scholarly journals Soldiering on: a survey on the lived experience of tinnitus in aged military veterans in the UK

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Burns-O'Connell ◽  
David Stockdale ◽  
Derek James Hoare

Tinnitus has long been interrogated as a medical conundrum, with little discourse between medicine and other disciplines. It involves the perception of sound in the ears or head without any external sound source, most likely a natural consequence of some form of hearing loss. For many people, tinnitus is bothersome and associated with various problems such as insomnia, difficulty concentrating and impaired listening ability. Nevertheless, with little attention from humanities or the social sciences, our understanding of the wider perspectives and psychosocial context of adults with tinnitus is limited, especially among UK military veterans. The aim of this study was to explore the impact of tinnitus on aged UK veterans, and to consider the support they receive and require to live well with tinnitus. In all, 120 aged UK veterans took part in this study. Data revealed similarities and differences between UK veteran and other study populations. For example, tinnitus symptom severity was higher in aged veterans than a general (younger) research population, particularly so on measures of intrusiveness and the effect of tinnitus on listening ability. Veterans had mixed views on social support. Many did not want to talk about tinnitus with others and/or did not want to burden their family, preferring to deal with their tinnitus ‘backstage’. Others appreciated empathy or sympathy; many implied a desire that their family and/or friends could better understand their experience of living with tinnitus and the problems it caused them. These complexities support a need for cross-disciplinary work to understand and respond to tinnitus-related problems in veterans.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Lisa Scullion ◽  
Katy Jones ◽  
Peter Dwyer ◽  
Celia Hynes ◽  
Philip Martin

There has been an increasing focus in the UK on the support provided to the Armed Forces community, with the publication of the Armed Forces Covenant (2011), the Strategy for our Veterans (2018) and the first ever Office for Veterans’ Affairs (2019). There is also an important body of research – including longitudinal research – focusing on transitions from military to civilian life, much of which is quantitative. At the same time, the UK has witnessed a period of unprecedented welfare reform. However, research focused on veterans’ interactions with the social security system has been largely absent. This article draws on the authors’ experiences of undertaking qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) to address this knowledge gap. We reflect on how QLR was essential in engaging policy makers enabling the research to bridge the two parallel policy worlds of veterans’ support and welfare reform, leading to significant policy and practice impact.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
LINDSEY APPLEYARD ◽  
CARL PACKMAN ◽  
JORDON LAZELL ◽  
HUSSAN ASLAM

Abstract The financialization of everyday life has received considerable attention since the 2008 global financial crisis. Financialization is thought to have created active financial subjects through the ability to participate in mainstream financial services. While the lived experience of these mainstream financial subjects has been the subject of close scrutiny, the experiences of financial subjects at the financial fringe have been rarely considered. In the UK, for example, the introduction of High-Cost, Short-Term Credit [HCSTC] or payday loan regulation was designed to protect vulnerable people from accessing unaffordable credit. Exploring the impact of HCSTC regulation is important due to the dramatic decline of the high-cost credit market which helped meet essential needs in an era of austerity. As such, the paper examines the impact of the HCSTC regulation on sixty-four financially marginalized individuals in the UK that are unable to access payday loans. First, we identify the range of socioeconomic strategies that individuals employ to manage their finances to create a typology of financial subjectivity at the financial fringe. Second, we demonstrate how the temporal and precarious nature of financial inclusion at the financial fringe adds nuance to existing debates of the everyday lived experience of financialization.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nando Sigona ◽  
Jotaro Kato ◽  
Irina Kuznetsova

AbstractThe article examines the migration infrastructures and pathways through which migrants move into, through and out of irregular status in Japan and the UK and how these infrastructures uniquely shape their migrant experiences of irregularity at key stages of their migration projects.Our analysis brings together two bodies of migration scholarship, namely critical work on the social and legal production of illegality and the impact of legal violence on the lives of immigrants with precarious legal status, and on the role of migration infrastructures in shaping mobility pathways.Drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews with irregular and precarious migrants in Japan and the UK collected over a ten-year period, this article develops a three-pronged analysis of the infrastructures of irregularity, focusing on infrastructures of entry, settlement and exit, casting a comparative light on the mechanisms that produce precarious and expendable migrant lives in relation to access to labour and labour conditions, access and quality of housing and law enforcement, and how migrants adapt, cope, resist or eventually are overpowered by them.


Author(s):  
Clare Murphy

Because of feminist activism, what were once considered incompatible entities, women and sport, have come to be united within the social fabric of the 21st century. Recent generations of women are the first to experience sport as a commonplace reality that is largely taken for granted. After initial exclusion from the first and second wave feminist agendas, many activists now recognize sport as a vehicle for the advancement of women. The female athlete has been described by some academics as a type of “stealth feminist” who can support key feminist causes without arousing a knee-jerk social response. Although female sport participation and the status of female athletes have improved significantly, the impact this has had in the lived experience of women remains to be understood. This research project seeks to conduct focus groups with female athletes to better understand their relationship with the topic of feminism and to explore the impact sport participation has had within their lives. Deeper comprehension and documentation of sport from the perspective of female participants may not only serve to help guide sport policy and programing, but may also serve to foster a united, feminist consciousness that is capable of expanding the possibilities for female athletes and for women more broadly. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Howe

AbstractThis article by Adrian Howe is based on a presentation given at the ‘Sources and Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice Conference’ in November 2015, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Education and the Socio-Legal Studies Association. She begins by querying whether there are indeed distinct feminist methods in the social sciences. She outlines the impact of what she calls the ‘methodical revolution’ on the criminology discipline, Foucault's contribution and Foucauldian methodologies deployed in criminological and criminal justice research.


