Pose Research Questions Research Articles

Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making

Architecture embodies human agency in all of its dimensions and effective scales. Specifically, the wooden posts of Mississippian peoples in the American mid-continent were simultaneously spatial, material, and corporeal dimensions of the process of cultural construction and contestation. Our reconsideration of the lowly postmold is based on the principle of physicality that, in turn, alters the ways in which we pose research questions and interpret archaeological data. A historical-processual methodology involves three procedural fundamentals: identifying practical variability, comparing genealogies of practices, and tacking between lines of evidence at multiple scales of analysis.

Climatically driven changes in oceanic processes throughout the equatorial Pacific

The mass accumulation rates of sedimentary components (carbonate, organic carbon, opal, barite, reactive phosphate, iron, terrigenous minerals, etc.) are used in many paleoceanographic reconstructions to learn about temporal and spatial changes in surficial Earth processes including wind stress and direction, oceanic circulation, weathering rates, marine productivity and ecosystem structure, climate change, and more. In most studies it is assumed/desired that the sediment accumulation represents the production and deposition of particles from the overlying water column since substantial horizontal transport imply homogenization of paleoceanographic proxies and little confidence in any paleoceanographic time series. In this note we highlight some discrepancies between the different approaches used to reconstruct sediment mass accumulation rates and specifically discuss the consequences of these discrepancies to the reconstruction of paleoproductivity in the equatorial Pacific. We pose research questions and suggest possible approaches/research strategies for the community to solve them.

Accounting Information Systems Research Opportunities Using Personality Type Theory and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

The cognitive science paradigm, with its computational and information processing models of the human mind, dominates much of current accounting information systems (AIS) research. While these models aid our understanding of cognition, it is unclear how much of the mind they explain. Personality type theory (PTT) is one supplement to cognitive science. PTT is especially useful for AIS researchers because an extensively tested and validated psychometric instrument based on PTT, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), is available for use in practice and research. We provide an overview of PTT and the MBTI and discuss how AIS researchers can use PTT to complement and extend current research initiatives. We highlight opportunities for PTT-based AIS research by posing research questions, the investigation of which contributes to the AIS literature.

Collecting and managing multisource and multimethod data in studies of pediatric populations.

To provide recommendations for the collection and management of multisource and multimethod data in studies of children and adolescents with pediatric conditions. We discuss limitations of single-source and single-method data collection strategies. We review strategies for collecting and managing multisource and multimethod data, including coverage of the literature on level of agreement across sources, strengths and weaknesses of various source and method aggregation strategies, and methods of examining discrepancies between sources. Multisource and multimethod data collection strategies enable researchers to rule out alternative explanations for their findings and pose research questions that would probably not be testable with single-source, single-method data sets. We emphasize the utility of multisource and multimethod data and provide recommendations for future work.

Heritage Language Instruction for Post-secondary Students from Immigrant Backgrounds

The “intergenerational transmission” of heritage languages (HLs) is crucial to the vitality of heritage language communities (especially for indigenous communities, where immigration is not a source of new speakers). We know, however, that HLs in the United States often do NOT survive well from one generation to the next as the shift to English takes place. In conjunction with the Second National Conference on Heritage Languages in America, a small group of researchers met to discuss priorities for research on intergenerational transmission of languages. Each of the ten researchers who participated prepared a short paper, posing research questions with some commentary to guide future research. Those papers form the major part of this article, covering topics related to language ecological patterns (in communities, families, and institutions), language ideology, measurement issues, and literacy.

Solitude, Silence, and the Training of Psychotherapists: A Preliminary Study

The spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude have long been practiced within the contemplative Christian tradition as a means of character transformation and experiencing God. Do these disciplines affect the use of silence in psychotherapy for Christian clinicians in a graduate training program? Nineteen graduate students in clinical psychology were assigned to a wait-list control condition or a training program involving the disciplines of solitude and silence, and the groups were reversed after the first cohort completed the spiritual disciplines training. One group, which was coincidentally comprised of more introverted individuals, demonstrated a striking increase in the number of silent periods and total duration of silence during simulated psychotherapy sessions during the period of training. The other group, more extraverted in nature, did not show significant changes in therapeutic silence during the training. These results cause us to pose research questions regarding the interaction of personality characteristics and spiritual disciplines in training Christian psychotherapists.

