Research evaluation: From power to empowerment

This article explores issues in the evaluation of research through an examination of the situation in the field of international development. It is increasingly recognized that traditional evaluation, which served largely a policing function, is not useful in assessing the impact of the development research process. It is argued that the role and perception of evaluation must change if it is to provide a reflection of the learning which takes place in research. The field of international development research provides a rich ground in which to explore the argument. The field is subject to the difficulties of evaluating research and to the difficulties of evaluating development—in both cases, we are dealing with long time frames and the influence of many factors other than the activity itself. If evaluation is to serve a learning function, then the shift must be to a purpose ofempowerment. This article explores the changes which are implicit in such a shift through an examination of three key areas: changing perspectives on evaluation; changing patterns in development; and changing patterns in research for development.     

Investigating how ostracizing others affects one’s self-concept

Abstract

Social relationships are connected with an individual’s self-concept, so events that influence one’s relationships subsequently influence one’s self-concept. Ostracism, being excluded and ignored, is an aversive experience involving both a target (the one being ostracized) and source (the one ostracizing). We will discuss previous limitations of source paradigms and how we addressed them when developing our paradigms. We will also highlight current source research, from a co-edited special issue, and how this research is relevant to an individuals’ self-concept. Lastly, we will suggest how cognitive dissonance work can ground source research within a larger theoretical framework and inspire future research. We consider how one’s self-concept influences cognitive dissonance related to knowingly harming others through ostracism.     

The reinstatement of dissonance and psychological discomfort following failed affirmations

The research in this article examined the consequences of a failed attempt to reduce dissonance through a self‐affirmation strategy. It was hypothesized that disconfirming participants' affirmations would reinstate psychological discomfort and dissonance motivation. In Experiment 1, high‐dissonance participants who affirmed on a self‐relevant value scale and received disconforming feedback about their affirmations expressed greater psychological discomfort (Elliot & Devine, 1994) than either affirmation‐only participants or low‐dissonance/affirmation disconformed participants. In Experiment 2, disconfirmation of an affirmation resulted in increased attitude change. The results of both experiments suggested that a failed attempt to reduce dissonance reinstates psychological discomfort and dissonance motivation. We discuss how the reduction of psychological discomfort may play a role in the success of affirmations in reducing dissonance‐produced attitude change. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Field of Consciousness and Extended Cognition

Extended cognition theorists claim that the definition of cognition can be extended to include not only the brain, but also the body and environment. In a series of works, Mark Rowlands has envisioned a new science of mind that explores the externalism of consciousness and cognition. This paper connects Rowlands’ work with the phenomenology of Aron Gurwitsch. It shows how Gurwitsch’s field of consciousness, in particular his conception of the marginal halo, can provide a distinct, organized way of thinking about extended cognition. A key question considered is from where do cognitive processes project and disclose meanings? By thinking of location as locus—a projecting pathway of points of intentional opportunity—organization in extended cognition becomes organization in a field of consciousness. The marginal halo in the field of consciousness is articulated as this locus of intentionality, what Rowlands (The new science of the mind: from extended mind to embodied phenomenology, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2010) calls “the noneliminable intentional core”. Problems of cognitive bloat and personal character are addressed in light of the findings. In addition to situating Gurwitsch’s work within the extended mind movement for the first time, this study highlights the importance of the marginal halo, largely neglected in previous Gurwitsch scholarship.     

Weighing science and politics in local decision making about hazards

As a step towards understanding how local environemntal hazards policy is made, this article explores how Canadian local elected officials gained and assimilated scientific and technical information about the environmental hazards facing their communities. Consistent with previous work in the hazards field, three of Weiss’s (1979) meanings of research utilization were found to be directly applicable. The elected officials expressed the view that reconciling conflicting expert opinion and competing concerns was more difficult and more rightly their responsibility than gathering information. This research demonstrates the utility of focus groups for interviewing elite populations making community scale decisions. Her current research interest in knowledge utilization is the adoption of innovative approaches to environmental policy implementation among regional authorities.     

A Construct Modeling Approach to the Assessment of Reading Comprehension for Adolescent Readers

This article describes the development of an assessment system for adolescent reading comprehension. It presents a research context—a reading intervention implemented in middle and high schools in an urban district—which became the impetus for the work. The article outlines the organizational principles of construct modeling that guided the design of the measures and describes the theory and research on adolescent reading that formed the basis of the work. It outlines the technical aspects of the measurement system and the methodology used to analyze internal and external validity. The curriculum-embedded assessment profiled in this study informs teachers about student learning. It also grounds assessment in cognitive and learning theory, thereby linking the assessments to broader content standards and current research and policy. By aligning what is taught with what is assessed, the article adds to a growing body of work that calls for increased integration between reading intervention and assessment teams.     

