scholarly journals Exploring the Mission-Development Nexus Through Stories from Christian ‘Missionaries’ in Bangladesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anna Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Current Setting ◽  
Development Workers ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Development Discourses ◽  
Research And Policy

<p>Over the past decade, development research and policy has increasingly paid attention to religion and belief. Donors and researchers have progressively engaged with faith-based organisations and recipients. However, Christian mission and ‗missionaries‘ remain underexplored aspects within religion and development discourses. In response, this research explores stories from eleven Christian ‗missionaries‘ in Bangladesh. Firstly, I assess how the changing non-governmental sector in Bangladesh influenced participants‘ activities. Secondly, I contextualise their stories within religion and development discourses with reference to analyses of development workers. Finally, I reflect on the significance of spirituality in participants‘ lives. I also describe how spirituality played a role in my research. I frame this research within feminist and poststructuralist ways of knowing. Methodologically, I conducted semi-structured interviews and ‗hung out‘ with participants. I ‗wrote myself-in‘ to this research to highlight how the process intersected with my own subject positions. I found that participants‘ engaged with development in similar ways to development workers as analysed by others. They reproduced discourses of modernisation, expertise, altruism, and the ‗third world‘. They additionally responded to Christian discourses, such as ‗calling‘. Participants‘ activities and subjectivities were shaped by these intersecting discourses, and were also shaped by the historic and current setting of Bangladesh. Missionaries‘ stories revealed some aspects of the ‗mission-development nexus‘ in Bangladesh (Fountain, 2012). Participants‘ stories and my own research experience, also demonstrated that engagement with belief in God can be difficult within development and within ‗the academy‘ (Shahjahan, 2005).</p>

scholarly journals Exploring the Mission-Development Nexus Through Stories from Christian ‘Missionaries’ in Bangladesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anna Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Current Setting ◽  
Development Workers ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Development Discourses ◽  
Research And Policy

<p>Over the past decade, development research and policy has increasingly paid attention to religion and belief. Donors and researchers have progressively engaged with faith-based organisations and recipients. However, Christian mission and ‗missionaries‘ remain underexplored aspects within religion and development discourses. In response, this research explores stories from eleven Christian ‗missionaries‘ in Bangladesh. Firstly, I assess how the changing non-governmental sector in Bangladesh influenced participants‘ activities. Secondly, I contextualise their stories within religion and development discourses with reference to analyses of development workers. Finally, I reflect on the significance of spirituality in participants‘ lives. I also describe how spirituality played a role in my research. I frame this research within feminist and poststructuralist ways of knowing. Methodologically, I conducted semi-structured interviews and ‗hung out‘ with participants. I ‗wrote myself-in‘ to this research to highlight how the process intersected with my own subject positions. I found that participants‘ engaged with development in similar ways to development workers as analysed by others. They reproduced discourses of modernisation, expertise, altruism, and the ‗third world‘. They additionally responded to Christian discourses, such as ‗calling‘. Participants‘ activities and subjectivities were shaped by these intersecting discourses, and were also shaped by the historic and current setting of Bangladesh. Missionaries‘ stories revealed some aspects of the ‗mission-development nexus‘ in Bangladesh (Fountain, 2012). Participants‘ stories and my own research experience, also demonstrated that engagement with belief in God can be difficult within development and within ‗the academy‘ (Shahjahan, 2005).</p>

scholarly journals (The) Margin(s) Speak! A Multifaceted Examination of Practising ‘Men who have Sex with Men’ Development in Bangkok

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
James Burford
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Performative Writing ◽  
Postgraduate Students ◽  
Development Interventions ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Sex With Men ◽  
Development Literature

