

Photo-Elicitation and At-Promise Youth: Sharing Perceptions of Self and Identity

ABSTRACT Adolescents go through a critical process of identity formation. This time in their life can be confusing and having a mentor to provide support and guidance has proven to be helpful and may increase self-esteem, self-efficacy, problem-solving and coping skills in youth. In this qualitative narrative study, at-promise youth from historically oppressed communities (ages 12 to 15) who participated in a 12-week therapeutic youth mentoring program, were interviewed utilizing a creative method called photo-elicitation. Photo-elicitation and semi-structured questions facilitated the narrative interview process allowing the youth to share experiences surrounding identity formation through photographs. Significant findings are presented in narrative form utilizing participant quotes to capture the emotion, language, and perspective of the participants’ perceptions of self and identity. Implications for mental health professionals working with adolescents during a time of self-exploration and identity formation, and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Reconstructed multisensoriality. Reading The Catcher in the Rye

Summary In natural face-to-face interactions, verbal communication always occurs in association with expressions of nonverbal behavior. The functional contribution of these multimodal aspects to the meaning of the message and to its effects fulfils multiple communicative functions that differ according primarily to the speaker’s intentions, to the interpersonal relations between the speaker and the addressee, to the nature of the message, and to the context. When nonverbal behavior is reproduced in a written literary text, it becomes functional to the textual and narrative process as it serves as a signifier for the reader. A fictional character is never fixed and unchanging. Through writing, each author encourages the explicit or implicit evocation of a multisensory world, which readers decode and reconstruct, inevitably conditioned by their cognitive and cultural environment. In this paper, we refer to Salinger’s famous novel The Catcher in the Rye to analyze the literary valence of representing the characters’ multisensory communication, focusing on the core relationship between the explicit and the implicit parts in reconstructing the psychological depth of a literary character.

Generating walkability concept for basuki rahmat corridor: a content analysis

Walkable City is a term for a city that has good pedestrian paths by considering 6 aspects such as connectivity, linkage with other modes of transportation, sound land use patterns, safety, quality of pedestrian paths, and the condition/atmosphere of pedestrian paths (Southworth, 2005). This study focuses on the Tunjungan area, specifically the Jalan Basuki Rahmat corridor, as it is crucial for accessibility to the trade and service area of Surabaya City. The objective of this study is to evaluate the environment of the Basuki Rahmat Street corridor and assess the current condition of pedestrian pathways. The research inquiries are as follows: 1. Identifying Basuki Rahmat sidewalk condition; 2. Generating Walkability concept through Content Analysis. Before determining the corridor segment for survey purposes, field observations are carried out as a whole. Based on these observations, 2 significant intersections divide the study area into 3 equal sizes. In addition, the existence of bridges as pedestrian crossing facilities and bus stops as pedestrian transit points is an important consideration. The Narrative process is carried out to formulate the concept of developing a walkable city. Based on the analysis results, appropriate development concepts are divided into 2, namely macro and micro development concepts. This is because the analysis of the previous target measures general and specific/detailed things, so it is necessary to distinguish between overall concepts and specific/complex concepts.

Multiple Spaces of Cooking

A recent surge of interest in South Asian culture has met with a wealth of outstanding novels by Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan authors. These writers have contributed a fine balance between historical and modern settings, divergent religions, geographical diverse settings, and a wide range of literary techniques which has earned them worldwide acclaim. Artefacts such as food, clothing, music, art, or literature pertain to culture. Thus, food occupies an important place in the delineation of culture and is used abundantly in South Asian literature. Recent interest in food studies has opened doors to examine how the use of food imagery and metaphor represents complex ideas and deeper meaning in literature. Literary food studies analyses food symbolism to reflect on cultural identity. The domestic arena associated with femininity also becomes a space to reproduce cultural and national identity. Studying ordinary moments in everyday life can yield insights into the culture of the past and present. Women writers have used food and eating to symbolize cultural issues of acceptance, resistance, and preservation of culture, as well as symbols of memory, emotions, narrative history, relationships, power, and consumption.Food is a crucial indicator of individual and social identities. In the context of the diaspora, it is more than an indicator of one's nostalgia and search for rootedness. This paper seeks to explore whether food can be used as a tool of recognition-personal and national.The texts to be taken up for the present study are Esther David’s The Book of Rachel and Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron. in which recipes are interwoven into the texts as part of the narrative process.

