Recently a statement has been issued and circulated privately to interested parties by a Committee composed of the Food Manufacturers' Federation and a few Public Analysts…
Abstract
Recently a statement has been issued and circulated privately to interested parties by a Committee composed of the Food Manufacturers' Federation and a few Public Analysts, containing suggested standards for the composition of jams. The suggestions are that jams are to be divided into two grades, first quality and second quality respectively, each grade to contain generally a minimum amount of soluble solids, and fruit or fruits individually. Each grade is to include all varieties of jams, pure and mixed, with different fruit standards for each variety. At the same time particular attention is to be paid to correct labelling of each jam. The scheme is a step in the right direction, but it is open to severe criticism on several points on which many Public Analysts and local authorities will agree. The question of correct labelling will be satisfactory to all parties including the consuming public, but it is to be regretted that the suggestion is made that first quality jams may contain not only other added fruit juices, but also such substances as citric, tartaric and malic acids and pectin, without declaration. Second quality jams containing these or other substances must, on the other hand, have a label declaring the additions, therefore what possible objection can be raised to the declaration of added fruit juices, etc., in first quality jams, especially when it is claimed that any such addition is for the improvement of the consistency of the jams? The consuming public are certainly entitled to know the composition of the jam which they purchase—it is unlikely that objection would be taken to such jam if the procedure adopted was honestly and openly intimated to the purchaser, and a declaration of this nature, binding on all manufacturers, ought to be compulsory. As every housewife knows, good jams can be made without the addition of other fruit juices or pectin. Further, in the proposals issued there is no suggestion as to the amount of added substances which are to be permitted. Standards of such a nature constitute a severe and serious handicap to those manufacturers who produce what are after all the genuine and superior articles, namely, jams made by boiling fruit with sugar without additions of any kind whatever.
Lizzie Ward, Marian Barnes and Beatrice Gahagan
There has been increasing recognition that alcohol may be a source of problems for older people. This has been reflected in the increase in alcohol‐related hospital admissions for…
Abstract
Purpose
There has been increasing recognition that alcohol may be a source of problems for older people. This has been reflected in the increase in alcohol‐related hospital admissions for people over 65. Although a neglected area in policy and research within the UK, studies from health and social care practice have drawn attention to the complexity of the issues for practitioners. This paper seeks to report on qualitative research which aims to generate a wider evidence base by exploring the circumstances in which older people drink; the meaning that drinking alcohol has for them and its impact; and acknowledging that this can be a pleasurable and positive experience, as well as something that can have adverse health, financial, personal and interpersonal impacts.
Design/methodology/approach
A major challenge of the research, given the sensitive nature of the topic, was how to approach older people and ask about their experiences of alcohol use. A participatory methodology was developed in which older people were actively involved in designing and carrying out the research. Older co‐researchers conducted 21 individual interviews and three focus groups with a diverse range of older research participants from different backgrounds and circumstances.
Findings
The findings indicate that participants engaged in different drinking styles which are connected to complex relationships between individual biographies, personal circumstances and external factors. Recommendations for practice and policy development are made on the basis of these findings.
Originality/value
This is a sensitive topic involving stigma and practitioners have highlighted issues around lack of training and appropriate referral services as well as difficulties in approaching the topic with older people. In addition, there is a tension in the drive to promote service users' rights to have choices and the question of whether to intervene if those choices involve risky behaviour. Even less is known about the perspectives of older people themselves and more research is needed to understand the social, cultural and economic contexts of older people's drinking behaviour.
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– The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ways in which a researcher's maternal status as “mother” or “non-mother/child-free” is implicated in the research process.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ways in which a researcher's maternal status as “mother” or “non-mother/child-free” is implicated in the research process.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws on the experiences as two feminist researchers who each independently researched experiences of motherhood: one as a “mother” and one as a “non-mother/child-free”. The paper draws on extracts from the original interview data and research diaries to reflect on how research topic, methodology and interview practice are shaped by a researcher's maternal status.
Findings
The paper found that the own maternal identities shaped the research process in a number of ways: it directed the research topic and access to research participants; it drove the method of data collection and analysis and it shaped how the authors interacted with the participants in the interview setting, notably through the performance of maternal identity. The paper concludes by examining how pervasive discourses of “good motherhood” are both challenged and reproduced by a researcher's maternal status and question the implications of this for feminist research.
