Making meaning with metaphor in grief therapy

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Tay ◽  
Robert A. Neimeyer
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Single Session ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Therapeutic Work ◽  
Verbal Activity ◽  
Grief Therapy

Abstract Metaphors play an important role in contemporary approaches to grief therapy by helping clients (re)construe their continuing relationship with the deceased. Relevant studies have illustrated the substantive elements of metaphors (i.e. sources, targets, and mappings) in this regard, often focusing on localized bursts of intense metaphoric activity. This paper highlights the extended nature of metaphoric conceptualizations and their relationship with key meaning-making processes, following the principle of ‘correspondent analysis’ as a collaborative move between language analysts and therapy practitioners. Three specific phenomena are detailed through a mixed methods analysis of 18 motivated segments in a single session of grief therapy: (i) sporadic sources, (ii) persistent sources, and (iii) metaphor ‘chaining’ across embodied and verbal activity. Their respective links to treatment objectives and processes demonstrate how metaphor theoretic constructs dovetail with therapeutic work, and suggest future avenues for modeling unfolding metaphoric activity as a time series.

Searching and Making Meaning of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives of African Immigrants in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110224
Author(s):  
Angela U. Ekwonye ◽  
Nina Truong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
African Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
The Impact

African immigrants continue to be disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear how they are searching for and finding meaning in the face of this adversity. This study sought to understand how African immigrants in the United States are searching for and making meaning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted in-depth interviews remotely with 20 immigrants from West Africa (Nigeria and Ghana), East Africa (Somali and Rwanda), and Central Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo). The meaning-making model was used as a framework to understand the processes of coping during a significant, adverse life event. The study found that some participants attempted to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their global meaning by seeking answers as to why the pandemic occurred and creating positive illusions. Some redefined their priorities and reframed the pandemic in a positive light. Participants found meaning in the form of accepting the pandemic as a reality of life, appreciating events previously taken for granted, and making positive changes in their lives. This study’s findings can inform health care providers of the meaning-making processes of African immigrants’ and the need to assist them in their search for meaning.

scholarly journals Counselling Muslim Selves on Islamic Websites: Walking a Tightrope Between Secular and Religious Counselling Ideals?

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Abdel-Fadil
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Counselling Service ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Online Counselling ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Counselling Psychology

This article focuses on the interactive counselling service Problems and Answers (PS), an Arabic language and Islamic online counselling service, which draws on global therapeutic counselling trends. For over a decade, PS was run and hosted by www.IslamOnline.net (IOL). Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article aims to provide a layered, contextualized understanding of online Islamic counselling, through addressing the ‘invisible’, ‘behind the screens’ aspects of PS counselling and the meaning making activities that inform the online output. In particular, I examine: 1. The multiple ways in which ‘religion’ shapes the PS counsellors' counselling output, and 2. The extent to which secular and religious counselling ideals clash, in PS counselling. Drawing on a mixed methods approach, I demonstrate instances in which offline data nuance and generate new understandings of online data. The findings demonstrate the multivocality and variations in the PS counsellors' perspectives on both religion and counselling psychology, and shed light on possible tensions between professed ideals and actual online practices.

Poetry and Mixed Methods Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-165
Author(s):  
Mandy M. Archibald ◽  
Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Mixed Methods Research ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Hermeneutic Circle ◽  
Arts Based Research ◽  
Research Designs ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
Poetic Representation

Integration—or the meaningful bringing together of different data sets, sampling strategies, research designs, analytic procedures, inferences, or the like—is considered by many to be the hallmark characteristic of mixed methods research. Poetry, with its innate capacity for leveraging human creativity, and like arts-based research more generally, which can provide holistic and complexity-based perspectives through various approaches to data collection, analysis, and representation, can offer something of interest to dialogue on integration in mixed methods research. Therefore, in this editorial, we discuss and promote the use of poetry in mixed methods research. We contend that the complexities and mean-making parallelisms between poetry and mixed methods research render them relevant partners in a quest to complete the hermeneutic circle whose origin represents experiences, phenomena, information, and/or the like. We advance the notion that including poetic representation facilitates the mixed methods research process as a dynamic, iterative, interactive, synergistic, integrative, holistic, embodied, creative, artistic, and transformational meaning-making process that opens up a new epistemological, theoretical, and methodological space. We refer to this as the fourth space, where the quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, and poetic research traditions intersect to enable different and deeper levels of meaning making to occur. We end our editorial with a poetic representation driven by a word count analysis of our editorial and that synthesizes our thoughts regarding the intersection of poetry and mixed methods research within this fourth space—a representation that we have entitled, “Dear Article.”