<p>In this study, I explore the experiences and understandings of twenty-seven participants involved with ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM) development interventions in Bangkok, seeking to better understand the complex realities that emerge in practising MSM development. I endeavor to interrogate the development field’s limited understandings of sexuality as well as the discourses present (and absent) in existing Queering Development research. By acknowledging my personal journey in and through this re-search, I also examine authentic ways-of-being a queeresearcher, noting the challenges I faced and power I discovered in re-searching and re-presenting my own work. Ultimately, I explore the link between the paucity of local developing queer narratives in Queering Development and the limited space students have, to be visibly queer in mainstream theses – to do this I use the metaphor of ‘the margins’. In framing this re-search, I draw nourishment from queer, critical, poststructural and Participatory Action Research epistemologies. Methodologically, I carried out semi-structured interviews and focus groups, as well as using other tools such as mapping and story writing. I also spent time ‘hanging out’ at both Rainbow Sky and Bangkok Rainbow, enabling both a deeper appreciation of the work carried out by the organisations as well as providing an opportunity to gather materials. The generation of data did not cease once I left ‘the field’; I continued to produce autoethnographic texts including poetry and a re-search performance which I used both as a method of enquiry and re-presentation of this study. This multifaceted approach enabled diverse questions (emerging across disciplines) to be addressed in my work. To re-present my analyses of participants’ accounts I have celebrated different ways-of-knowing re-search. I have used poetry and consciously performative writing, visual art (including graffiti) and performance alongside traditional scholarly prose. This approach enables multiple voices to emerge all over the page, questioning the hegemony of the bound, straight-lined thesis and the ‘legitimate’ knowledges it generally contains. I argue that queer postgraduate students may be able to open spaces to produce authentic work, despite pressures to perform straight research texts. Yet, pressures to conform to traditional understandings of theses may be painful reminders of their own positions in academia and society. Overall, my study offers intimate, multifaceted perspectives on the agency of MSM development practitioners in Bangkok and my own experience of finding power through queeresearch. I hope it will contribute to more nuanced understandings of local practitioners of MSM development in Queering Development literature, and to scholarship on queer postgraduate students’ experience of re-search more generally.</p>

scholarly journals Through the Looking Glass Space to New Ways of Knowing: A Personal Research Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabrielle Brand
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Health Professional ◽  
Health Care Professionals ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Looking Glass ◽  
Personal Research

This article describes how writing personal research narratives during my doctoral research journey challenged my role as a health professional and my personal beliefs and values in fundamental ways. In qualitative narrative inquiry, the reflexive account of the research experience is a key element in conducting ethical, rigorous, and meaningful forms of qualitative research. However, as a novice researcher, I was unprepared for the unlearning journey I experienced during the research process. This uncomfortable experience cut to the core of my identity by dismantling unexamined belief and value systems that lay dormant and hidden from my everyday consciousness as a health professional. In the spirit of transparency, reflexivity and “good” qualitative research, this article presents an explicit account of my exquisite and sometimes excruciating reflexive research journey that profoundly changed how I relate and work with people. I believe health care professionals should adopt a narrative view of experience that creates the “looking glass space” to locate their own stories within the broader socio-cultural and historical context of their lives, especially in relation to their health professional identity. Exchanging diminishing dialogue with deeper dialogue honours both the complexities of young peoples’ lives and social worlds and encompasses socially-conscious methodologies of promise and hope.

Keeping the wheels of the automotive industry turning: the use of tacit knowledge by product development workers in a multinational automotive manufacturer

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
René Schmidt ◽  
Robin Bell ◽  
Vessela Warren
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Tacit Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Job Descriptions ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Organizational Goals ◽  
Development Workers ◽  
Development Department ◽  
Product Development Department

PurposeThis research identifies the forms of tacit knowledge frequently requested in the job descriptions of knowledge workers in a multinational automotive manufacturer's product development department. It then explores how and why the most requested forms of tacit knowledge are used in practice to achieve organizational goals.Design/methodology/approachThis study follows a sequential mixed-methods approach to quantify the most frequently requested forms of tacit knowledge within internal job descriptions and then explores how and why this tacit knowledge is used. The first stage applies manifest content analysis to internal job descriptions to highlight the epitomes of tacit knowledge to identify the most frequently requested forms of tacit knowledge. The second stage employs semi-structured interviews to explore the use of the most frequently requested forms of tacit knowledge in practice.FindingsThe research indicated that the organization most frequently requested tacit knowledge in the form of skills and experience in the job descriptions of knowledge workers in the product development department. When the use and application of tacit knowledge in the form of skills were further explored in practice, it was found that tacit knowledge-based socially-focused skills were used, which was underpinned by the need to bring people together and align them towards a common goal to make things work; by enabling people to work together as a team; by developing and using networks; and acting as a required resource to support the development and integration in product development. Tacit knowledge in the form of experience was applied through the application of personally obtained experience to enhance development work by acting as a pacemaker for increasing efficiency and a sense of upcoming issues.Originality/valueThis work addresses the paucity of studies identifying tacit knowledge in large organizations and meets calls to investigate the processes and activities related to tacit knowledge in specific contexts.

