Sort Of Evidence Research Articles

Nursing research and nursing practice: an exploration of two different cultures

Despite increasing efforts by both the government and the professions to institute evidence-based practice, there still remains a significant research practice gap in UK nursing. This paper explores the two worlds of practice and research and the factors that may affect them. It suggests that academic researchers and practitioners often have different perspectives and are working under different imperatives. These different cultures need to be recognized and made more explicit. Consideration will be given as to what sort of evidence is required by practitioners to nurse effectively, how we should identify this evidence and the role which research plays.The disharmony between the worlds of research and practice extends the discussion to consider the ways in which research is produced and disseminated. The question is raised as to why researchers fail to identify the contingencies, adaptations and social biases that affect their work. Strategies that might facilitate a franker discussion of research and the way in which it is produced will be illustrated by examples of research work undertaken by the author.

Livy's Written Rome

Reviewed by: Livy’s Written Rome William Seavey Mary Jaeger. Livy’s Written Rome. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xii 1 205 pp. Cloth, $39.50. How Livy went about writing his immense history has been a topic of keen interest, and recent work such as Jaeger’s directs our thinking in new and interesting ways. Livian historiography has traditionally focused on Quellenforschung and more recently on the rhetorical influences that often remain unrecognized by modern readers. A still newer kind of historiography, branching from rhetorical studies, considers the influence of space on a writer’s text, and it is attracted to both topographical and material issues. Indicative of such works in the last decade are Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor 1988); Eleanor Winsor Leach, The Rhetoric of Space (Princeton 1988); C. Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor 1991); and Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1993). Jaeger follows many historiographers in beginning with Livy’s preface, and then considering disparate episodes throughout Ab Urbe Condita before returning to the preface to reevaluate Livy’s method. By this approach, narrative is not just a chronological reflection of political and religious events; rather, spatial reminders (monumenta) may influence the organization of written narrative. Jaeger narrows her study to focus on “reminders that for various reasons fail to point unambiguously back to a particular person or event” (10). It is when Livy has restored in his text a [End Page 318] lost monumentum that his method is most readily observed: “when monuments fail and the text restores them, reminders of stories give way to stories about reminders” (11). This method of historiography, as Jaeger wields it, gives us a fresh look at an old text. It does not work equally well in all environments—witness the problems Sparta would offer such an approach, as both Jaeger (2) and, long ago, Thucydides realized. Yet more difficult would be monumental—in all senses of the word—societies such as those of ancient Egypt and Central America. Jaeger’s discussion of method and historiography (the Introduction and chapter 1) is excellent. Her survey of Livian historiographical research is thorough and attested by a wealth of judicious footnotes which review the relevant scholarship. The discussion of monumenta is particularly illuminating. Jaeger explains how the “monumentum stands between the res gestae and their literary celebration, so that two layers, the monumental and the literary, come between event and reader” (16). That all share certain qualities make them suitable for historical evaluation: “In sum, we can assume of all monumenta some common characteristics: an absent person or thing commemorated; a present audience reminded; a memory or an exhortation that is socially relevant; and a meaning determined jointly by the reminder, its physical context, and the circumstances of each viewer” (18). Jaeger’s belief that Daedalus’ labyrinth in the Aeneid (Veneris monumentum nefandae, 6.24–27) is the only exception to her standard that monumenta are “exposed to the public view” (17) is a bit strained, even without considering that Vergil’s ecphrasis describing the doors of Apollo’s temple is not really Roman at all. Moreover, Columella recorded that Hyginus collected precisely that sort of evidence: Hyginus veterum auctorum placita secretis dispersa monimentis industrie collegit (De Re Rustica 9.2.1). And what of all the Roman religious elements that are also secret (i.e., not exposed to public view)? It would be difficult to believe that there were no hidden monumenta among all the Roman sacra. Nevertheless, Jaeger’s approach to monumenta reinforces the importance of visualizing narrative as written by classical historians, which results in an illuminating and novel way of examining Livy’s historical text. After discussing the notion of monumenta in chapter 1 Jaeger proceeds to consider four separate episodes from Ab Urbe Condita, noting how Livy “maps the plot of a story onto the Roman landscape, then commemorates the particular enactment of the plot in a monument” (12). Chapter 2 considers the abduction of the Sabine women in AUC book 1, demonstrating a rhythmic flow of action between the...

