Personal Life Experiences Research Articles

Culture for Health – Example from Serbia

Abstract Using the possibility of social prescribing at the community level integrates several sectors, primarily the health sector and the culture sector. The goal of this project was to strengthen intersectoral cooperation (culture and health) and consider the possibility of providing conditions in the local community for continuous prescribing of the culture ‘on prescription’. Institute for Public Health of Vojvodina invited Matica Srpska Gallery to participate together with the Novi Sad Healthcare Center in a unique project that connects culture and health. The ‘Culture on prescription - culture for health’ consisted of two phases: curatorial guidance and group workshops. Curatorial guidance means the selection of individual works of art whose narration is planned and methodologically adapted to different groups of participants and which evokes different feelings related to quality of life and health. The second part of the program consisted of workshops in the Museum, enriched with works of art and a pleasant atmosphere.The workshops are based on group analytical methods and participants had the opportunity to reflect their observations, experiences and feelings on individual works of art, and they often reflected with personal life experiences that were not only aesthetic, but also pleasant and therapeutic. Participants came in two sessions, with two different curatorial guides, carefully thematically prepared, and which were later the source for substantive reflection. The positive outcomes of these innovative workshops was confirmed through written and oral facts, through which the participants emphasized that the stay in the museum space was therapeutic in itself. The possibility of the so-called ‘depot’ or prolonged effect of the unique prescription was observed, emphasizing that the participation in the workshops left an impression on the participants and that they will stay with a positive feeling and pleasantness after receiving a ‘dose’ of culture for health.

Benefits and barriers of participating in community sport for individuals with an intellectual disability.

In recent years, there is an increasing number of individuals accessing integrated community sport clubs in Australia. The objective of this study was to explore the benefits and barriers of participating in community sport directly from the perspectives of the individuals with the intellectual disability. This qualitative study provided an appreciation of the lived experienced of participating in community sport for individuals with intellectual disabilities. A total of 29 participants shared their personal lived experiences in a series of focus groups. Data from the focus groups was transcribed and coded using a thematic analysis. Results highlight that participation in community sport increased exposure to social capital, ameliorated interpersonal skills, confidence, leadership, and respect, in addition to enhancing ability to develop and achieve personal goals. Findings illustrate the need for increased awareness about community integrated sport in schools and communities to increase participation in the programs.

“No Way Out”: The Gothic Concept of Home in Shirley Jackson’s Horror Fiction

The “haunted house formula” is a central component in every Female Gothic narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, it revolves around a heroine trapped in a gloomy mansion, seeking to escape a male villain. This trope, which covertly explores feminine anxieties such as domestic confinement and familial oppression, recurs multiple times in Shirley Jackson’s “house trilogy” as well, namely The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. However, as noted by many critics, while Female Gothic narratives usually conclude with the protagonist’s successful escape and her marriage to the male hero, in Jackson’s fiction, there is “no way out”. Her protagonists remain confined within the domestic space. This essay explores Jackson’s reappropriation of the haunted house trope as a symbol of the paranoia experienced by women in 1950s suburban America. The analysis begins by outlining the theme in traditional Female Gothic fiction, followed by an account of the sociohistorical context in which Jackson operated, without dismissing the significancy of her personal life experiences as well. Jackson’s “house trilogy” will then be examined, paying particular attention to the ways in which the haunted house formula is subverted to function not as an escape narrative, but as a metaphor for modern women’s inescapable confinement.

Study on the Influencing Factors of Adolescent Mental Health

Adolescent mental health is a popular topic of general concern to the global public, and there are many researchers already finding out various factors that lead to psychological problems represented by depression. However, usually one study only focuses on the analysis of one factor, causing it being lack in a comprehensive consideration of the personal life experience of adolescents. Therefore, this paper collects the questionnaire dataset on Kaggle website and conducts correlation and stepwise regression analysis to explore the factors leading to adolescent depression through the score evaluation on the questionnaire. The results show that typical factors such as teacher-student relationship, academic performance, and safety have a negative impact on adolescent depression, while factors like study load, extracurricular activities, noise level have a positive impact on adolescent depression. Based on this conclusion, this paper suggests that schools should pay more attention to adolescent mental health to ensure that they thrive.