Innovative Moments and the Process of Change in the Treatment of Bulimia Nervosa

Problematic patient narratives emerging in the process of treatment have been identified as important factors in the maintenance of psychopathology, and their change is associated with desired treatment outcomes. This increased focus in psychotherapy research has triggered the investigation of innovative moments (IMs) as novelties in patient narratives in therapy. This exploratory study aims to investigate the development of IMs throughout treatment in bulimia nervosa (BN) in a sample of good and poor outcome cases, and examine their longitudinal associations with binge and purge frequency change. IMs were coded in sixty sessions across five good outcome and five poor outcome cases in different stages of treatment. Generalized estimating equation analyses indicated that IMs evolved significantly over time, with different trajectories between good and poor outcome groups. High-level IMs showed higher proportion in the good outcome group at the end of treatment indicating that the ability to elaborate on how and why change might occur (as measured by high-level IMs) plays a role in the process of change in BN. Additionally, both low- and high-level IMs predicted symptom decrease in the following session. The study provides a preliminary understanding of important patient narrative processes in psychotherapy for BN and their association with treatment change.

Designing a Conceptual Framework to Align Learning Objectives to the Interprofessional Education Collaborative Core Competencies: A Narrative Review

Introduction: Early placement of interprofessional education (IPE) in academic curricula may foster foundational learning to shape student attitudes, knowledge, and skills and better prepare practice-ready clinicians for future team-based collaboration. The purpose of this narrative review was to investigate and analyze the current use of IPE in OT and PT higher education. Methods: Three databases, Academic Search Complete, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and ERIC, were searched from 2017 to 2022. Inclusion criteria were articles with full text availability, published within the 5 year search time range from the time of the narrative review process, peer reviewed studies, original research, meta-analysis studies, case studies, and review articles. Duplicates were removed, and studies were excluded if related to only clinical or practice-based healthcare delivery, community health service-learning, virtual or telehealth platforms, not applicable to the disciplines of OT and PT, or not available in English. Results: After filtering and screening articles yielded from the literature review, a total of studies (n = 76) provided considerable evidence for contributing to best-practice guidelines in aligning IPE learning with student outcomes and the Interprofessional Education Collaborative Core Competencies. Substantial evidence was found, which resulted in the creation of a conceptual framework to advance IPE health science education and to meet discipline-specific IPE accreditation standards for OT and PT education. The resultant proposed IPE Conceptual Framework provides alignment of course learning objectives, accreditation standards, institutional and programmatic learning outcomes, and IPEC Core Competencies to create authentic IPE learning activities. Conclusions: This study provides a current review for IPE in OT and PT education in the United States and can have application abroad. The findings guided development of a conceptual framework for alignment of IPEC Core Competencies, curricular outcomes, and accreditation standards. Follow-up studies are recommended to validate the utilization of the proposed framework, and then subsequent research inquiry to further assess IPE effectiveness.

Narrative Processes, the Power of the Image,and Postmemory in a Graphic Novel: The Example of Petit-fils d’Algérie1by Joël Alessandras Petit-fils d'Algérie (2015).

How do narrative processes serve the post-memorial project of the actorialized narrator? This is what we propose to examine here, based on a study of Joël Alessandra's Petit-fils d'Algérie, in which the author, who set out in the footsteps of his ancestors, recounts his trip to Algeria in 2014. This graphic novel has a complex narrative structure, with several narrators, temporal shifts and a great importance attached to the story’s setting. Drawing on the definition of post-memory as an indirect memory of the facts (Howell, 2015) and on the narratology of comics (Groensteen 1999, 2011, 2021), this article examines the close links between narrative processes, their visualisation and the construction of a personal memory which thereby becomes transmissible, before leading to a rapprochement with the notion of the "post-memorial subject" (Fevry, 2018).

