Student self‐efficacy narratives: A collaborative co‐constructive method

This article outlines the challenges faced by mature‐aged students transitioning to higher education and presents a method of assisting these students to reflect on ways in which they have overcome past difficulties in terms of their self‐efficacy. For the purpose of the study, self‐efficacy was conceptualised as an individual initiating action to engage in a given task, applying effort to the task, and persisting in the face of obstacles to successfully complete the task. The main aim of the article is to explicate a research method that involves a cyclical and iterative process using qualitative interview data from the population of interest, namely four female mature‐aged students starting an undergraduate degree. The method is highly collaborative, with narratives co‐constructed by the researcher and participants as they are guided in reflecting on those experiences that constitute a sense of self‐efficacy, in narrative and by narrative. The article briefly reports on a research study to illustrate the method and lists the main themes emerging from the narratives. The article concludes with an evaluation by the participants of being involved in the research process, with positive implications for the utility of the method with mature‐aged students and possibly other cohorts.     

Stem-Cell Spin: Covering the Hwang Affair in Science and Nature

In 2006 the South Korean cloning expert Woo Suk Hwang was found guilty of fraud and scientific misconduct. The scandal reached far beyond Hwang's own laboratory, encompassing national pride, geopolitics and global discussions of stem-cell research. But the Hwang affair was also a case of fierce competition between two of the world's leading scientific journals. Individually, Science and Nature used the Hwang affair and their unique positions to air specific and conflicting agendas resulting in completely different narratives as the scandal unfolded. In Science, where Hwang's fraudulent papers were published, the readers learned about a caring and concerned South Korean research director. Science was true to this narrative over a two-year period until finally, around Christmas 2005, there was no longer any doubt about Hwang's misbehaviour. In Nature, on the other hand, Hwang was, from the very beginning, treated with suspicion and framed as a cynical director of a cloning factory. Media studies of science and technology tend to focus almost exclusively on how this framing process works in the mass media and ignore that this process is already well under way in scientific journals that then feed into mass media news stories. Thus the news coverage of the Hwang affair in Science and Nature demonstrates that these two leading scientific journals frame their news stories in important ways that reflect (and are reproduced by) mass media reporting.     

Sense of community coherence and inter-religious relations

ABSTRACT

The current article attempts to broaden the individual-based concept of sense of coherence to the community level. We examine sense of community coherence and its connection with perceptions of collective narratives and acculturation tendencies in the social context of Palestinian Muslims and Christians living in Israel. Questionnaires that were developed and adapted for the unique population in this study were distributed to a representative sample of 1034 Muslims (455 males) and 720 Christians (354 males), all Israeli citizens aged 18 and up. As expected, sense of community coherence was negatively related to the level of acceptance of the out-group collective narratives and positively related to the level of acceptance of the in-group collective narratives. In the same vein, it was also positively related to the tendency for separation and negatively related to the tendency for integration and assimilation. The discussion focuses on the contribution of the research findings to the deepening of our understanding of the concepts of sense of coherence and sense of community coherence.     

Who speaks? Who looks? Who feels? Point of view in autobiographical narratives1

In this paper, the author aims to substantiate Freud's claim that neurotic illness creates gaps in autobiographical narratives in terms of the narrator's stating and inducing perspectives. He sketches out the role of narrative perspective and the joint taking of a shared perspective by analyst and patient in psychoanalytic therapy. He introduces four ways of representing perspectives in narratives. Three degrees of narrative distortion are exemplifi ed by three excerpts from life narratives and explored in terms of narrative perspective representation. The most comprehensive perspective representation is achieved in the fi rst example by explicitly stating the present perspective of the narrator as well as the past perspective of the story's protagonist by use of mental verbs. In the second narrative, exclusive use of linguistic forms for inducing the protagonist's perspective both overwhelms the narrator and gives the listener an incomplete picture of what happened. Inconsistent motives, denial of responsibility and omission of detail render the third narrative even more diffi cult to follow. The author discusses the clinical signifi cance of this exploratory analysis of perspectives in narratives in terms of claiming responsibility for one's past action and of level of defence mechanisms, and by highlighting the emotional impact on listeners, which the author suggests is the stronger the more perspectives are left out. He discusses analogies to countertransference. The analysis of narrative perspectives offers an approach for systematic research in psychoanalytic practice.     