2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Borokhovich ◽  
Allissa Lee ◽  
Betty Simkins

Purpose – Studies of research influence commonly look at the overall field of finance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the sub-field of corporate finance at four different points in time to determine its evolution and range of influence, specifically focussing on the relative influence of seven leading journals. Design/methodology/approach – Not all articles appearing in the set of journals are in corporate finance. The authors examine each article published in the journals for four key periods and identify those that are corporate. The impact factors (IFs) published in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are for all articles appearing in a journal. The authors are interested only in the corporate articles, so the authors calculate separate corporate IFs based on the citations to the corporate articles using the JCR technique. Findings – The authors find a broad corporate research environment with influence that extends well beyond finance. The authors also find differences in the relative influence of the journals not only in their total influence, but in where the influence occurs outside finance and other business journals and even more broadly in the social sciences. Research limitations/implications – The exclusion of journals outside the seven selected may not uncover other areas where corporate finance articles impact research more broadly. Also, classification of articles is inherently subjective. Practical implications – The authors draw comparisons between journals and corporate finance topic areas; indicating the breadth and depth research in these areas attain. These results should prove beneficial to researchers in determining areas of influence for their work, consequently providing opportunities for additional exchanges of ideas resulting in better and more informed research in the overall social sciences. Further, our approach to analyzing journal influence could prove fruitful for additional research. Originality/value – The findings allow for a greater understanding of the influence of individual journals and their subsequent rankings by a number of different means. The authors propose that the means and measures employed here can lead to a greater understanding of how influential a journal really is. Further, the authors contend that the study provides comparisons of the scope and depth of influence for each journal in a way that could lead to new avenues of research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Richard Philip Lee ◽  
Caroline Coulson ◽  
Kate Hackett

The on-going rise in demand experienced by voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) providing emergency food aid has been described as a sign of a social and public health crisis in the UK (Loopstra, 2018; Lambie-Mumford, 2019), compounded since 2020 by the impact of (and responses to) Covid 19 (Power et al., 2020). In this article we adopted a social practice approach to understanding the work of food bank volunteering. We identify how ‘helping others’, ‘deploying coping strategies’ and ‘creating atmospheres’ are key specific (and connected) forms of shared social practice. Further, these practices are sometimes suffused by faith-based practice. The analysis offers insights into how such spaces of care and encounter (Williams et al., 2016; Cloke et al., 2017) function, considers the implications for these distinctive organisational forms (the growth of which has been subject to justified critique) and suggests avenues for future research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Abdalla Elkheir Elgobshawi

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of Idiomaticity on language learning and the extent to which it can be a language learning barrier. It contrasts the perspective of language teachers and the attitude of language learners regarding how idioms can influence language learning. The theoretical framework provides a description of the general properties of English idiomatic expressions and shows the relevance of idiomaticity to linguistic theory. The paper is based on an analytical analysis and follows a quantitative approach in which two questionnaires are used to collect the data. The two questionnaires are administered to two independent samples: 20 participants representing ELT teachers at the tertiary level and 80 subjects representing Saudi EFL college students. The data are then analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). The study reveals learners’ reasonable consensus on the issues assessed. They generally acknowledge the significance of idioms for language learning but with a general dissatisfaction with their status in learning and teaching contexts. Both teachers and learners view idioms as odd pieces of language that lack a uniform character and do not receive due attention in language syllabi and curricula. Teachers give different ratings on the pedagogical value of idioms, but they generally show low interest in teaching them.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Rigby ◽  
Barbara Jones

This paper reflects on alternatives to the traditional form of doctoral thesis which are emerging to reflect a new approach to the valuation and designation of scientific outputs. We examine the changes and consider some implications. We suggest that the adoption of co-citation as underpinning principle for the measurement of knowledge structures has led to re-designation of the value of knowledge and knowledge producers in increasingly quantitative terms. We use notions of ‘institution’ and ‘logic’ to better understand such a change and its implications. Under a new logic that is gradually embedding itself across the higher education sector, the ‘constitutive rules’ concerned with the value of research now prioritize quantification, and tangibility of output, and quality is increasingly equated with citation. Whilst the scientific disciplines have traditionally been closer to this model, albeit with significant national variations, subjects within the Social Sciences and Humanities are now being affected. We present evidence from a small study of the UK higher education sector of university regulation of doctoral degree submission format in two disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences (History and Sociology). Our evidence shows the recent and gradual adoption of a practice, previously more common in scientific disciplines, that allows the doctoral thesis to be constituted by a series of publishable papers, known by a variety of names, the most common being ‘Thesis by Published Papers’, ‘Journal Format Thesis’, ‘Alternative Format Thesis’, and ‘Integrated Thesis’. As the thesis of the Social Sciences and Humanities – itself an important institution in the academic field - begins to reflect a greater emphasis upon quantity of knowledge outputs, a tension emerges with the most central of all scientific institutions, the peer-reviewed journal paper.


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