Originality/value
While much has been written about researcher “positionality” and the impact of researcher identity on the research process, the ways in which a researcher's “maternal status” is implicated in the research process has been left largely unexamined. Yet, as this paper highlights, the interaction of the often-conflicting identities of “mother”, “researcher”, “feminist” and “woman” may shape the research process in subtle yet profound ways, raising important questions about the limits of what feminist social research about “motherhood” can achieve.
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Lizzie Hehir and Jerome Carson
The purpose of this paper is to provide a profile of Lizzie Hehir. Lizzie tells her own story and is then interviewed by Jerome.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a profile of Lizzie Hehir. Lizzie tells her own story and is then interviewed by Jerome.
Design/methodology/approach
This series of papers used the case study approach. However, each paper is written collaboratively, using the person’s own words. The deeply individual nature of each person’s story reminds us of the complexities of working in mental health.
Findings
In her account, Lizzie tells us of her long-term battles with self-harm. It was a struggle that she eventually won.
Research limitations/implications
Individual stories allow us to access people’s lived experience with mental illness. No diagnostic manual can ever truly categorise this uniqueness.
Practical implications
Lizzie shows it is possible to overcome self-harm though she still experiences something of the trauma she went through when she has triggers.
Social implications
When we see burns victims, we seldom approach them asking them how they sustained their injuries, but as Lizzie points out, many people feel able to ask people who have self-harmed about their injuries.
Originality/value
Lizzie writes with conviction and humility. Now working in mental health, she is able to reach out to others who are as troubled as she once was.
Case study builds upon Kay Whitehead’s detailed empirical work with respect to South Australia. Equally pertinent is Whitehead’s and Thorpe’s analysis of historical discourses of…
Abstract
Case study builds upon Kay Whitehead’s detailed empirical work with respect to South Australia. Equally pertinent is Whitehead’s and Thorpe’s analysis of historical discourses of ‘vocation, career and character’ as constituting a ?matrix of subjectivity’ against which individuals construct their teacher‐selves. My methodological and conceptual approach is also informed by those historically‐situated ‘narrative inquiries’ collected in Weiler and Middleton’s book, Telling Women’s Lives, and Cunningham and Gardner’s ‘life histories’ of UK teachers in the years 1907‐1950.The authors use personal accounts (oral and written) as a major source for examining the ways in which twentieth‐century teachers constructed their own subjectivities within the context of dominant practices, institutions and discourses. Such studies give voice to women in education whose lives historians in the past have deemed insignificant ‐ none more so than the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ female classroom teachers with whom this article is centrally concerned. Thus I similarly use the privately‐printed teaching memoirs of Gladys E. Ward (Present, Miss: the story of a teacher’s life in the outback and in the city), reading the representations of herself as a ‘career teacher’ in the Primary Branch of the South Australian Education Department against the contemporary local discourses of women in teaching which framed her narrative.
DULLNESS can be the aftermath of conferences, but Scarborough may be an exception. Some of the heat engendered at the Annual Business Meeting has indeed already evaporated, but…
Abstract
DULLNESS can be the aftermath of conferences, but Scarborough may be an exception. Some of the heat engendered at the Annual Business Meeting has indeed already evaporated, but its implications remain. They are these: that, while the examination system of the L.A. is to remain as it is for another two years, some revision is imperative; and the relations of the L.A. with the Association of Assistant Librarians must be so arranged that the latter can continue a distinctive existence. As for the examinations, resentment was felt not so much at the age‐limits, although these were the gravamen of the criticism against them, but against the undue severity of the Intermediate Examination, which, we are told, has delayed and impaired the careers of many quite capable young people. The severity, great as it seems in the two subjects, is increased by the requirement that both must be passed together. Only students exceptionally possessed of the examination faculty can do this, and we have the spectacle of several who have passed in each subject two or more times and yet have never been able to pass them together. The sanity of the requirement that they be passed together lies in the fact that it prevents cramming. Will anyone tell us the remedy?
