Suchergebnisse

Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with seafarers and their partners, this article examines the impact of routine absence on couple and family relations. Using the lens of time, we identify how work patterns and extended absence lead to temporal desynchrony and fragmentation of the life course. We examine how seafarers' lives are both continuous and fractured and often out of step with lives at home.Temporal desynchrony was exemplified in reduced opportunities for couples jointly to produce temporal markers and share in significant calendar events. This lack of temporal harmony posed a challenge to family relations.These findings draw attention to the need for further research that embraces a more multifaceted understanding of time in the context of work and family life.

Time permeates all aspects of our everyday lives but its very centrality often renders it invisible. This article examines how temporal understandings and priorities shape and inform lay and professional constructions of illness, understandings of symptoms and help-seeking behaviour, based on semi-structured interviews with 20 GPs and 16 parents of children with asthma. This identifies the significance of a temporal perspective for beliefs about the nature of asthma as episodic or linear, the appropriate sequences and timing of symptoms and treatment, patterns of help-seeking, and perceptions of speed and treatment choices. Comparing GPs' and parents' accounts highlights both the concordance and divergences in temporal perspectives.We argue that understanding the complexity of illness behaviours requires engagement with the ways in which temporal understandings shape and inform behaviours throughout the illness trajectory and may vary among different social and cultural groups.

This article reports findings of an exploratory study examining the impact of intermittent partner absence on couple relationships and family life. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews with seafarers and their partners, it considers the period when the seafarer is home on leave to examine the salience of the 'breadwinner' role to contemporary masculine identity and explore and contrast the experiences of seafarers at home on leave to that of unemployed men. The article concludes that during the seafarers' leave periods, the experience of sea-faring families has many parallels with that of unemployed men and their families. While seafarers do not lose their 'breadwinner' role, they experience considerable problems associated with loss of role during their leave period, and frequently experience a sense of 'role displacement' where they feel redundant, unnecessary and essentially 'outsiders' in relation to their families.

This article draws on the authors' experiences conducting research on-board cargo vessels as part of a project on Transnational Seafarer Communities. It considers dangerous fieldwork in a hazardous occupational setting. Specific attention is given to the ways in which the ambient risks of particular research sites combine with the situational risks associated with being a female researcher in a male-dominated, rigidly hierarchical setting with a strong occupational culture. It concludes that issues of researcher health and safety are frequently under-emphasized and under-reported in both written and verbal accounts of fieldwork. The article highlights the extent to which gender contributes to situational risk in some research contexts and ambient risk acts to amplify situational risk potentially creating a dangerous environment for fieldworkers. Whilst some risks are immutable, greater steps should be taken at both an institutional and a personal level to minimize the dangers associated with fieldwork.

This article draws on the authors' fieldwork experiences in four different research studies to address the gap in the methodological literature on the practical activities of sample recruitment. Boundaries between ineligibility and refusal are considered along with the `emotional labour' required during the recruitment process. In particular, the article aims to draw attention to the necessary indeterminacies in the recruitment process to show how the practical reasoning and situated action of researchers in the field critically determine the constitution of the study sample and the recruitment rate. It is concluded that, while no rules can adequately specify the process of recruitment, more resources, particularly to allow team recruitment, would reduce researcher stress and allow greater quality control.