Approved Social Work Training in Northern Ireland: Using Research to Examine Competence-Based Learning and Influence Policy Change

This article reports on how research activity helped describe and analyse ASW (Approved Social Worker) learning experience as well as acting as a catalyst for change and development in policy and practice in Northern Ireland. The paper contextualizes the study by outlining the legislation, the main features of the ASW role and the approach to ASW training in Northern Ireland, and by reviewing the literature on the efficacy and value of competence-based learning. While the findings do not provide conclusive evidence that a competence-based approach is inherently more effective than previous courses, they do indicate that candidates who were trained in this way were moderately more satisfied than those who had participated in non-competence based programmes. The research also highlights the importance of the interrelationship between training, practice experience and support in developing and sustaining competence. The paper concludes with a review of the recommendations arising from the study and an analysis of the developments in training and regulations relating to practice experience and re-approval of ASWs since publication of the research. The study is of contemporary interest given the proposed changes to the role of ASWs/Mental Health Officers in the context of the reviews of UK mental health law.

Scientific revolutions, progess and accounting research

Thomas Kuhn’s concept of a normal science paradigm has been utilised and criticised across a range of social science fields. However, Kuhn’s aim was to argue that science progresses not in an incremental manner but through a series of paradigms that need a revolution in thought to shift from one to the next. This paper addresses Kuhn’s work focusing on the totality of his model, but recognising the ambiguities concerning paradigm shifts that have led to charges of relativism. To address this weakness an argument is advanced for a political economy analysis of the publication process and the development of critical accounting research centred on human emancipation. The paper concludes with some suggested research agendas particularly relevant to the Irish context.

On Publication, Refereeing, and Working Hard

We present a model for academia with heterogeneous author types and endogenous effort to evaluate recent changes in the publication process in Economics. We analyze the implications of these developments on research output. Lowering the precision of refereeing signals lowers effort choices of golden middle authors, but invites more submissions from less able authors. Increasing the number of journals stimulates less able authors to submit their papers. The editor can improve the journal's quality pool of submitted manuscripts by improving the precision of refereeing, but not by lowering acceptance standards. The submission strategy of an author is informative of his ability.

Embracing an integromic approach to tissue biomarker research in cancer: Perspectives and lessons learned

Modern approaches to biomedical research and diagnostics targeted towards precision medicine are generating ‘big data’ across a range of high-throughput experimental and analytical platforms. Integrative analysis of this rich clinical, pathological, molecular and imaging data represents one of the greatest bottlenecks in biomarker discovery research in cancer and other diseases. Following on from the publication of our successful framework for multimodal data amalgamation and integrative analysis, Pathology Integromics in Cancer (PICan), this article will explore the essential elements of assembling an integromics framework from a more detailed perspective. PICan, built around a relational database storing curated multimodal data, is the research tool sitting at the heart of our interdisciplinary efforts to streamline biomarker discovery and validation. While recognizing that every institution has a unique set of priorities and challenges, we will use our experiences with PICan as a case study and starting point, rationalizing the design choices we made within the context of our local infrastructure and specific needs, but also highlighting alternative approaches that may better suit other programmes of research and discovery. Along the way, we stress that integromics is not just a set of tools, but rather a cohesive paradigm for how modern bioinformatics can be enhanced. Successful implementation of an integromics framework is a collaborative team effort that is built with an eye to the future and greatly accelerates the processes of biomarker discovery, validation and translation into clinical practice.