Suchergebnisse

In the large international projects where many qualitative researchers work, generating qualitative Big Data, data sharing represents the status quo. This is rarely acknowledged, even though the ethical implications are considerable and span both process and product. I argue that big-team qualitative researchers can strengthen claims to rigor in analysis (the product) by drawing on a growing body of knowledge about how to do credible secondary analysis. Since this necessitates a full account of how the research and the analysis are done (the process), I consider the structural disincentives for providing these. Debates around credibility and rigor are not new to qualitative research in international development, but they intensify when new actors such as program evaluators and quantitative researchers use qualitative methods on a large scale. In this context, I look at the utility of guidelines used by these actors to ensure the quality of qualitative research. I ask whether these offer pragmatic suggestions to improve its quality, recognizing the common and hierarchized separation between the generation and interpretation of data, or conversely, whether they set impossible standards and fail to recognize the differences between and respective strengths of qualitative and quantitative research.

Co-production is the involvement of citizens in the design and delivery of services. In primary schools, this involves parents working with teachers to improve the educational development of their children. In this contribution, we present the results of a systematic literature review on co-production in primary schools to establish what research has been conducted and to what extent there is evidence on the effectiveness of co-production in this context. After three subsequent steps of literature selection, an initial database of 3121 articles was reduced to 122 articles which were then carefully analysed. Generally, co-production in education tends to be aimed at specific groups, which makes it hard to generalize, but some findings appear more generally applicable. Co-production does appear to improve students' knowledge acquisition. Parent–teacher relationships can be difficult and ambiguous, but teacher training appears to be an effective tool for improving co-production.Points for practitionersAlthough co-production in schools is increasingly popular, it has been tested mostly for specific socioeconomic groups. Further testing is necessary to know whether it would work as a mainstream method. Co-production in school requires a tailor-made approach. The evidence suggests that it is only effective if it is adapted to the specific context. It is therefore misleading to speak of co-production in schools as a single phenomenon; there are many different types of co-production in schools. Investing in teacher training turns out to be helpful in overcoming initial resistance.

Limited access to public space for marginalized groups remains an understudied theme in citizenship research in public administration. To address this important research gap, using ethnographic research methods, this article investigates the influence of street-level policing on the everyday citizenship of the Khawaja Sira – a marginalized genderqueer group in Pakistan. Everyday citizenship is conceptualized as the inalienable, equal right of every citizen to be present, visible, and mobile in the public space of a polity. The discussion highlights that through selective implementation of law, hyper-surveillance and moral policing, frontline workers can contribute to curtailing the citizenship of marginalized social groups. Theoretical and practical implications that underscore the intersections of mobility, everyday spaces and administrator–citizen interactions are also discussed.Points for practitioners• Through selective implementation of law, hyper-surveillance and moral policing, frontline workers can contribute to curtailing the citizenship of marginalized social groups. • Access to public space is often disproportionately denied to marginalized social groups like the members of the LGBT community. • The frontline workers of various departments should be educated about the unique identity and requirements of marginalized groups to improve street-level service delivery.

To investigate the historical case of North American feminist bookstores, I use archival materials, interviews, and surveys to consider how cultural distribution sites affect the acquisition and interpretation of cultural objects. The findings point to the importance and variety of distributor conditions, including physical space, atmosphere, bookseller characteristics, stock, and audience members. I develop the concept of the cultural interaction space, defined as a location where a distributor, its cultural objects, and its audience converge. These spaces provide opportunities for interaction, observation, and experimentation with both tangible and intangible cultural materials, as well as for identity formation and the development of group solidarity. Future research should consider how variations in cultural distributors and in cultural interaction spaces affect audience reception, interpretation, and use of cultural objects.