The Microscopy of Catastrophic Tire Failures

Abstract Tires sometimes suffer catastrophic failure during travel on highways, resulting in a scatter of tire fragments along the pavement and berms. A large number of these fragments, including partial and whole tires, were collected and examined microscopically. The goal was to determine what sort of evidence might be “read” from these fragments via the optical stereo microscope using examinations of 7× to 60×. It was found that these fragments contain a wealth of well preserved information. Rubber tear lines and other fracture topographies are readable, allowing the failure analyst to determine directions of fracture/tear propagation which make it possible to postulate modes of separation. The features of torn surfaces that are normally encountered in laboratory testing are modified in tire failures due to the presence of adjoining compounds, complex shapes, and nonrubber components. Guidelines have been established to account for these complicating variables. A concept of “directional anisotropy” aids the analyst in understanding product failure surfaces. Additional items surveyed in this post mortem study were the condition at wire belt ends and indications of wire corrosion.

Universal Tendencies in the Semantics of the Diminutive

ion may be seen as a special case of this Tendency IIa. The diminutive exhibits Tendency IIb in its shift from 'small' to 'approximative hedges' to 'metalinguistic hedges'; here we see an exceptionally clear example of the shift from the real-world domain ('x is small') to the linguistic or textual domain ('weaken the locutionary force of the predicate p') to the metalinguistic domain ('weaken the illocutionary force of p(x)'). 5. DETERMINING THE STRUCTURE OF THE RADIAL CATEGORY: THE ORIGIN OF THE DIMINUTIVE. Determining the structure of a radial category requires both synchronic and diachronic evidence. One sort of evidence uses an extension of the comparative method. If we find that a grammatical function has sense A in twenty languages, and then in two other languages we find the function also with sense B, and if sense B never occurs with this function without sense A, this may be evidence that A gave rise to B historically. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 05:32:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms UNIVERSAL TENDENCIES IN THE SEMANTICS OF THE DIMINUTIVE 561 Real-Word Linguistic Domain = Metalinguistic Domain x is small weaken locutionary force of p(x) 7 weak n the illocutionary f rce of p(x) FIGURE 6. Unidirectionality: from the real-world to the metalinguistic domain. More generally, we look for a subsumption relation between the set of languages exhibiting sense A and the set of languages exhibiting sense B. This is true for the central senses 'child' and 'small'. Every diminutive in our database has either the 'child' or 'small' sense (except some reduplicatives, but their relationship with diminutives is complicated; see ?7). As a particular example, the radial category in Figure 5 assumes that the 'member' sense derives from the 'child' one. Table 19 shows the subsumption relation between languages with the 'child' and 'member' senses. It is also necessary to check for subsumption relations that might falsify the hypothesis: for example morphemes that exhibit many of the senses of the diminutive, but can be shown not to have or have had either the sense 'child' or 'small'. Although many morphemes have a minor overlap with diminutive semantics (approximation markers used as hedges, etc.), I have found no such falsifying examples (however since the data collection often depended on each grammar's definition of diminutive, the sample may be skewed). A second kind of evidence comes from an analysis of the semantics of the category itself. Our examination of the pragmatics of the diminutive in ?5.2 below, for example, suggests that 'child' is the core pragmatic sense. Perhaps the most secure evidence for the radial category structure is direct historical evidence of the timing of different senses. The partitive sense, for example, seems to have developed late in the Indo-European -lodiminutive; the Latin -ellus reflex had no partitive sense, but after being borrowed into Germanic, the -1 diminutive developed the partitive sense in Yiddish. But by far the largest body of evidence for the radial category structure is data indicating the origin of the diminutive in the concept 'child'. Previous scholars, in contrast, have not agreed on a single historical origin of the diminutive construction cross-linguistically. The issue is particularly complicated by the tendency of diminutives to be borrowed; well-known examples of extensive borrowing include consonant symbolism in western North America, the Yiddish LANGUAGES WITH LANGUAGES WITH 'child' SENSE 'member' SENSE

