Social contact and trust: a study of a super diverse neighbourhood

This thesis presents an in-depth case study of a superdiverse neighbourhood in Glasgow where long-term white and ethnic minority communities reside alongside Roma migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, young professionals and other recent arrivals in traditional tenement housing. It focuses on the nature and extent of social contact and trust and on the role of context in shaping social relations. Employing the concepts of social milieu and intersectionality to identify social differences the research examines the relationships between five broad groupings of residents in the neighbourhood: Nostalgic Working Class, Scottish Asian, Liberal Homeowners, Kinship-sited Roma and Global Migrants. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in contexts within the neighbourhood, theorised as being potential sites for intergroup contact. Three types of interactions were examined: Group-based Interactions, Neighbour Interactions and Street Interactions. The data comprised documentary evidence, participant and direct observations, in-depth qualitative and walk-along interviews with residents and local organisations. Findings show that rather than individualising and isolating residents, superdiversity can stimulate community activism, yet there remains a preference for interaction within one’s own social milieu. The research has found that the concentration of poverty and material conditions has a more profound effect on social relations than historical diversity and the extent to which diversity is normalised within local discourses. Trust judgements in a superdiverse context may rely more on shared interests, moral outlook and assessments of the context rather than the extent of social contact. The quasi-private spaces of shared residential spaces and community activities can facilitate encounters with the potential to build trust, yet for this to occur cooperation through shared activities may not be sufficient. Interactions may need to move beyond co-presence and conviviality to increased understanding and empathy through dialogue. At an aggregate level, the extent to which superdiversity contributes to social contact and trust within the neighbourhood is strongly influenced by contextual factors and wider economic processes influencing housing tenure mix, private renting, property maintenance, residential churn and environmental conditions. Through examining different types of social contacts, the dynamics of trust as well as contextual influences, this thesis offers insights into the causal processes and factors that influence social relations at a local level.

Quichua-Spanish language contact in Salcedo, Ecuador: revisiting media lengua syncretic language practices

The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a ‘mixed’ language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media Lengua to relexification, ruling out any influence from other bilingual phenomena. I argue that the only characteristic that distinguishes Media Lengua from other language contact varieties in central Ecuador is the quantity of the overall Spanish borrowings and not the type of processes that might have been employed by Quichua speakers during the genesis of Media Lengua. The results from the Salcedo data that I have collected show how processes such as adlexification, code-mixing, and structural convergence produce Media Lengua-type sentences, evidence that supports an alternative analysis to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis. Overall, this dissertation is developed around four main objectives: (1) to describe the variation of Spanish loanwords within a bilingual community in Salcedo; (2) to analyze some of the prominent and recent structural changes in Quichua and Spanish; (3) to determine whether Spanish loanword use can be explained by the relationship consultants have with particular social categories; and (4) to analyze the consultants’ language ideologies toward syncretic uses of Spanish and Quichua. Overall, 58% of the content words, 39% of the basic vocabulary, and 50% of the subject pronouns in the Salcedo corpus were derived from Spanish. When compared to Muysken’s description of highlander Quichua in the 1970’s, Spanish loanwords have more than doubled in each category. The overall level of Spanish loanwords in Salcedo Quichua has grown to a level between highlander Quichua in the 1970’s and Media Lengua. Similar to Spanish’s lexical influence in Media Lengua, the increase of Spanish borrowings in today’s rural Quichua can be seen in non-basic and basic vocabularies as well as the subject pronoun system. Significantly, most of the growth has occurred through forms of adlexification i.e., doublets, well-established borrowings, and cultural borrowings, suggesting that ‘ordinary’ lexical borrowing is also capable of producing Media Lengua-type sentences. I approach the second objective by investigating two separate phenomena related to structural convergence. The first examines the complex verbal constructions that have developed in Quichua through Spanish loan translations while the second describes the type of Quichua particles that are attached to Spanish lexemes while speaking Spanish. The calquing of the complex verbal constructions from Spanish were employed when speaking standard Quichua. Since this standard form is typically used by language purists, I argue that their use of calques is a strategy of exploiting the full range of expression from Spanish without incorporating any of the Spanish lexemes which would give the appearance of ‘contamination’. The use of Quichua particles in local varieties of Spanish is a defining characteristic of Quichuacized Spanish, spoken most frequently by women and young children in the community. Although the use of Quichua particles was probably not the main catalyst engendering Media Lengua, I argue that its contribution as a source language to other ‘mixed’ varieties, such as Media Lengua, needs to be accounted for in descriptions of BML genesis. Contrary to Muysken’s representation of relatively ‘unmixed’ Spanish and Quichua as the two source languages of Media Lengua, I propose that local varieties of Spanish might have already been ‘mixed’ to a large degree before Media Lengua was created. The third objective attempts to draw a relationship between particular social variables and the use of Spanish loanwords. Whisker Boxplots and ANOVAs were used to determine which social group, if any, have been introducing new Spanish borrowings into the bilingual communities in Salcedo. Specifically, I controlled for age, education, native language, urban migration, and gender. The results indicate that none of the groups in each of the five social variables indicate higher or lower loanword use. The implication of these results are twofold: (a) when lexical borrowing occurs, it is immediately adopted as the community-wide norm and spoken by members from different backgrounds and generations, or (b) this level of Spanish borrowing (58%) is not a recent phenomenon. The fourth and final objective draws on my ethnographic research that addresses the attitudes of syncretic language use. I observed that Quichuacized Spanish and Hispanicized Quichua are highly stigmatized varieties spoken by the country’s most marginalized populations and families, yet within the community, syncretic ways of speaking are in fact the norm. It was shown that there exists a range of different linguistic definitions for ‘Chaupi Lengua’ and other syncretic language practices as well as many contrasting connotations, most of which were negative. One theme that emerged from the interviews was that speaking syncretic varieties of Quichua weakened the consultant’s claim to an indigenous identity. The linguistic and social data presented in this dissertation supports an alternative view to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis, one that has the advantage of operating with well-precedented linguistic processes and which is actually observable in the present-day Salcedo area. The results from the study on lexical borrowing are significant because they demonstrate how a dynamic bilingual speech community has gradually diversified their Quichua lexicon under intense pressure to shift toward Spanish. They also show that Hispanicized Quichua (Quichua with heavy lexical borrowing) clearly arose from adlexification and prolonged lexical borrowing, and is one of at least six identifiable speech styles found in Salcedo. These results challenge particular interpretations of language contact outcomes, such as, ones that depict sources languages as discrete and ‘unmixed.’ The bilingual continuum presented in this thesis shows on the one hand, the range of speech styles that are accessible to different speakers, and on the other hand, the overlapping, syncretic features that are shared among the different registers and language varieties. It was observed that syncretic speech styles in Salcedo are employed by different consultants in varied interactional contexts, and in turn, produce different evaluations by other fellow community members. In the current dissertation, I challenge the claim that relexification and Media Lengua-type sentences develop in isolation and without the influence of other bilingual phenomena. Based on Muysken's Media Lengua example sentences and the speech styles from the Salcedo corpus, I argue that Media Lengua may have arisen as an institutionalized variant of the highly mixed "middle ground" within the range of the Salcedo bilingual continuum discussed above. Such syncretic forms of Spanish and Quichua strongly resemble Media Lengua sentences in Muysken’s research, and therefore demonstrate how its development could have occurred through several different language contact processes and not only through relexification.

