Co-existing Notions of Research Quality: A Framework to Study Context-specific Understandings of Good Research

Minerva - Notions of research quality are contextual in many respects: they vary between fields of research, between review contexts and between policy contexts. Yet, the role of these co-existing...     

Why do people accept environmental policies? The prospects of higher education and changes in norms,beliefs and policy preferences

Pressing problems of environmental degradation are typically argued to require coordination, primarily through state intervention. Social scientists are struggling to understand how attitudes toward such state interventions are formed, and several drivers have been suggested, including education. People with university degrees are assumed to have certain values as well as the analytical skills to understand complex issues such as climate change. By using a unique panel data-set with students in different university programs (economics, law and political science), this study provides a better understanding of whether and how education affects environmental policy acceptance. One important finding is that university studies generate variation in support and scepticism toward different types of policy measures. For example, economics students tend to develop more positive attitudes toward market-based policy measures. This indicates a potential for education to increase the societal support often hindering the implementation of such policy tools.     

Creative Thinking in the Classroom

The article discusses how current changes in the system of reasoning about education in Finland, Iceland and Sweden are characterised by culturally woven patterns where marketisation strategies, for instance budget reform, are introduced as technically effective devices both for educating the best and to increase inclusion. This system of reason presupposes that the neo-liberalist restructuring changes are inevitable global phenomena and that they are a progress compared with the old arrangements, but is silent about socio-economic issues and the equity goals of the 1960s-1980s. The article also argues that school-based self-evaluation as a practice and as a language is a normalising technique that ensures that school actors will identify the obstacles encountered in the restructuring transition so that neither state nor other authorities intervene.     

Risk factors and protective factors in relation to subjective health among adult female victims of child sexual abuse

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the relationships between risk and protective factors and health outcome in a sample of adult females who had been victims of child sexual abuse. METHOD: Both person- and variable-oriented analyses were applied to questionnaire data from a non-clinical group of women (n = 152) reporting sexual abuse during childhood. RESULTS: Six groups with different patterns of risk and protective factors were found by cluster analysis. Two groups (Good Coping and Support Compensation) had significantly better health than expected in spite of severe abuse. Self-esteem and social support were strong predictors of health in the regression models. CONCLUSION: The relationships between risk and protective factors and health may be different in different groups of victims of child sexual abuse. Self-esteem was closely related to health outcome displaying the importance of this concept in clinical practice. Availability of resources seems to be more important for health outcomes than the amount of risk factors.     

Communication between courts and expert witnesses in legal proceedings concerning child sexual abuse in Sweden: a case review.

OBJECTIVE: The objective was to explore the communication between courts and expert witnesses in legal proceedings concerning child sexual abuse in Sweden. METHOD: A cross professional research team performed a qualitative text analysis of files covering 20 court cases (court report and expert witness statement) from 4 different years (1985, 1989, 1992, and 1997). RESULTS: Expert witnesses applied a wide variety of assessment procedures. Several patterns of communicative difficulties were identified, categorized as "mismatch," "misunderstanding," "misuse," and "missing pieces." Experts and courts sometimes used similar words (e.g., "credibility") but seemed to apply different meanings to them, indicating a lack of a mutual conceptual framework. CONCLUSIONS: The combination of brief expert assignments and diverse assessment procedures turned out to be a specific risk factor for communicative impairment. Alternate strategies for improved communication are discussed.     

Educating for the New Sweden?

Here we focus on Sweden as an advanced welfare state with a centralised educational system stressing modernisation and democratisation that was rapidly restructured into a deregulated, decentralised system based on vouchers and parental choice. The design was based on the collection of different kinds of data: policy texts, public statistics, in depth interviews with policy makers and administrators at different levels ( n = 12) and teachers and headteachers ( n = 42), surveys of students in Grade 9 in comprehensive schools ( n = 413) in different contexts. In the interviews we found different recurrent themes in the narratives dealing with changes in education governance and on the subjects, students and teachers, in the system. By means of this we could portray a field of different conceptions of relations between education governance and social inclusion and exclusion among actors in different positions in Swedish education. The study showed large differences in the context of schools in terms of social and cultural backgrounds among students. We also found distinct differences between students in different cultural contexts. Those in contexts dominated by students of 'foreign background' were more loyal to traditional schooling cultures compared to more sceptical students from other contexts. In sum, our studies show a transition in the education culture in Sweden. This was conceptualised as a change in hegemony in the former welfare state where no alternatives are present in the current discourse on restructuring.     

Historicizing the Future: Educational Reform, Systems of Reason, and the Making of Children Who are the Future Citizens

Educational reform and reformist research are not merely about school improvement. They embody a field of cultural practices that constitutes the objects of schooling – the teacher who administers the reforms to the child and the distinctions and differentiations about who the child is and should be. Our interest is in the rules and standards of reason assembled through the cultural practices of school reform. Reason is a cultural practice functioning to enact a change in the conditions of people but also invests people with particular capacities and capabilities. This investiture of capacities and capabilities produces particular human kinds or categories of the determinant qualities of the individuals schools administer. Using studies of educational governance and social inclusion/exclusion in Europe and on US educational reform, the discussion focuses on the overlapping practices of system management and curriculum reforms that map different human kinds. One human kind is the child as a lifelong learner, an individual whose qualities entail actively and flexibly participating in communities through problem-solving strategies. The characteristics and qualities of the lifelong learner are differentiated from those who do not embody the norms of participation –the child left behind. The study of the systems of reason that govern the objects of reflection and rectification in school reforms is a strategy to consider the politics of reform, change, and social inclusion and exclusion.     

Teachers and Social Class Orientation: An Empirical Note Based on Comparisons with Different Social Classes in Sweden 1

Abstract: Lindblad, S. 1986. Teachers and Social Class Orientation. An Empirical Note Based on Comparisons with Different Social Classes in Sweden. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 30, 181‐192. The study is an exploratory reanalysis of a questionnaire survey of a random probability sample drawn from the economically active population in Sweden. The investigation was carried out in 1980 and includes 1170 subjects. The teachers in the sample were used as a specific category. Their social class orientations were compared with those of different social classes pictured in the sample. The orientations in focus concerned economic contradictions, political preferences, division of labour, and norms of socialization. The results showed that the social class orientations of teachers concerning economic contradictions and political preferences were closest to employers and most distant from workers. In addition, the teachers were the group that was most negative to a vertical division of labour and advocated more liberal socialization norms. These results were empirically related to the social origin of teachers.

     

The ‘physiologization’ of skiing: the lab as an obligatory passage point for elite athletes?

Abstract

In The Pasteurization of France, Bruno Latour argued that the rise of hygiene was dependent on collaboration between Pasteur, the hygiene movement, scientists and others. He also pointed at the importance of obligatory passage points such as the Pasteurian laboratory, to ensure the scientization and rationalization of hygiene. This article argues that there has been a similar process in elite sports, a ‘physiologization’ where scientists, sport organizations and specialized coaches have transformed training from a deeply personal and experiential matter to something universal and scientific. Physiologists made the test lab an obligatory passage point for athletes who wanted to compete on the highest level. Through theories of sportification and science and technology studies this paper analyses the scientization of endurance sports.