Three rules to cut the hype

Critical appraisal of articles on health published in newspapers is much more difficult than appraisal of papers published in medical journals, mainly because you don't have adequate information. But you also have to consider the spin put on the information by the sources of the story for their own ends, the extra twist added by the journalists to get it past the editor, and the exaggerated words inserted by subeditors to encourage people to read the pieces. By critically appraising the Independent of 2 April—a particularly awful issue—I hope to illustrate some of the principles. The first question is to ask whether the story emerges from a paper published in a scientific journal. If it does, then you can have more confidence that it is supported by some sort of evidence. You can also track down the original paper. The front page of …

Sociolinguistic aspects of Old English colour lexemes

This paper presents an experimental attempt to investigate the social contexts of certain Old English vocabulary belonging to a particular semantic field, namely that of colour. Sociolinguistic studies are concerned with language variations between social classes, age groups, the sexes and other social groupings, so it is obvious from the outset that this sort of evidence will be difficult to retrieve from a dead language. However, in the case of this particular semantic field, textual information can often be augmented by comparative evidence from the colour semantics of living languages, and by the theories about colour term acquisition and usage developed by linguists and anthropologists.

The Façade of Precision in Education Data and Statistics: a Troubling Example from Tanzania

To understand what people do and why, we need to know something about what they have done. Rarely, however, are social scientists direct observers of all events of interest to them. Hence, most often we rely on information that someone else has collected, more or less systematically, usually for some other purpose. The behavioural revolution in the social sciences, with its shrill cries of ‘falsifiability!’ and ‘reproducibility!’, has pushed us towards the sort of evidence that can be recorded and stored in quantitative form. It has as well urged us towards increasingly complex, and perhaps sophisticated, techniques for exploring relationship within that evidence.

The sexual abuse of children: cases submitted to a police laboratory and the scientific evidence.

This paper is based on a lecture given to an audience consisting mainly of social workers and paediatricians. The purpose of the talk was to explain the sort of evidence that could be provided by a forensic biologist in order to show that a child had been sexually assaulted, and to help identify the assailant. The introduction to the talk was composed of a review of the types of cases involving the sexual abuse of children that have been dealt with by this laboratory during the last two years (1984–85). A description was then given of the various biological materials which, if found in appropriate places, can substantiate an allegation of sexual assault. A brief reference was made to the persistence of semen in the vagina, rectum and mouth, and to the blood group substances which occur in different body fluids.