SOLVING TOMORROW'S DESIGN CHALLENGES REQUIRES NEW TOOLS FOR LARGE WORLD DECISION-MAKING

AbstractEngineering design research has largely focused on normative models of decision analysis based on small world causal frames where uncertainty can be resolved as probabilities or probability distributions. However, today we need to design solutions for our built environment that are sustainable, just, and able to adapt. Because of the scale and complexity of our world, designs that address sustainability, justice, and adaptability are dominated by unresolvable uncertainty. This requires large world frames and new engineering design frameworks and tools that provide a much broader and nuanced understanding of the impact of our engineering decisions. In this paper we propose that these tools will need to link quantitative and qualitative data and engineering judgment using narrative decision-making processes. To support this, we provide two examples where engineering decision-making is based in part on narrative processes. We then identify five research areas that require additional research to support large-world frames including (1) how can we create microcosms that enable transition between large- and small-world frames and (2) how engineers develop conviction to act using the narratives they create.

Using motor vehicle crash records for injury surveillance and research in agriculture and forestry

Problem: Fatal injuries in the agriculture, forestry, and fishing sector (AgFF) outweigh those across all sectors in the United States. Transportation-related injuries are among the top contributors to these fatal events. However, traditional occupational injury surveillance systems may not completely capture crashes involving farm vehicles and logging trucks, specifically nonfatal events. Methods: The study aimed to develop an integrated database of AgFF-related motor-vehicle crashes for the southwest (Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas) and to use these data to conduct surveillance and research. Lessons learned during the pursuit of these aims were cataloged. Activities centered around the conduct of traditional statistical and geospatial analyses of structured data fields and natural language processing of free-text crash narratives. Results: The structured crash data in each state include fields that allowed farm vehicles or equipment and logging trucks to be identified. The variable definitions and coding were not consistent across states but could be harmonized. All states recorded data fields pertaining to person, vehicle, and crash/environmental factors. Structured data supported the construction of crash severity models and geospatial analyses. Law enforcement provided additional details on crash causation in free-text narratives. Crash narratives contained sufficient text to support viable machine learning models for farm vehicle or equipment crashes, but not for logging truck narratives. Discussion: Crash records can help to fill research and surveillance gaps in AgFF in the southwest region. This supports traffic safety’s evolution to the current Safe System paradigm. There is a conceptual linkage between the Safe System and Total Worker Health approaches, providing a bridge between traffic safety and occupational health. Practical Applications: Despite limitations, crash records can be an important component of injury surveillance for events involving AgFF vehicles. They also can be used to inform the selection and evaluation of traffic countermeasures and behavioral interventions.

Individualized treatment estimates to inform on personalized cancer care decisions for treatment selection and treatment management.

e13571 Background: Clinical trials report average effects of treatments at a population level. However, clinicians must balance treatment benefits against risks to personalize therapy. Here, we present a statistical framework which incorporates real-world data to estimate efficacy and symptom burden for an individual patient. We then assess the potential impact of continuing immunotherapy beyond progression in patients with metastatic solid malignancies on immune-related adverse events, progression, and survival. Methods: We corrected for sampling biases with inverse propensity score weighting (IPTW), and used the IPTW-transformed data to train predictive models of patient outcomes under each option. The models utilize a peer-based similarity based on 222 routinely-collected patient characteristics, such as cancer and treatment specific factors, laboratory tests, demographics, vitals, stage, comorbidities and symptoms, which are extracted from the electronic health record or natural language processing of clinician narratives, and Social Determinants of Health from Census data. We developed our methods on “Dataset A”: 5,919 breast and genitourinary (GU) cancer patients at a tertiary cancer center. We computed individualized treatment effect (ITE) estimates on “Dataset B”: 5,486 breast, GU, and thoracic cancer patients who received immunotherapy. Results: Our approach eliminated biases in Dataset A: the IPTW-transformation reduced the between-group standardized mean difference across identified confounders from an average of 0.225 to an average of 0.022. The similarity model exhibited strong discrimination (ROC-AUC > 0.75), and identified associations between patient characteristics and outcomes that matched clinicians’ expectations. Validations are ongoing to assess the ITE estimates on a held-out subset of Dataset B. These include subgroup analyses for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. Conclusions: We introduce a method to estimate the efficacy and toxicity of interventions, actions, or treatment decisions, which replicates the statistical robustness of a clinical trial while obtaining individualized insights. This framework provides causal estimates of symptom burden and risks of progression and survival to inform clinical decisions, including continuation of immunotherapy beyond progression. After IPTW, confounders in Dataset A were balanced between the treatment groups, with weighted standardized mean differences <0.1. [Table: see text]