scholarly journals PET VISITATION AS NARRATIVE CARE FOR OLDER ADULTS IN THERAPEUTIC SETTINGS

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S867-S867
Author(s):  
Jill Yamasaki ◽  
Kelley Murfin
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Term Care ◽  
Personalized Care ◽  
Healing Relationships ◽  
Therapeutic Settings

Abstract A growing body of research highlights the physiological and psychosocial benefits of pet visitation programs in therapeutic settings. These programs utilize the profound connection between humans and animals to promote holistic healing, foster greater quality of life, and influence meaningful communication between patients and providers. For older adults in hospitals or long-term care, these benefits are often correlated with moments of pleasure, comfort, relaxation, and entertainment. The current study builds on this prior knowledge by examining pet visitation programs as a novel form of narrative care that can also help preserve biographical continuity and promote the sharing of lived stories. We worked with two volunteer pet visitation programs in Houston and one in Los Angeles. Our research included a variety of ethnographic methods, including participant observation; informal interviews with providers, patients (or residents, depending on the context), and their families; semi-structured interviews with volunteers; and discourse review of organizational materials. We employed a method of constant comparison to identify and thematically analyze recurrent patterns of behavior and overarching meanings across the data. Three primary themes emerged from the data: (a) compassion, (b) connection, and (c) response. Collectively, the presence of pets prompted stories and behaviors that foster healing relationships characterized by empathy and mutual understanding between patients (or residents), family members, and providers. Pet visitation programs facilitate storied conversations, increased autonomy, and alternative ways of knowing that promote greater understandings of the patient’s (or resident’s) psychosocial context and biographical history, leading to more personalized care and improved well-being.

scholarly journals THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE? THE VALUE OF EXPERT ADVICE IN THE PRODUCTION OF EVIDENCE-BASED GUIDANCE: A MIXED METHODS STUDY OF THE NICE INTERVENTIONAL PROCEDURES PROGRAMME

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oyinlola Oyebode ◽  
Hannah Patrick ◽  
Alexander Walker ◽  
Bruce Campbell ◽  
John Powell
Keyword(s):  
Expert Opinion ◽  
Interventional Procedures ◽  
Expert Advice ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Usefulness Score ◽  
Qualitative Work ◽  
Patient Selection Criteria ◽  
Guidance Development

Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the aspects of expert advice that decision makers find most useful in the development of evidence-based guidance and to identify the characteristics of experts providing the most useful advice.Methods: First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seventeen members of the Interventional Procedures Advisory Committee of the UK's National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. Interviews examined the usefulness of expert advice during guidance development. Transcripts were analyzed inductively to identify themes. Second, data were extracted from 211 experts’ questionnaires for forty-one consecutive procedures. Usefulness of advice was scored using an index developed through the qualitative work. Associations between usefulness score and characteristics of the expert advisor were investigated using univariate and multivariate analyses.Results: Expert opinion was seen as a valued complement to empirical evidence, providing context and tacit knowledge unavailable in published literature, but helpful for interpreting it. Interviewees also valued advice on the training and experience required to perform a procedure, on patient selection criteria and the place of a procedure within a clinical management pathway. Limitations of bias in expert opinion were widely acknowledged and skepticism expressed regarding the anecdotal nature of advice on safety or efficacy outcomes. Quantitative analysis demonstrated that the most useful advice was given by clinical experts with direct personal experience of the procedure, particularly research experience.Conclusions: Evidence-based guidance production is often characterized as a rational, pipeline process. This ignores the valuable role that expert opinion plays in guidance development, complementing and supporting the interpretation of empirical data.

scholarly journals PP8 Paramedic views and experiences of the ethical considerations in ambulance based clinical trials: an interview study

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. e4.1-e4
Author(s):  
Stephanie Armstrong ◽  
Adele Langlois ◽  
Niroshan Siriwardena
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trials ◽  
University Education ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Ethical Considerations ◽  
Potential Barriers ◽  
Patient Capacity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Facilitators And Barriers ◽  
Time Limitations