Parapsychological research: A tutorial review and critical appraisal

Beginning in the 1850s, some eminent scientists such as Robert Hare, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Sir William Crookes investigated the claims of spiritualist mediums and believed that they had demonstrated scientifically the existence of psychic phenomena. Critics, without examining the evidence, dismissed the claims out of hand and charged the offending scientists with gross incompetence or with fraud. Encouraged by the work of these early psychical researchers, a group of scholars founded the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882. In spite of this beginning, psychical research remained an amateur and uncoordinated set of activities until the publication of Rhine's Extra-Sensory Perception in 1934. The card-guessing experiments featured in Rhine's book became the model for experimental parapsychology for the next 40 years. Since the 1970s Rhine's paradigm has been replaced by a number of research programs such as remote viewing, the-Ganzfield experiment, and psychokinetic investigations using Random Event Generators. The present paper examines examples of what were considered, in their time, the best examples of scientific evidence for paranormal phenomena. Each generation of para-psychologists has set aside the work of earlier generations and offered up as sufficient scientific evidence the best work of its own day. As a result, parapsychology lacks not only lawful and replicable phenomena, but also a tradition of cumulative evidence. Two systematic evaluations of the best contemporary research programs in parapsychology revealed that the experiments departed from the minimal standards of adequate randomization of targets, appropriate use of statistical inference, and controls against sensory leakage. The historical survey in this paper suggests that the same themes and inadequacies that haunted the very earliest investigations still characterize contemporary parapsychological research. Both proponents and critics throughout the 130 years of the controversy over psychical research, have deviated greatly from those standards of fair-play and rationality that we would like to believe characterizes the best scientific arguments. Some encouraging signs for progress towards resolving some of the issues raised by the controversy have recently appeared. The criticism of the parapsychological claims is becoming more informed and constructive. Many younger parapsychologists have been working for higher standards within their field. The best lines of systematic research in parapsychology are not of sufficient quality to be put before the scrutiny of the rest of the scientific community. However, with the recent increase in constructive criticism and with the growing awareness within the parapsychological community that it needs to specify minimal standards and set its own house in order, there is hope that in the near future either the parapsychologists will fail to find evidence for psi or will be ready to challenge the scientific community with the sort of evidence that it cannot ignore.

A Specification Issue in Job Satisfaction Research

Prevailing theories of job satisfaction assume that the pursuit of job satisfaction is an important employment goal to workers. The central questions asked here are as follows: (1) Is this assumption tenable? (2) What effects do the violation of this assumption have on the testing of popular models in job satisfaction research? Using data representative of registered nurses in a large metropolitan area, it was found that only about half of the workers rank the pursuit of job satisfaction highly among the employment goals relevant to their work places. Furthermore, it was found that much more variance can be explained in job satisfaction among workers who value increased job satisfaction highly than can be explained among workers who do not value it as highly. When workers' value for increased job satisfaction is used as a moderator variable, it is found to have methodological and substantive significance for the sort of evidence that can be obtained using standard models of job satisfaction.

Analytical Approaches to Determinism

Determinism in one sense is the theory that all events, including human actions, are governed by laws and hence are necessary. Some think that it can be refuted simply by identifying entrenched beliefs that contradict it, i.e., simply by establishing incompatibilism. Others think that this is not enough, that if determinists uncover the right sort of evidence, they can use that evidence against any contrary beliefs, however well entrenched. In that case, attention must be paid to contingent facts about human behaviour. Probably a combination of the two approaches is the best strategy. Obviously, ascertaining what the facts are, and what their relevance is, cannot be done independently of analysis and logic. Yet a concentration on incompatibilism seems particularly vulnerable to stalemate. Hence the need arises to investigate whether concepts formed during the analytical inquiry are actually true of anything, independently of questions of entrenchment. To confirm this suspicion about the limitations of analysis, I shall consider two perceptive and well-regarded arguments for thinking that determinism clashes with a belief in alternate possibilities.

A rival magician

When I got back to the monastery, I found the abbot and his monks assembled in the great hall, observing with childish wonder and faith the performances of a new magician, a fresh arrival. His dress was the extreme of the fantastic. He was a celebrity from Asia—so he said. That sort of evidence was as good as gold.

Informal Judicial Admissions of Criminal Activity: A Comparative Study of England, Canada and the United States

INFORMAL1 admissions2 which are against a party's interest are admissible against that party in both civil and criminal proceedings.3 In criminal trials where the admission was made to a policeman the prosecution must show that it was made voluntarily.4 The bulk of the literature dealing with incriminating statements is concerned with confessions to the police; this article, in contrast, will examine the use in criminal and civil actions of a statement which incriminates its maker in a crime and which was made during judicial proceedings. England, Canada and the United States of America, the three countries which will be considered and compared, show some interesting diversity in the treatment of this sort of evidence.