Tracking the interplay of narrative and emotion change processes in therapy sessions: The narrative–emotion process video coding system 2.0.

Tracking the interplay of narrative and emotion change processes in therapy sessions: The narrative–emotion process video coding system 2.0.

Portuguese representations in the Semana Santa ritual in Larantuka

The encounter of Indonesian society with foreign cultures leaves a mark on a culture, leaving traces in the form of narratives and symbols. In Larantuka, the encounter of local culture with the Portuguese leaves the Semana Santa tradition or Easter tradition which in the oral narrative and ritual process still presents the Portuguese style. This research was conducted to find out how the presence of Portuguese culture functions in the Semana Santa tradition in Larantuka; and why Portuguese heritage is maintained and preserved in the tradition. Data collection utilized participatory observation, interview, and literature study methods. The results showed that the Semana Santa ritual as a Portuguese heritage still takes place as an annual ritual, the use of Portuguese language in the ritual, symbols, and the Confraria brotherhood formed by the Portuguese. Three important points that become the reason for the Portuguese presence in the Semana Santa ritual are the acculturation process, narratives in collective memory, and the obedience of tradition actors in carrying out ancestral messages.

Dijital Hikaye Geliştirme Etkinliklerinin Ebeveynlerin Dijital Ebeveynlik ve Teknoloji Kullanım Tutumlarına Etkisinin İncelenmesi

A digital story is described as the presentation process of narration in an interactive digital environment based on sound, picture, graphics, motion graphics, images, music, and script. From all these situations forth, this study aims to enable awareness by examining the effect of digital story activities, which is about digital parenting, on parents’ digital parenting attitudes. At the same time, by examining the technology usage of the parents, it aims to put forward their technology usage attitude. This study is designed via a mixed-method research model. The study group of the research is composed of 40 parents. The most significant result of this research is that digital story activities like story development contribute to parents developing awareness of digital parenting.

Aligning story and gameplay through narrative goals

There is consensus that the intersection of gameplay and story is complicated. Some scholars conclude that these elements are fundamentally at odds with one another in game and narrative design. In this paper, we discuss how their relationship is symbiotic—not antagonistic—by articulating a novel nexus between story and gameplay. We term this nexus a narrative goal, defined as a player interpretation of a ludological goal, which in turn is a condition a player is expected to meet to succeed at the game. We articulate this nexus as part of a novel framework centered on Goals, Feedback, and Interpretation (GFI), which is useful for characterizing uniquely narrative phenomena that arises as part of a designer’s effort to align story and gameplay. GFI complements the long-standing Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics (MDA) framework, and we evidence its utility by analyzing problems when trying to align story and gameplay, as well as offering perspectives on how to design them to achieve particular narrative effects. We believe that narrative goals and GFI have potential to clarify the narrative design process, and offer them as conceptual tools for researchers and practitioners to decompose, study, and design a broad class of games that are intended to elicit a sense of story.