The Insider’s Journey: Two Investments for Epistemic Justice in Educational Research

The extent to which any social scientist is authentically an insider continues to be a spirited debate within qualitative circles. Amid this weighty dispute, “insider” researchers, or me-searchers, maintain that we have certain advantages in conducting qualitative inquiry in marginalized communities that mimic our personal histories and life experiences. This article reports my first professional study as a publicly engaged scholar who directed an ethnographic childhood lead poisoning study among my cultural group, and the ways in which that initial investigation formed the trajectory of my identity as an educational researcher. Two investments needed by African American me-searchers, regarding personal and professional contributions for qualitative inquiry among marginalized people, are explored. Upon reflection, disclosure of the insider’s personal history and the inclusion of the researched as affirmed collaborators in studies that impact their lives are determined to be prerequisites to epistemic justice.

Sense of coherence in the life experiences of persons with schizophrenia living in the community

Sense of coherence in the life experiences of persons with schizophrenia living in the community

코로나19 팬데믹 상황에서 초기 청소년의 가정에서의 경험과 변화에 대한 개념도 연구

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the conceptual structure of early adolescents' experiences and changes at home in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: For this purpose, focusing questions were developed to generate ideas from 20 male and female students in the first and second grades of middle school, and ultimately 62 statements were derived. Research participants rated the similarity classification of the final statements and the degree to which they matched their own experiences and changes, and based on the results, multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis were performed to derive a concept map. Results: As a result of the study, the concept map was classified six clusters and composed of two dimensions : ‘the experience of living with family members’ vs. ‘personal life experience (x-axis)’and ‘class and academic attitude vs personal activities (Y-axis)’. Six clusters were ‘increased worries and conflicts about family members’, ‘as family members spent more time together, intimacy increase’, ‘changes in personal life patterns at home and opportunities for personal growth’, ‘changes in personal life patterns and increased negative emotional experiences’, ‘increased personal activities at home’, ‘changes in (online/offline) class and academic attitudes during the COVID era’. Second, as a result of evaluating the degree of agreement, the research participants recognized the ‘increased personal activity at home’ cluster as most consistent with their own experiences and changes. Conclusion: Based on these research results, implications regarding educational intervention and support plan for the healthy growth of early adolescents who experienced COVID-19 were discussed.

Notes on Le Grand Macabre and the Aesthetics of Camp

The article presents an analysis of the features of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, indicating that it belongs to the camp aesthetics. The starting point for the analysis is the features of this aesthetic/sensitivity described by Susan Sonntag in her Notes on Camp. The opera’s libretto, its theatrical and musical layers, as well as Ligeti’s personal life experience as a composer – important for camp – are the subject of the analysis. Keywords: Camp, opera, Ligeti, Sonntag, postmodernism

Being different: what it means to be a person with albinism in Nigeria

Persons with albinism experience visual impairments and have unusually white hair and skin colour. In Nigeria, they face social disadvantages due to misconceptions about albinism, which create barriers to equal participation in education, employment, and society. This study explored the life stories of persons with albinism in Nigeria to understand the meanings they ascribe to their experiences. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology, forty-two interviews were conducted with eleven persons with albinism. ‘Being Different’ emerged as the main theme representing the life experiences of persons with albinism in Nigeria from childhood to adulthood. Participants expressed ‘Being Different’ through subthemes such as ‘being in a tug of war’, ‘disadvantaging schooling system’, and ‘suffering double tragedy’. The study concludes that strongly enforcing anti-discrimination laws, promoting inclusive education, and regularly educating the public about albinism can significantly reduce the negative effects of ‘Being Different’ in Nigeria.

“It’s like building a new person”: lived experience perspectives on eating disorder recovery processes

BackgroundDeeply engaging with the expertise of those who have experienced or supported someone with an eating disorder can add to a growing body of knowledge about recovery processes. In this qualitative study, we sought to explore and generate nuanced understandings of recovery experiences of people with a lived ED experience (first hand or as a caregiver) who were working as mentors in the field. To do this, we focused on changes that occur in personality, traits, and interests over the course of an eating disorder and into recovery.MethodWe conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 people with an eating disorder history, either through personal lived experience (n = 14) or as a caregiver of a loved one with an eating disorder (n = 13). We undertook a reflexive thematic analysis of the data through a critical realist lens.ResultsWe developed three themes, which illustrate the nonlinearity, relationality, and systemically linked nature of changes across experiences of having and recovering from an eating disorder. The first theme focuses on expansion; participants described how their worlds got bigger as they explored who they were becoming and discovered new ways of living in line with their values. The second theme emphasizes the balance between support and autonomy participants described as important for enabling change to occur across the recovery process. The last theme highlights the ways in which changes throughout the recovery process entwined with systemic factors, including actively pushing back against diet culture and weight stigma.ConclusionsParticipants’ stories highlight interactions between individual, relational, and societal shifts that occur throughout the course of an ED and into recovery. They support ongoing calls to orient to ED recovery as situated within a broader social milieu, which invites us to build supportive environments to enable expansion and flourishing.