Belief and Will Revisited

The relation of will to belief is an issue of perennial philosophical and religious interest. Most of the classical accounts of religious belief, both ancient and modern, have accorded the will an important, if not the decisive, role. In the philosophy of mind, the issue has traditionally been one of the major dividing lines, some philosophers arguing a position near that of Descartes, that the will is a constituent element of belief, others siding with Spinoza and Hume, arguing that it is not. But what really is the issue? Much recent discussion of belief and will has been devoted to the question whether we can believe at will apart from any sort of evidence—what has been called belief by fiat. While it may be that this is the most natural interpretation of the claim that belief is based on will, it is certainly not the only one. What is more, most of those who have argued for the importance of the will in belief have never really asserted it. No doubt, one can glean statements from their writings that seem to suggest it; but with due allowance for rhetorical excess, a careful reading of their positions will, I think, show that they were really dealing with other issues. What I hope to accomplish in raising again the issue of will and belief is to advance and defend a set of claims that gets at these other issues. Throughout, my concern will be primarily with religious beliefs, and this not simply out of personal and professional interest, but because the issues I want to discuss arise more clearly (though by no means exclusively) in relation to beliefs of this sort.

Creative analogy and language evolution

The English “good and” intensifier is discussed as an example of a form that is acceptable even though ungrammatical, both synchronically and diachronically. The construction is analyzed as a case of creative analogy: the extension of a grammatically generated form to a new function, one for which it has no direct grammatical justification. From the perspective of a “dynamic” theory of language acquisition and evolution, it is argued that such forms constitute a new sort of evidence regarding the nature of language universals.

Ruse's Treatment of the Evidence for Evolution: A Reconsideration

The Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection is beyond a doubt an extremely well established theoretical edifice that satisfies any reasonable conceptual and empirical criterion of scientific respectability. It is a body of well confirmed nomological generalizations with great explanatory and predictive power. And yet the most accessible account of the relation between this theory, its competitors and the empirical evidence seems seriously defective in its account of these relations. Indeed, it may seem so defective as to leave the question open, not whether the theory of natural selection is well confirmed (this cannot be doubted), but exactly what sort of evidence does confirm it and via what bridge principles. The account of the matter which I have described as most accessible (in the philosophy of science at any rate), and yet seriously bedeviled is to be found in Michael Ruse's otherwise excellent introduction to the Philosophy of Biology (Ruse 1973 ).