Internal Issues in Private Education

One of the keynote addresses at the Private Research Conference held at the University of Dayton in November of 1997 focused on “Internal Issues in private Education.” This paper addresses several salient points and then poses research questions related to this topic and to issues which embrace school participants school organizations and management, school climate and culture, and academic programs and support services in private schools.

Assessment of behavioral symptom management in demented individuals.

This article is intended to stimulate interdisciplinary research by social, behavioral, and biomedical researchers to solve some of the problems for persons with Alzheimer disease who suffer from behavioral symptoms. We identify the need for using conceptually based measures that have adequate reliability and validity to operationalize indicators of psychological well-being, suggest instruments to assess mood, engagement, agitation, resistiveness and comfort, and pose research questions to explore responses to active involvement (individual or group), passive involvement, lack of activity, aversive activity (related to activities of daily living), and limitation of activity (restraints) in persons with dementia. Answers to the research questions posed in this article will lead to expanded knowledge and can redefine how we give care to those in need.

Choices in conceptualizing classroom‐anchored research and linking it to policy/practice to improve educational quality in ‘developing’ countries

ABSTRACT This paper discusses three scientific traditions (positivist, interpretivist and critical) as they inform methodological and strategic choices within a USAID‐funded ‘Improving Educational Quality’ project in Ghana, Guatemala and Mali. These scientific traditions are shown not only to frame choices in posing research questions and selecting data‐gathering and analysis strategies, but also to orient decisions about approaches for linking research to policy and practice and for establishing relationships between researchers and policy‐makers and practitioners. Special consideration is given to these issues as they inform classroom‐anchored research undertaken by and for educational personnel in ‘developing’ countries.

Distance education research and continuing professional education: Reframing questions for the emerging information infrastructure

This article reviews the evolution of the theoretical influences upon the study of distance education and explores the influence of the emerging telecommunications technologies upon questions important to the continuing professional education of health professionals. The article offers multiple frameworks for posing research questions designed to help us understand professional learning in the new telecommunications environment.

Drug safety, pharmacoepidemiology, and regulatory decision making.

The safety or risk assessment of a pharmacotherapeutic agent begins early in its development and continues throughout its use cycle. The practice of pharmacoepidemiology is the art of using the sciences and the tools of science to generate information about pharmaceutical outcomes, including associated risks, in the postmarketing environment. A pharmacoepidemiologist must be capable of functioning with a matrix constructed of three components: a knowledge base, a conceptual framework, and an interpretive framework. From this perspective one can establish surveillance schemes, or understand a posed research question, select strategies, apply methodologies, and interpret the results of purposeful investigations. When conveyed to the risk manager, appropriately interpreted results of a properly conducted risk assessment can be used in regulatory decision making. Seven case studies are presented as examples of this approach.

Konstruowanie projektu pracy dyplomowej jako element kształcenia akademickiego prz yszłych naucz ycieli jęz yków obcych

The aim of the article is to answer the question if and to what extent preparing a diploma project on glottodidactics should be an opportunity for the student trainee to understand glottodidactics as a scholarly domain. The author of the article assumes that student’s understanding of the specificity of glottodidactics depends on their developing the so called general epistemological consciousness. The student should gradually develop the awareness of how a researcher epistemological perspective influences the posed research questions and the interpretation of analyzed phenomena as well as the construction of knowledge of and beliefs about the process of learning/teaching a foreign language. To illustrate the problem, the article refers to specific diploma work projects whose authors are the student trainees of the French section at the College of Foreign Languages at UAM in Poznań.