Curriculum as ‘folding’ democratic practice: Integrating Deleuzian and Deweyan philosophies with the lived experiences of English teachers

AbstractThis article advocates the revision of the English as an Additional Language (EAL) Curriculum in Australia into a “curriculum as ‘folding’ democratic practice”, a concept deeply informed by the lived experiences of sixteen teachers of English from multilingual backgrounds. Using hermeneutic phenomenology and narrative inquiry, this study explores how these educators leverage their personal and professional lived experiences to transcend the limitations of a curriculum dominated by Australian Standard English. These narratives highlight the adaptation of the curriculum through ethical engagements with learners’ diverse needs, embodying democratic and pluralistic approaches. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s (1993) concepts of the “fold” and “molecular possibilities” and John Dewey’s “democratic education” (1916), the research illustrates the potential of a responsive and inclusive curriculum that fosters intercultural capabilities in superdiverse classrooms. This study advocates an EAL curriculum that not only imparts linguistic skills but also prepares learners for meaningful participation in a globally interconnected society, extending the scope of English language education and teacher capabilities in Australia and beyond. The research highlights broader implications for other subject-related curricula, suggesting principles that could foster inclusivity and intercultural understanding.

Exploring career choices of specialist nurse students: Their decision-making motives. A qualitative study.

To explore Registered Nurses' motives to undergo specialist training and to choose a particular speciality. A descriptive qualitative interview study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted during 2021 with 20 Swedish specialist nurse students from different specialisation areas. Qualitative content analysis was used. The COREQ checklist was used to report the study. Specialist nurse students' motivations for further training were divided into three main categories with two sub-categories each. The main categories were 'toward new challenges and conditions in work life', 'contributions to the development and higher competencies in health care' and 'personal work and life experiences as ground for choice'. Our study demonstrates the importance of motivating factors in the career choices of Specialist nurse students, such as personal challenges, desirable working conditions, career growth opportunities and personal experiences in the career choices. Creating a supportive work environment that helps to prioritise work-life balance and offers the development of new skills might help retain nurses. No patient or public contribution was used. However, if more nurses would choose to undergo specialist training, especially in areas facing significant shortages, it would most likely lead to improved health-related outcomes for patients or populations.

Lived Experiences of Adolescent Mothers in their Transition to Motherhood in a Rural Barangay

This descriptive phenomenological type of study employed Giorgi’s Phenomenology with transcribed semi-structured face-to-face interviews to provide detailed examinations of personal lived experiences among the selected adolescent mothers in Barangay Rizal, Surigao City. Ten informants were selected using the criterion-based purposive sampling method specifying those who are mothers aged between 10 to 19 years old, have given birth to one live baby, are residents of Barangay Rizal, and are living with their parents who underwent struggles in transitioning to motherhood only. The emergent themes from the study revolved around three key aspects: physical problems, insufficient support, and mental and emotional distress. The journey into motherhood, while transformative for any woman, presents a unique set of challenges and complexities for adolescent mothers. Their experiences were vividly expressed in their narratives, showcasing a range of emotions including fear, uncertainty, and the simultaneous joy of motherhood. As they grapple with their new responsibilities, they also face the ongoing challenge of identity formation as adolescents. Throughout their journeys, there is a prevalent theme of profound personal development. This study serves as a very useful and trustworthy input for the creation and execution of specific programs and treatments that address specific challenges faced by adolescent mothers as they transition to motherhood.