Rule ordering in Korean phonology

Rule ordering in Korean phonology Chin- Wu Kim UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS IN this paper, I will examine a portion ofsegmental phonology ofKorean in some detail. 1 My discussion will primarily be confined to the sonorant consonants in Korean, especially the liquid, nasals, and glides. It will be divided into two parts, the first dealing with liquid-nasals and the second with glides. My main purpose is to examine the rules or phonological processes that affect these sonorants and to determine the interrelationship among these rules. I will be mostly concerned with establishing a linear ordering of these rules and with motivating a particular ordering as against other alternatives. In most cases, therefore, I will not attempt to justify a particular shape of underlying representation. Also, rules affecting other parts ofphonology, e.g., vowels and obstruents, will be discussed only insofar as they relate to sonorant consonants, and even then a particular form of such rules will not be given a full justification here, but it will be assumed that any reasonable description of Korean phonology must contain some such or similar form of rules. Most Korean forms will be cited in the Yale romanization without any special notation. When I depart from this, a pair of slashes / / will denote underlying representation, and a pair of brackets [ ], the surface phonetic form. To begin our discussion of the Korean liquid and nasals, first examine the following : 1. Research for this paper was supported in part by the Graduate Research Board, and Center for Asian Studies of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and by the Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawaii. 1 2 CHIN W. KIM (1)sip-li [simni] ?? miles' payk-li [?e???] ?00 miles' phok-lak [phonnak] 'abrupt fall' yuk-lo [yurjno] 'land-road' In these examples, when a stop and a liquid / abut across a morpheme boundary, both segments turn into nasals. What is the path of derivation between the underlying form and the final pronunciation in the above case? There are three possibilities. Taking sip-li as a representative example, (2)a. /sip-li/ -» [simni] b./sip-li/ -> sim-li -» [simni] c./sip-li/ -> sip-ni -> [simni] In (a) the surface phonetic form [simni] is directly derived from the underlying /sip-li/. In (b), the morpheme final stop ? becomes a nasal m in front of /, then this / in turn becomes a nasal n. In (c) the / becomes a homorganic nasal ? after a stop, then the stop becomes a homorganic nasal. What sort of evidence would bear on the issue to let us choose one derivation over the others? We will exclude from our discussion the derivation (a), for, although there is a theoretical possibility of a rule that turns a stop-liquid sequence into a nasal-nasal sequence, we subscribe to the framework of phonology in which a phonological rule affects only a segment at a time. Looking now at the derivations (2b) and (2c), it becomes apparent that there are two rules involved in both cases : (3)i) Stop Nasalization ii) /-Nasalization The order of (i)-(ii) will give the derivation (2b), while the reverse order (ii)-(i) will give the derivation (2c). The task before us then is to determine the correct order in which the two rules should apply and to motivate such ordering. It has been generally assumed that the naturalness condition is a possible criterion for rule ordering. If we now look at the step by which the surface phonetic form is derived from the intermediate representation in (2b,c), it appears that the step is quite natural in both cases. In (2b), sim-li becomes [simni]. It is very plausible that a liquid / becomes a nasal ? after a nasal m. In (2c), sip-ni becomes [simni]. Again, it is quite natural that a stop becomes a homorganic nasal in front of another nasal. Both processes are rather commonly found in various languages. The argument, RULE ORDERING IN KOREAN PHONOLOGY3 therefore, in terms of plausibility or naturalness of the particular process involved does not seem to favor one analysis over the other. Actually, both processes are found independently in Korean. Examinethe following: (4)sam-li [samni] 'three miles' wang-lay [warjns] 'coming...

Studies on Intra‐ and Inter‐Specific Competition in Drosophila

Of eight species of Drosophila (ananassae, funebris, melanogaster, nebulosa, pseudobscura, simulans, virilis, and willistoni), the number of progeny produced per culture vial increases with the number of female parents for D. melanogaster, D. simulans, D. willistoni, D. ananassae, and D. nebulosa; in contrast, the progeny yield is a constant that is independent of the number of parental females per vial for D. funebris, D. pseudoobscura, and D. virilis. Forall species, however, the per capita yield decreases more or less exponentially with the square—root of the number of parental females per vial. The outcome of mixed—species competition depends largely upon the two species concerned. Drosophila simulans seemingly benefits by increases in number of its own females; four or five D. simulans females yield more progeny in the presence of D. funebris, for example, than produces D. simulans. Drosophila simulans alsoproduces greater number of progeny per vial as the number of competing D. funebris females is increased. Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans females competing in individual culturesyield mixed progeny; the two species share the resources of each vial. In contrast, the progeny of D. pseudoobscura and D. virilis females in individual mixed—culture vials tend to be of one species or the other many cultures containing these two types of females yield few or no flies of either species. For most species—pairs the logarithm of the ratio of the two species among offspring varies directly with that among parents (slope of the regression = 1.00). For three species—pairs, however, the slope of this regression is significantly less than 1.00. If the same relationship were to hold among freelybreeding populations of the two species, the species should establish stable equilibrium proportions. Analyses of the competing species by means of replacement series reveals that the members of individual pairs may enhance or interfere with each other's development, or do neither. Similarly, the competitive abilities of the species differ considerably. The ease with which each species uses different resources within the culture vials differs. Thus, intra— and interspecific competition differentially affect the per capita progeny production of conspecific and heterospecific females. Because the competition between conspecific females differs demonstrably from that between heterospecific ones, it appears that inter—specific frequency—dependent selection may reflect the relative proportions of resources that are used with contrasting ease by the competing species. If so, frequency—dependent selection is precisely the sort of evidence needed to demonstrate that two species are not competing identically for identical resources, the type of competition that is expected to lead to competitive exclusion.