Mediators in the dissonance eating disorder prevention program

Previous research has supported thin-ideal internalization as a partial mediator of the effects of the dissonance eating disorder prevention program. The current study replicated previous findings and examined an additional mediator, body dissatisfaction, hypothesized to account for partial intervention effects. As a secondary goal, we developed a more rigorous and accurate test of mediation that accounted for the temporal, causal interplay between mediator and outcome, and controlled for “reverse mediation”. Results from a sample of 71 high-risk females (M age = 19.8, SD = 1.3) who participated in a four-week dissonance intervention supported thin-ideal internalization as a partial mediator of the effects of the dissonance intervention on bulimic symptoms, even after controlling for body dissatisfaction as a second mediator. Furthermore, results supported body dissatisfaction as a partial mediator for bulimic symptoms after controlling for thin-ideal internalization. Significant “reverse mediation” effects suggested the reciprocal influence of some risk factors for bulimia nervosa and bulimic symptoms. These results contribute to our understanding of the mediators in the dissonance intervention, which can help refine eating disorder prevention programs.     

The cognitive underpinnings of policy process studies: Introduction to a special issue of Cognitive Systems Research

This article introduces the special issue of Cognitive Systems Research on public policy processes. We begin with a discussion of the cognitive foundations of public policy that stem from the complexity of human cognition and emotion. Next, we provide an overview of the articles in the special issue, which occur at the edge of a public policy-cognitive systems boundary. We then turn to a discussion of promising new work in the study of public policy that explores—or may benefit from—the cognitive systems perspective.     

Vilification of the “batterer”: How blame shapes domestic violence policy and interventions

This article explores ways in which the vilification of the “batterer” — the popular, policy, and “scientific” legitimization of the dismissive and degrading categorization of perpetrators — has influenced research, policy, and intervention in the field of domestic violence. The historical, political, ideological, legal, and theoretical bases of this process are reviewed. Factors behind the convergence of feminist and law enforcement perspectives are discussed. Current policies and practices are described as being unnecessarily constrained and unresponsive to a wide range of families and relationships. Vilification exerts its impact on policy through a rhetoric of blame, portraying perpetrators as undeserving of a broader range of interventions and services.     

Road safety knowledge and policy: A historical institutional analysis of the Netherlands

This paper explores the institutional development of Dutch road safety policy over the last century and the role of knowledge therein. After a theoretical exploration of the concept of institutionalization, the article sketches an overview of the institutionalization of road safety policy in the Netherlands between 1900 and 2010. In particular, it reports on the rise of knowledge organizations and national policy departments since the 1960s. Furthermore, it indicates an increasing importance of the regional and local level of governance since 1990 in road safety, while knowledge relevant at that level is hardly produced. This recent mismatch between knowledge production and policy making results in two barriers for knowledge utilization in road safety policy: Dutch road safety knowledge is neither well tailored to regional and local governments, nor does it pay sufficient attention to the needs of regional and local governments to weigh various interests with road safety. This study presents an example of an investigation on how institutional patterns may enable and constrain knowledge utilization.     

Cognitive dissonance induced by writing a counterattitudinal essay facilitates performance on simple tasks but not on complex tasks that involve working memory

This article examines how performance is facilitated with simple tasks and is impaired with complex ones in individuals experiencing dissonance. Experiment 1 measured the performance of dissonance participants at a simple reaction time task. Reaction times were shortest in the dissonance condition. This facilitation effect was interpreted as resulting from increased arousal with dissonance. In Experiment 2, participants performed a more complex secondary memory task that required to memorize and to recall short and long series of numbers. Participants in the dissonance condition performed less well than participants in the no-dissonance condition only under a high memory load and did not differ with a low load. It is suggested that dissonance requires some working memory resources. Accordingly, it is assumed that the arousal properties of dissonance facilitate performance with simple task that do not involve working memory and require a dominant response, but that dissonance impairs performance with tasks that strongly involve working memory.     

Towards an interpersonal understanding of bodily experience

This paper attempts to understand the interpersonal nature of bodily experience. It explores the way the body symptoms we meet in the consulting room, and in everyday life, express and communicate disturbances in our relationships with others. The article seeks to understand how others that are close to us can really get under our skins. The work of the philosopher of the body, MerleauPonty, findings from contemporary developmental psychology, recent psycho-biological studies and psychoanalytic insights are all drawn upon as a way of offering an introduction to contemporary developments in thinking and research on the body.

The article explores the interdependence of body and environment. In particular, the body is always in an interpersonal context with others. Bodies are interdependent; communication is first and foremost bodily. Bodily behaviour and biological functions develop in the context of a relationship. The relationship with the other influences the formation of bodily processes and actions. Clinical examples are drawn upon to illustrate how interpersonal disturbances in development are expressed in bodily symptoms. The difference between a hysterical and psychosomatic body symptom is also briefly addressed.     