Sacred breath: Ohio nurses respond to COVID-19

In the fall of 2021, the Wick Poetry Center, a recognized international leader in creative writing interventions, launched the website Sacred Breath: Voices of Ohio Nurses in Response to COVID-19 (sacredbreathproject.com) with funding from the Ohio Nurses Foundation. The purpose of the website was to offer Ohio nurses an accessible platform to reflect on their personal and professional lived experiences as caregivers during an historic time of pandemic, sacrifice, uncertainty, and scarcity, and to share their voice with others. What resulted was 204 submissions over a three-month period with participant responses touching on widespread sentiments including grief, fatigue, anger, and resilience. It was from the gap in the current literature on pandemic narratives that the researchers of this study began a basic qualitative thematic analysis of the Sacred Breath project website (SBP) responses to gain a better understanding of how nurses, nurse educators, and nursing students made sense of and gave voice to their personal and professional lived experiences during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.While stories of nursing during the Covid-19 pandemic have been widely available and disseminated by popular media, academic studies have been slower to utilize qualitative and experimental methods to specifically address pandemic narratives and the resulting discourses by nurses working in and around clinical settings. The Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University has spent nearly forty years working in the community to address urgent social needs using expressive writing methods that are often overlooked by traditional social and arts outreach. The Wick Poetry Center engaged local academic networks and community health partners to invite nurses, nursing students, and nurse educators the Sacred Breath Project By evaluating responses to the intervention website, this qualitative study is aimed to fill this gap in the current literature as well as begin to understand how nurses made sense of their work lives during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.What does this paper contribute to the wider global clinical community?What is already known:•The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in substantial increases of alarm fatigue, moral distress, and dysfunctional coping mechanisms among clinical nurses.•Art interventions positively impact mental health conditions in nurses.What this paper adds:•This review of the Sacred Breath thematic analysis broadens the understanding of how nurses made sense of their work lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.•This review creates a new discourse about the nursing profession in times of crisis—one cocreated by practitioners, educators, students, and creative intervention participants.

Heterogeneous experience and constant-gain learning

Recent evidence suggests that agents may base their forecasts for macroeconomic variables mainly on their personal life experiences. We connect this behavior to the concept of constant-gain learning (CGL) in macroeconomics. Our approach incorporates both heterogeneity in the life cycle via the perpetual youth model and learning from experience (LfE) into a linear expectations model where agents are born and die with some probability every period. For LfE, agents employ a decreasing-gain learning (DGL) model using data only from their own lifetimes. While agents are using DGL individually, we show that in the aggregate, expectations follow an approach related to CGL, where the gain is now tied to the probabilities of birth and death. We provide a precise characterization of the relationship between CGL and our model of perpetual youth learning (PYL) and show that PYL can well approximate CGL while pinning down the gain parameter with demographic data. Calibrating the model to U.S. demographics leads to gain parameters similar to those found in the literature. Further, variation in birth and death rates across countries and time periods can help explain the empirical time-variation in gains. Finally, we show that our approach is robust to alternative ways of modeling individual agent learning.

Curating Community behind Barbed Wire: Canadian Prisoner of War Art from the Second World War

Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives and in Canadian military historiography more broadly, the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of war art. In an attempt to see past the mythologised versions of POWs that appear in Hollywood films, best-selling monographs, and other forms of popular culture, it is through bits of ephemera—including wartime log books and the drawings carefully kept and sent home to loved ones along with handwritten letters—that the stories of non-combatant men and women who spent their war as POWs, can be told. Together, Canadian POWs created and curated community and fostered unconventional family ties, sometimes called “emotional communities”, through the collection and accumulation of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and other examples of war art on the pages of their wartime log books while living behind barbed wire. This article uncovers some of these stories, buried in the thousands of boxes in the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Public stigma against fentanyl overdose decedents in the United States: A conjoint vignette experiment

The United States is facing a drug overdose crisis, and stigma against people who use drugs is a major roadblock to implementing solutions. Despite the public health importance of understanding and mitigating substance use stigma, prior research has focused mainly on perceptions of individuals with substance use disorders and a limited set of demographic traits. This leaves critical gaps in our understanding of stigma against fentanyl overdose decedents, who represent a much broader group, including people who use substances recreationally. This study develops a more robust understanding of these attitudes through an experimental vignette survey fielded to a national sample of American adults (n = 1432). Respondents were shown two fictional fentanyl overdose obituaries where a complex suite of decedent characteristics—including demographic traits and contexts of substance use—were randomly varied in a conjoint design. Respondents then endorsed one of the two decedents for each of several attitudinal outcomes, including blameworthiness and support for various interventions, and justified their choices in an open-ended format. Results indicate that the public assesses victims of fentanyl overdose meritocratically, making judgments based on personal history and life experience rather than traditional race, class, and gender status beliefs. While certainly a signal of progress on some fronts, this meritocratic lens conflicts with the public health model of addressing the overdose crisis and exposes the alarming persistence of explicit stigma against people who use drugs.