Language Abilities in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Reading Disabilities, and Normal Controls

Research has demonstrated a high prevalence of language impairments (LI) and reading disabilities (RD) in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Since RD is also associated with LI, it is unclear whether the language impairments are specific to ADHD or associated with comorbid RD. The language abilities of ADHD children with and without RD were investigated in a task requiring recall of a lengthy narrative, and in tests assessing knowledge of the semantic aspects of language. The study was conducted with 50 boys—14 ADHD, 14 ADHD + RD, 8 RD, and 14 normal controls, aged 7 to 11. Children with ADHD (ADHD-only, ADHD + RD) exhibited difficulties in organizing and monitoring their story retelling. Children with RD (RD-only, ADHD + RD) demonstrated deficits in receptive and expressive semantic language abilities on the language processing tests. The comorbid group (ADHD + RD) exhibited the deficits of both ADHD and RD children. The deficiencies of ADHD children are consistent with higher-order executive function deficits while the deficits of RD children are consistent with deficits in the basic semantics of language processing.     

Becoming a teller of tales: associations between children's fictional narratives and parent-child reminiscence narratives

Previous research has revealed a connection between the contributions parents make while reminiscing and their children’s narratives for personally experienced events. The current research expands the literature by focusing on the connection between parental reminiscing and children’s production of fictional narratives. After 4- to 9-year-olds and their parents reminisced about past shared events, the children (with an experimenter) produced narratives based on wordless picture books. The results revealed that the overall quality of the fictional narratives was correlated with parents’ provision statements that emphasized orientation and evaluation in the reminiscence narrative. For younger children, correlations held for reminiscence narratives about recent events. For older children, correlations held for reminiscence narratives about events from the distant past. The results are consistent with the suggestion that children learn general storytelling skills from adult models.     

Embodied narratives in becoming a counselling trainer: an autoethnographic study

This autoethnographic study addresses the newly appointed counselling trainer's question ‘How did I get here?’ The procedure is described, and findings are presented as partial narratives of the Wounded Dancer, poems and prose written from different voices. Themes are revealed of love, healing, risk taking, unconventionality, physicality and overcoming physical limitations. ‘Wounded healer’ stories are inscribed alongside ‘powerful body’/‘subversive body’ stories. The role of the father is considered in facilitating these stories, including the tomboy throwing off ‘definitions of what it means to be a girl’. The study is evaluated in terms of Richardson's (2000) criteria. One contribution to knowledge lies in the methodology's potential application to research-led learning and teaching with counsellor education.     

God changes people: modes of authentication in Evangelical conversion narratives

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Evangelicalism is the conversion story. In this article we focus on the conversion stories of interviewees within the setting of several related Evangelical television programs broadcast in the Netherlands since the 1980s. We argue that the conversion story is construed through a particular view on and practice of authenticity. Thus we see that, in the televised conversion story, modes of authentication are at work in what we analytically distinguish as frames, narratives, and strategies of authentication. We argue that the idea of an authentic transformation has changed from a more fundamentalist mode of authentication, emphasizing the subjection of the self to a particular religious narrative, to a more expressive mode of authentication that emphasizes the exploration of the inner, unique self of the interviewee.     

“We have answered their prayer”: American Jewish old age homes as guardians of religious tradition

ABSTRACT

The old age home was the major American Jewish communal response to aged poverty during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first homes offered a self-conscious projection of their sponsors as socially progressive and compassionate in a new landscape. For a religious community increasingly distanced from formal hierarchies of traditional religious practice, the highly visible performance of good deeds under explicitly Jewish auspices became central to its communal identity. Acting on a combination of compassion and the perceived moral imperative of providing a Jewish environment, the founders and supporters of these homes recast Judaism and Jewish identity through an idealized image of aged piety.