Catarina Barata, Vânia Simões and Francisca Soromenho
Obstetric violence is the mistreatment of women in the setting of obstetric care, which includes preconception, medically assisted reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth and…
Abstract
Obstetric violence is the mistreatment of women in the setting of obstetric care, which includes preconception, medically assisted reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. Obstetric violence follows and perpetuates the devaluation and subjugation of women in patriarchal societies, where socio-cultural conceptions contribute to a view of the female body as faulty and deviating from the male prototype. These shape the perception that female reproductive processes require technological corrections. The medicalisation of reproductive processes and the mechanisation of a normal life event, with the threat of death and other life-changing consequences, disempower women and objectify the body and its functions.
The entrance of women into the workforce and the specialised fields, feminising care professions, failed to shift this paradigm. Female health workers are trained in the procedures instituted by dominant patriarchal structures, expressing values encoded in the professional culture and the institutions where they work. As women conform to the models they are exposed to during their training, perpetuating corporate hierarchies and practices, they act as agents and perpetrators of obstetric violence. Thus, obstetric violence also constitutes a specific type of violence against women at the hands of other women.
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This chapter examines the nexus between women's experiences of domestic abuse and their subsequent violent offending, as viewed through the lens of keyworkers in a women-only…
Abstract
This chapter examines the nexus between women's experiences of domestic abuse and their subsequent violent offending, as viewed through the lens of keyworkers in a women-only charity. The role of female subjectivity, stereotypes of femininity and the gendering of behaviours is discussed, alongside an exploration of the paradox of the female ‘victim-offender’. Qualitative semi-structured interviews with the keyworkers, drawing on the author's experience of working in the system, enable individual voices to be captured in detail, resulting in a rich narrative piece. This is analysed thematically and framed conceptually by the work of Judith Butler on gender performativity and precarious existence, and Jessica Benjamin on the ‘Third’ and the potential of recognition to transcend the experience of gendered violence. The discussions lead to the conclusion that the keyworkers' attention to interpellatory dynamics and intersubjectivity effects powerful individual change. However, the impact of this is limited, as the criminal justice system itself acts as Benjamin's ‘moral Third’, maintaining its status quo of inequality and gendered violence through patriarchal attitudes and a corresponding language of exclusion.
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Michael Clark, Michelle Cornes, Martin Whiteford, Robert Aldridge, Elizabeth Biswell, Richard Byng, Graham Foster, James Sebastian Fuller, Andrew Hayward, Nigel Hewett, Alan Kilminster, Jill Manthorpe, Joanne Neale and Michela Tinelli
People experiencing homelessness often have complex needs requiring a range of support. These may include health problems (physical illness, mental health and/or substance misuse…
Abstract
Purpose
People experiencing homelessness often have complex needs requiring a range of support. These may include health problems (physical illness, mental health and/or substance misuse) as well as social, financial and housing needs. Addressing these issues requires a high degree of coordination amongst services. It is, thus, an example of a wicked policy issue. The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenge of integrating care in this context using evidence from an evaluation of English hospital discharge services for people experiencing homelessness.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper undertakes secondary analysis of qualitative data from a mixed methods evaluation of hospital discharge schemes and uses an established framework for understanding integrated care, the Rainbow Model of Integrated Care (RMIC), to help examine the complexities of integration in this area.
Findings
Supporting people experiencing homelessness to have a good discharge from hospital was confirmed as a wicked policy issue. The RMIC provided a strong framework for exploring the concept of integration, demonstrating how intertwined the elements of the framework are and, hence, that solutions need to be holistically organised across the RMIC. Limitations to integration were also highlighted, such as shortages of suitable accommodation and the impacts of policies in aligned areas of the welfare state.
Research limitations/implications
The data for this secondary analysis were not specifically focussed on integration which meant the themes in the RMIC could not be explored directly nor in as much depth. However, important issues raised in the data directly related to integration of support, and the RMIC emerged as a helpful organising framework for understanding integration in this wicked policy context.
Practical implications
Integration is happening in services directly concerned with the discharge from hospital of people experiencing homelessness. Key challenges to this integration are reported in terms of the RMIC, which would be a helpful framework for planning better integrated care for this area of practice.
Social implications
Addressing homelessness not only requires careful planning of integration of services at specific pathway points, such as hospital discharge, but also integration across wider systems. A complex set of challenges are discussed to help with planning the better integration desired, and the RMIC was seen as a helpful framework for thinking about key issues and their interactions.
Originality/value
This paper examines an application of integrated care knowledge to a key complex, or wicked policy issue.