Wilhelm Dilthey's Thoughts on Understanding, Hermeneutics and Communication

Wilhelm Dilthey, a towering figure in the realm of philosophy, dedicated his life's work to unravelling the complexities of human experience. Dilthey believed that life is not merely a series of random events, but a tapestry woven from these experiences, which collectively influence our perspectives and sense of being. By examining Dilthey's thoughts on communication as a process of shared knowledge and meaning making, we gain valuable insights into how we bridge the gap between different perspectives and forge deeper connections. Through a quantitative approach and literature review Dilthey's perspectives are analyzed. Dilthey believed a text goes beyond its literal meaning; it symbolizes deeper significance. Understanding the true depth of a symbol requires venturing beyond its surface meaning and delving into its historical context. Symbols are not merely arbitrary signs; they are often imbued with layers of meaning accumulated over time. These layers reflect the cultural, social, and political landscapes from which the symbol emerged. To fully grasp the symbolic meaning, then, requires an exploration of its historical journey. Despite the occasional inclusion of natural science objects in humanities, Dilthey saw a clear distinction between the two. He saw understanding as a process of grasping the intended meaning rooted in life experiences. Therefore, Dilthey's concept of meaning is historical highlighting the significance of personal and collective life experiences in interpretation.

Impact of Masking Academic Metrics on Enrolling a Broadly Diverse and Mission-Aligned Student Body.

The June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action required medical schools to discontinue considering race/ethnicity in admissions decisions. Medical schools must now identify different strategies if they aim to recruit and admit applicants from groups underrepresented in medicine (URiM; race/ethnicity), as enrolling broadly diverse students remains critical for serving the U.S. population. Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine (established in 2015) has an admissions process that assesses academic metrics using national threshold combinations of undergraduate grade point averages (UGPAs) and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores (published on school's website), and legal residency in or ties to Washington state, as prescreening criteria for secondary applications. UGPAs and MCAT scores are then masked from further consideration, allowing for decisions to be made with a focus on mission-aligned criteria, such as certain personal attributes and lived experiences and coming from specific environments (i.e., educationally or socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, rural communities, military service, or a member of a federally recognized Tribe). In the last 5 admissions cycles (enrollment years 2018-2022), cohort data demonstrates that as the admissions funnel narrows and each subsequent pool is smaller than the preceding one, the representation of mission-aligned applicants increases, despite the masking of academic metrics. The most recently enrolled class (enrollment year 2022) of 80 had 14 (17.5%) URiM students, closely mirroring the state's general population. The overall yield (acceptance:matriculation) has steadily improved with the last 2 cycles to 1.68:1 and 1.65:1, indicating slightly more than 1.5 times the number of offers needed to fill the class are being made. Next steps include further refining the process by considering more granular data on applicants' childhood community characteristics and rural background and examining how admissions data may correlate with residency and practice location and communities served.

Psychological Support of Internally Displaced Persons in Ukraine and Emigrants Abroad: Challenges of Wartime

In the context of war, providing timely psychological support is crucial for internally displaced persons in Ukraine and emigrants abroad. This kind of assistance is considered a priority for individuals who have recently experienced traumatic events and are in a vulnerable psychological state. The article is focused on identifying mental health problems among individuals who have been temporarily displaced or emigrated abroad during the war. It aims to improve the toolkit for providing psychological support to these populations. The study analyses the specific challenges associated with providing psychological support to these individuals. Forced resettlement to another region or country, combined with the prolonged impact of information stress, air raids, and the loss of a normal way of life, has been shown to contribute to the development of psychological disorders at both emotional and behavioural levels. The article focuses on the specificity of manifestations of prolonged stress, which can take the form of severe anxiety and excessive worry, as well as unpredictable outbursts of anger. It is widely accepted that physical stress can cause symptoms such as muscle pain, chronic fatigue, rapid heartbeat, and increased irritability. The physical aspects of stress, when combined, can have a detrimental effect on a person's personality and negatively impact their psychological well-being. This paper defines the complexity levels of mental disorders and outlines their factoriality. Factors such as age, involvement in the emergency (as a witness, participant, or directly affected), personal life experience, psychological health, and interpersonal relationships are considered. A conceptual approach is proposed for providing first psychological aid to the studied population categories. This includes providing emotional, physical, and social support to the affected individual, enhancing their sense of security. The practical significance of the research results lies in their potential application in the development, improvement, and implementation of psychological support programs for internally displaced persons in Ukraine and emigrants abroad in wartime conditions.