Multimodal Literacy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy A. Mills ◽  
Len Unsworth
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Making Meaning

Multimodal literacy is a term that originates in social semiotics, and refers to the study of language that combines two or more modes of meaning. The related term, multimodality, refers to the constitution of multiple modes in semiosis or meaning making. Modes are defined differently across schools of thought, and the classification of modes is somewhat contested. However, from a social semiotic approach, modes are the socially and culturally shaped resources or semiotic structure for making meaning. Specific examples of modes from a social semiotic perspective include speech, gesture, written language, music, mathematical notation, drawings, photographic images, or moving digital images. Language and literacy practices have always been multimodal, because communication requires attending to diverse kinds of meanings, whether of spoken or written words, visual images, gestures, posture, movement, sound, or silence. Yet, undeniably, the affordances of people-driven digital media and textual production have given rise to an exponential increase in the circulation of multimodal texts in networked digital environments. Multimodal text production has become a central part of everyday life for many people throughout the life course, and across cultures and societies. This has been enabled by the ease of producing and sharing digital images, music, video games, apps, and other digital media via the Internet and mobile technologies. The increasing significance of multimodal literacy for communication has led to a growing body of research and theory to address the differing potentials of modes and their intermodality for making meaning. The study of multimodal literacy learning in schools and society is an emergent field of research, which begins with the important recognition that reading and writing are rarely practiced as discrete skills, but are intimately connected to the use of multimodal texts, often in digital contexts of use. The implications of multimodal literacy for pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment in education is an expanding field of multimodal research. In addition, there is a growing attention to multimodal literacy practices that are practiced in informal social contexts, from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood, such as in homes, recreational sites, communities, and workplaces.

scholarly journals An SF-MDA of the Textual and the Logical Cohesive Devices in a Postgraduate Accounting Course

SAGE Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402094712
Author(s):  
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Business Students ◽  
Financial Statements ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Lexical Cohesion ◽  
Multimodal Discourse Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Discourse ◽  
Cohesive Devices

The use of cohesive devices in academic discourse not only improves the quality of writing but also enhances our learning experiences. This study aims to explain how the multimodal accounting discourse is constructed by postgraduate business students through the cohesive ties. Halliday and Hasan’s and Halliday’s cohesion analysis schemes were employed in the systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) of the cohesive devices in the multimodal accounting texts. The schemes are based on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) which suits the context of this study as it considers language as a social semiotic resource for making meaning. Its linguistic tools are capable of explaining the way we construct and make meanings. The SF-MDA findings showed the first and most frequently occurring cohesive device type in the orthographic texts was lexical cohesion, in particular repetition of the same lexical items, followed by reference and conjunctions. Lexical cohesive devices were higher in the tables than in the orthographic texts. Conjunctions were only employed in the orthographic texts to signal extension and enhancement relationships. One of the key features that characterize financial statements is the abundance of implicit hierarchically networked lexical ties that bind the separate lexical strings, thereby organizing the discourse of financial statements. The results contribute to our understanding of the complex multimodal meaning-making processes in accounting discourse.

Television and protest in East Germany’s revolution, 1989–1990: A mixed-methods analysis

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Grdešić
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Time Series Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Series Analysis ◽  
East German ◽  
Television Coverage ◽  
The Relationship

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the relationship between television and protest during East Germany’s revolution. The content of television newscasts, both West German and East German, is analyzed together with protest event data. There are two key findings. First, West German coverage of protests is associated with an increase in protest in the first phase of the revolution. This finding emerges from time series analysis. Second, West German and East German television coverage were interacting, with the latter reacting to the former. This finding emerges from both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

scholarly journals Paradigm Shift in Research: Emergence of Mixed Methods Research Design

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 74-86
Author(s):  
Nabaraj Neupane
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Mixed Methods Research ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Reasons For Use ◽  
A Current

Between the lines of quantitative and qualitative inquiries, mixed methods research, which has taken a considerable space in academia, has emerged as a promising design as a mark of paradigm shift from pure method to the hybrid one. In this context, this article aims to explore the phenomenon of the mixed methods research design in terms of reasons for use, historical developments, types, and assessments. To achieve this goal, document analysis method has been used. Only the secondary sources like books, journals and archives have been used for documenting information and making meaning from them. The conclusion is that mixed methods research design has been a current practice for many reasons in academia. This implies that the new paradigm should profusely be used in the field of research at universities and research centers.

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