Intimacy,sport and young refugee men

This article is about research with a group of young refugee men from Sudan and their relationship to football (soccer) as they resettle in Australia. It provides evidence of the resilience, independence and autonomy that such young refugees possess and what these young men's intimate knowledge of these qualities can teach us. In other words, how can we as researchers learn from these young refugees about how they perform these qualities and how may we accommodate this during ethnographic research and in sports-based intervention programs aimed at empowering such young people? Further, the article explores the role of intimacy in this process by accounting for the role of affective connections on and off the sporting field. The argument is that intimacy can help those involved negotiate the power inequities present in sports-based intervention programs and in associated research.     

“Am iz kwiin” (I’m his queen): Combining interpretative phenomenological analysis with a feminist approach to work with gems in a resource-constrained setting

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on working with gems using a feminist approach to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in a resource-constrained setting. The research explores the experiences of maternal disclosure of HIV to children of HIV positive mothers in Kingston, Jamaica. A feminist approach helps recognise power imbalances within research relationships and the women’s lived experiences. We present three “gems” which illuminate women’s lived experiences and explore how popularised representations of women’s sexuality and mothering influence disclosure discourses. We use emotion work as a conceptual resource to structure the women’s narratives and challenge existing policy discourses, which arguably represent disclosure within a binary, rationalist, decision-making framework. This article adds to global literature on maternal HIV disclosure and problematises policy discourses by bringing into relief the emotion work women engage in when deciding if and how to communicate their HIV status to their children. It adds to the body of research using IPA, particularly in resource-constrained settings where IPA has thus far had little application.     

Some Theoretical Considerations on Attitude,Arousal and Affect during Cognitive Dissonance

This article provides a general overview of cognitive dissonance research with the induced compliance paradigm. We begin by describiang how dissonance affects individuals' attitude change and address issues related to measurement of attitude. Next, we describe the arousal component of dissonance, how it has been measured and the issues that have been raised about its nature. Finally, we explore the emotional component of dissonance and review different ways for measuring and identifying the negative affect associated to dissonance. We conclude by claiming that a more intensive study of the process of dissonance, and particularly of its arousal and emotional components, will allow a more in‐depth understanding of the mental processes involved in cognitive dissonance.     

组织认同的基础理论、测量及相关变量

组织认同是个体源于组织成员身份的一种自我构念,它与组织认定、组织承诺等概念存在显著差异。文章阐述了组织认同基础理论的三种主要观点,对比了差异论、资源论和信息论的研究视角和相互关系。文章着重说明了组织认同的测量工具,分析了组织层面和个人层面的前因变量,以及组织认同对离职意愿等结果变量的影响。文章最后指出今后有必要对扩展定义、影响因素和国家文化差异等方面进行探讨     

Locating Religion in the Context of Charitable Food Assistance: An Ethnographic Study of Food Banks in a Finnish City

This article explores how, for whom, and to what extent religion is part of the reality that people enter into as they seek food assistance from a religious organization. Drawing from an ethnographic study of food assistance places in a Finnish city and applying Lefebvre’s spatial triad as a theoretical approach, the article describes the role of religion in the perceived, conceived, and lived space of charitable food provision in a secular Nordic welfare state. The findings show how the role of religion in the context of food assistance is subject to particular contexts and that this role is socially produced in the practices of the food banks, in the goals of the food providers, and in the lived experiences of the food recipients. The findings suggest that charitable food assistance is a social space where divergent readings of space as either religious or secular are potentially contested. The study provides a novel approach to understanding food assistance with its interconnections with religion and poses further questions for policy development, for religious organizations engaged in charitable food provision, and for future research.     

Networking In Organizations: Developing A Social Practice Perspective For Innovation And Knowledge Sharing In Emerging Work Contexts

This article focuses on the micro-level phenomena related to emergent ways of organizing. It explores how new ways of organizing might be enabled or inhibited through the networking activities and knowledge flows that organizational members engage in within a multinational business organization after the set-up of an innovative Internet business unit. The article considers innovation and networking as social practices mediated in this particular case study through knowledge-sharing activities. This perspective on innovation, networking, and knowledge leads to a conceptualization of organizations that stresses their inherent complexity and their interactive and co-evolving nature with their environments.     

Reflexive Ecclesiology: A Challenge to Applied Research in Religious Organizations

This essay addresses the issue of applied research in, on, and for religious organizations, especially trends in how research has been carried out in relation to religious organizations. It asks how applied research has changed, and what are the implications for the larger field of social scientific research. The essay begins with some general comments about the challenges that face religious organizations in a post‐traditional world that require reflexive monitoring of their traditions and ecclesial practices if these organizations are to survive and engage the future in a significant way. Applied research is defined as one form of reflexive monitoring and includes both (1) research commissioned by leaders of religious organization as an aid for understanding a particular situation or shaping policy or programs, and (2) research that, though not commissioned by religious organizations, has as its primary intent providing religious organizations with policy‐relevant information. Using this definition, the essay then traces trends in applied research from the earlier part of the twentieth century to the present, focusing especially on the past fifty years. It concludes with an assessment of these research efforts as examples of reflexive monitoring.