BackgroundPrehospital ambulance based research has unique ethical considerations due to urgency, time-limitations and the locations (home, ambulance) involved. We sought to explore these issues through interviews with paramedics that have research experience.MethodsWe undertook semi-structured interviews with paramedics, seeking their views and experiences of undertaking research in ambulance based clinical trials. Participants were purposively chosen because they were actively involved research and had enrolled one or more patients into a clinical trial. Participants were questioned regarding their experiences of the enrolment and consent process, and their opinions regarding the facilitators and barriers to ambulance based research. Transcripts were digitally recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed thematically.ResultsWe interviewed 15 paramedics. They ranged from newly qualified to experienced advanced paramedics. Mental capacity and consent were discussed and the time and complexity for undertaking these processes were highlighted. Participants discussed problems with completing paperwork due to the complexity of recording systems. Most highlighted paramedic training and experience as a potential barrier to research, stating that those that had gone through a university education in general seemed more open to research than those that had ‘learnt on the job’. It was also felt that more information on the benefits of a trial to both patients and practice were needed from the outset to allow paramedics to make an informed decision about whether to take part in research or not. Several stated that they did additional reading around the subject before signing up. All stated that the training given prior to commencing the research was good and appropriate to each trial.ConclusionsWe identified patient capacity and consent, paramedic training and experience and complexity of processes as important potential barriers to prehospital research. There is scope to improve guidance for prehospital research studies in future.

scholarly journals Patterns of knowledge used by nurses in caring for the patient in the first psychotic outbreak

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andressa de Oliveira ◽  
Ana Paula Rigon Francischetti Garcia ◽  
Vanessa Pellegrino Toledo
Keyword(s):  
Psychosocial Care ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
University Hospital ◽  
Psychiatric Ward ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Hospital Data ◽  
Know How ◽  
Patterns Of Knowing ◽  
Action Methods

Abstract Objective: To know how the nurse provides care in the first psychotic outbreak of patients, and to identify the Barbara Carper patterns of knowing used for this action. Methods: A qualitative study using a phenomenological approach was performed in four Psychosocial Care Centers and in a psychiatric ward of a university hospital. Data collection was carried out with ten nurses participating in semi-structured interviews using the following guiding question: "Tell me your experience in caring for a patient in their first psychotic outbreak". Results: Carper's fundamental ways of knowing (empirical, aesthetic, ethical and personal) were identified in the caring of the patient in their first psychotic outbreak. Conclusion and Implications: A fragmented practice is implied when patterns of knowledge are taken in isolation. This reflects on specific actions of nursing work, such as the nursing practice and its stages.

scholarly journals Contextual Factors Influencing Breastfeeding Practices Among Arab Women in the State of Qatar

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-95
Author(s):  
Behi (Behrokh) Nikaiin ◽  
Nahrida Nazir ◽  
Ambreen Mohammad ◽  
Tam Donnelly ◽  
Roqaia Ahmed Dorri ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Research ◽  
System Development ◽  
World Health ◽  
Physiological Status ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Breastfeeding Practices ◽  
Immune System Development

Breastfeeding is an important source of nutrition and sustenance for infants and toddlers, and has also been linked to several aspects of emotional, physiological, and psychological developments. Benefits of breastfeeding include lower morbidity and mortality rates in infants, appropriate nutrition for early physiological development, and improved immune system development. Some studies also suggest it may enhance cognitive development and reduce the risk of diabetes. These health benefits positively influence the physiological status of the infant throughout his or her early childhood and adolescence. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that breastfeeding be initiated immediately following birth and continued until the infant is at least 6 months of age. However, according to the UNICEF report, between 2000-2007 in Qatar, only 12% of babies under 6 months were exclusively breastfed. Funded by the QNRP (Qatar Undergraduate Research Experience Program), the goal of this exploratory qualitative study was to find ways to effectively promote breastfeeding practices among Qatari women by investigating factors affecting the ways in which Qatari women (national and nonnational Arab women) make decisions to engage in breastfeeding practices and their overall knowledge of breastfeeding. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 32 Arab mothers as research participants and individual in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant. Results showed that professional support from doctors and nurses, social support from parents and spouse, cultural and religious values, economic ability work restrictions, time, as well as availability of help and care at home, personal challenges, such as perceptions of pain, body image, and body changes, were some of the major factors in making decisions to breastfeed or not.

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