The United States Veterans Health Administration (VHA) serves more than 9 million enrolled Veterans each year. Although most of the care that the VHA sponsors is delivered within its own facilities, there has been a call for "privatizing" some or all of these services. Under such an arrangement, the Department of Veterans Affairs would pay non-VHA providers to deliver care in facilities open to the general public. Privatization is hotly contested on political grounds and is not resolved. Yet the question whether the VHA should be privatized cannot be resolved without first establishing that this policy change is even feasible. One potential obstacle to privatization would be the lack of nearby alternative facilities to deliver care. To assess for the presence of this impediment, we used Google Maps to measure the travel time between 167 VA hospitals and the teaching hospital nearest to each of them. We determined that the mean travel time between VA hospitals and their nearest teaching hospital was approximately 18 minutes with a median of 10 minutes. All but nine VA facilities were within two hours' travel, and these nine within ten minutes' travel to a tertiary care, nonteaching hospital. These data do not definitively resolve the privatization debate, of course, but do refute the assertion that inpatient VA services cannot be privatized because replacement hospitals are too far away. As shown, that is simply not the case.

We introduce the new, substantially updated, and revised version of the Dyadic Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) dataset. We discuss the underlying logic of constructing dyadic MIDs and demonstrate that these operations generate significant differences between the actual occurrence and properties of MID dyads and those extracted from machine-generated programs such as EUGene, or from the MID participant dataset. We provide some descriptive measures of dyadic MIDs over the period of 1816 to 2010 and compare some of the key dyadic results on the correlates of MIDs using different datasets. We discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of our results.

Background: Human pathogens are rapidly acquiring resistance to antibiotics leading to treatment failure. We carried out this study to isolate and screen actinomycetes strains that have potential to kill bacterial and fungal pathogens.Methods: In this descriptive study 288 soil and water samples were processed by standard microbiological techniques at Central Department of Microbiology, Tribhuvan University from 2013 to 2015. Screened actinomycetes were cultivated for bioactive metabolite production and minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of metabolites were determined against bacterial pathogens including multidrug resistant bacteria and fungi.Results: One hundred twenty isolates having antimicrobial property were screened. Out of them, four most potent strains, Nocardiopsis prasina, Streptomyces violarus, Streptomyces krainskii and Streptomyces tsusimaensis were identified all having both antibacterial and anti-fungal property.Highest zone of inhibition (ZOI)was given by N. prasina against Candida albicans(41.33 ±1.15mm) and among bacteria, maximum ZOI was against Acinetobacter baumannii(31.33±3.05mm). MIC value of metabolite of N.prasina was 0.125mg/ml for E.coli and C. albicans. It was 2.5 mg/ml each for methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), A. baumannii and Salmonella Typhi and 0.625 mg/ml for Bacillus Subtilis.Conclusions: Bioactive metabolite producing actinomycetes were recovered from soil and tested against human pathogenic bacteria and fungiand found to have antibacterial and antifungal property.

Background: Injuries are a problem worldwide in all occupations. Welders are exposed to many hazards at work resulting in a variety of health problems including injuries at work. This study was conducted to find out the prevalence and factors associated with injuries among welders in Dharan city of eastern Nepal.Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted among 86 welders in Dharan city. Occurrence of injury in past 2 weeks and past 12 months were recorded. Data regarding sociodemographic along with occupational characteristics was collected using semi structured questionnaire. Data analysis was done using SPSS version 17.Results: All the welders in this study were male with almost half of the welders under the age of 25 years and about a fifth (21.1%) of the welders having received some form of welding training. In the past 12 months, 21.1% of the welders suffered from work related injuries. More than 95% welders used at least one personal protective equipment in this study. More injuries were seen among welders with age ≥35 years, working experience ≥ 5 years, not received training and not using of PPE at work. However, these factors were not found to be statistically significant.Conclusions: Work related injuries are high among welders of Dharan. Further research is required to explore the relationship between age, literacy, training and use of personal protective equipment with the occurrence of injuries among the welders.

This article examines whether a distinctive type of war experience developed among the 26,000 soldiers from the Danish minority in Schleswig south of the Dano–German border who were conscripted into the German Army during the First World War. The analysis is focused on how the soldiers voiced their national identity during their encounters with the German Army and the civilian populations in Eastern and Western Europe. Subsequently, it is investigated whether the veteran culture, which developed among the troops from the Danish minority, was marked by a distinct war experience.