Realism, Underdetermination, and a Causal Theory of Evidence

I shall be concerned in this paper to defend scientific realism against the thesis that the structure of the scientific theories we accept is radically underdetermined by any possible experimental evidence. In the course of this discussion I will have occasion to advance an account of scientific evidence which, I believe, extends in interesting ways the considerations which have led some philosophers to advance theories of knowledge. By scientific realism I mean the doctrine that the sort of evidence which ordinarily counts in favor of the acceptance of a scientific law or theory is, ordinarily, evidence for the (at least approximate) truth of the law or theory as an account of the causal relations obtaining between the entities quantified over in the law or theory in question. On this view, experimental evidence for a theory which describes causal relations between (that is, unobservable) entities is evidence not only for the correctness of the observational consequences of the theory, but is also evidence that the particular causal relations in question explain the predicted regularities in the behavior of observable phenomena. Of course this does not mean that, in the general case, experimental evidence for a theory is evidence that the causal relations it describes between observable or theoretical entities exhaust those causal relations obtaining between them (although this might be the case in the case of theories which were suitably complete). But it does entail that experimental evidence for a theory is evidence that those causal relations it describes, and not others incompatible with them, operate to produce the regularities in observable phenomena which the theory predicts. This last feature of scientific realism has been thought by many philosophers in the tradition of logical empiricism to embody a fatal weakness. They argue that, given any theory which contains

RURAL DRESS IN NORFOLK

Ladies and Gentlemen, I suppose I must be the person least qualified among you tonight to speak on the subject of dress, for not only is my theoretical knowledge of your special subject, costume, limited and hazy, but I myself have no practical application either, being quite unable to ply a needle to anybody's satisfaction. My own subject is the social history of rural Norfolk, the tools and implements used in the agriculture of the county, and by the craftsmen, the fishermen, the marshmen and by the women, and the ways and means and the traditions of using those tools. I will not attempt tonight to give you a definitive account of the dress of the agricultural labourer in Norfolk, but to show you, I hope, how one of the tools of my trade may be useful. to you, and to place before you the information that I have gathered so far, without building any thesis upon it or drawing any conclusions. I shall leave you to decide whether my methods of enquiry have anything to offer to help you in your own researches into the history of costume. When I was first appointed to the Bridewell Museum, part of my brief was to undertake fieldwork in the county in the fields of local industry and rural crafts, to locate and collect material evidence relating to these, and to record that which was incapable of transference to the Museum, such as brick kilns, field patterns, and vernacular architecture. It was not many days before it became apparent that the evidence for the social history of the county that was so rapidly disappearing was not only the material evidence, the sugar beet drills, herring nets and blacksmith's anvils, but also the vital oral evidence without which many of the objects we were collecting in the Museum were virtually valueless, It is not so much the thing itself which is important to us but the total environment from which it came and in which it was used. Armed with a· tape recorder and notebooks, I therefore set out to rescue as much as possible before the repositories of this priceless and irretrievable information died,'Yet another race against time! That which I shall now pass on to you has been told to me by men and women in Norfolk, usually in the course of a conversation on a quite different subject, and I would like to record my gratitude to them for their patience and helpfulness. Unless specifically mentioned otherwise, the period concerned is from the beginnings of living memory, say from 1885, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, although any firm dating of this sort of evidence is more or less impossible. The First World War acts as a watershed in the history of the county, it is the period when the old traditions largely died, and the agriculture ,of the county changed rapidly with increasing mechanisation, and consequent loss of employmen t on the land. The oral evidence I have been seeking therefore relates to the period before the war, as those whose memories of this period are still fresh, are each year becoming fewer and fewer.