How Activated Self-Concepts Influence Selection and Processing of Body-Positive Narratives

ABSTRACT Guided by the self- and affect–management (SESAM) model, the current study employed a selective exposure quasi-experimental design in which women (N = 381; Mage = 31.50, SD = 4.89) chose a narrative genre (romance or career) they would like to read, featuring a thin or large character with low or high body esteem, to examine individual differences that influence story selections and subsequent impacts on their self-concepts. Results indicated participants’ salient self-concepts pertaining to romance and career predicted story genre selection. Participants with higher BMI were more inclined to read narratives featuring a large character. Those who read about thin characters with high body esteem reported the highest state appearance esteem. Participants who read about large, high body esteem characters reported more positive affect than those who read about thin, low body esteem characters. Perceived discrepancies between oneself and the character dampened some positive impacts of exposure to high body esteem characters with greater discrepancies resulting in lower state appearance esteem and less positive affect. Implications for self-consistency in media selection and the role of self-discrepancy are discussed.

Welcome, How Can I Help You? Design Considerations for a Virtual Reality Environment to Support the Orientation of Online Initial Teacher Education Students

Alongside the rapid and broad uptake of online learning in higher education, fully online students report feeling isolated and disconnected from their institutions. Although formal course content may be expertly designed to engage online learners, much of the information provided to support higher education students’ orientation to the institution and to study is presented online in a written static form. Such presentations may not be accessible and engaging and may contribute to feelings of disconnection. Technologies such as virtual reality (VR) are being used in higher education to engage, motivate and connect students in their learning. This paper reports on the early design stages for a VR that aims to support initial teacher education students to connect and engage with key orienting information. The design of the VR was achieved by following a user-centred, iterative engineering design process and design principles of spatiality, interaction and narrative. The VR environment emulates the School of Education’s physical, on-campus reception area to provide an immersive experience where students have a choice in the types and format of key study information they receive. This experience was designed to be utilised in online orientation but also throughout students’ first year of study. Future research directions include collecting student responses to the VR to inform how students can be involved in enhancing the VR so that it supports their learning and sense of connection. Furthermore, future research can aim for the expansion of the VR inclusive of additional information, rooms and buildings and increased capabilities such as gamification and mobile access. This will enable the creation of a valuable teaching resource for online programs.

From career to “coreer”: SIE and personal transformation in later life

PurposeDespite burgeoning self-initiated expatriation (SIE) research, little attention has been given to the personal development that occurs as a result of the SIE. The authors address this gap, exploring how the SIE undertaken by older women contributes to their longer-term life-path goals. As personal development has barely featured in the SIE literature, the authors must draw from a range of other global mobility experiences as a base for identifying the personal development of the older women.Design/methodology/approachThe paper employs narrative inquiry methodology, drawing on in-depth life story interviews with 21 women aged 50 or more, both professional and non-professional, who had taken a SIE. A five-step narrative process using a story-telling approach was the method of analysis.FindingsThe findings indicate that the existing focus on SIE and the work context in the literature needs to become more holistic to incorporate personal change experienced through the SIE. For these older women, the construct of “career” was increasingly irrelevant. Rather, participants were enacting a “coreer” – a life path of individual interest and passion that reflected their authentic selves. The SIE presented an opportunity to re-focus these women's lives and to place themselves and their values at the core of their existence.Originality/valueThe contributions highlight the need for a broader focus of career – one that moves outside the work sphere and encompasses life transitions and the enactment of more authentic “ways of being”. The authors identify a range of personal development factors which lead to this change, proposing the term “coreer” as one that might shift the focus and become the basis for career research in the future. Further, through the inclusion of a group of older women who were not exclusively professionals, the authors respond to calls to expand the focus of SIE studies.

MZ세대 대학생의 미술치료 경험 내러티브 탐구

This study aims to explore the meaning of art therapy for university students belonging to Generation MZ. The participants of this study were three university students from Generation MZ who engaged in a 90-minute art therapy once a week and one additional in-depth interview. This study is based on narrative inquiry process and uses materials such as the participants' artwork, verbatim in-depth interview records, on-site observation records, and more. The findings of the study reveal that the art therapy is a journey toward psychological independence and being themselves. The researcher discussed the subjects who are youth or in the process of transitioning to adulthood based on the research results, and identified the meaning and limitations of this study.