Long-term efficacy of orthokeratology contact lens wear in controlling the progression of childhood myopia

Purpose: The primary outcome of this study is to compare the axial length growth of white European myopic children wearing orthokeratology contact lenses (OK) to a control group (CT) over a 7-year period. Methods: Subjects 6–12 years of age with myopia −0.75 to −4.00DS and astigmatism ≤1.00DC were prospectively allocated OK or distance single-vision spectacles (SV) correction. Measurements of axial length (Zeiss IOLMaster), corneal topography, and cycloplegic refraction were taken at 6-month intervals over a 2-year period. Subjects were invited to return to the clinic approximately 5 years later (i.e., 7 years after the beginning of the study) for assessment of their ocular refractive and biometric components. The CT consisted of 4 SV and 12 subjects who switched from SV to soft contact lens wear after the initial 2 years of SV lens wear. Changes in axial length relative to baseline over a 7-year period were compared between groups. Results: Fourteen and 16 subjects from the OK and CT groups, respectively, were examined 6.7 ± 0.5 years after the beginning of the study. Statistically significant changes in the axial length were found over time and between groups (both p <0.001), but not for the time*group interaction (p = 0.125). The change in the axial length for the OK group was 22% (p = 0.328), 42% (p = 0.007), 40% (p = 0.020), 41% (p = 0.013), and 33% (p = 0.062) lower than the CT group following 6, 12, 18, 24, and 84 months of lens wear, respectively. Conclusion: A trend toward a reduction in the rate of axial elongation of the order of 33% was found in the OK group in comparison to the CT group following 7 years of lens wear.

L’analyse biomécanique du sprint sur ergomètre non-motorisé : interaction entre les asymétries cinétiques et cinématiques lors d’un sprint de 40 verges

Au sprint 100 mètres et dans de nombreux sport de puissance, la phase d’accélération est un déterminant majeure de la performance. Toutefois, les asymétries cinétiques et cinématiques peuvent avoir une incidence sur la performance. L’objectif de cette étude était d’identifier la présence d’interaction entre différentes variables cinétiques et cinématiques angulaires aux membres inférieures (MI) d’un sprint de haute intensité sur un ergomètre non-motorisé avec résistance (NMR). Suite à une rencontre de familiarisation, 11 sujets ont exécuté des sprints de 40 verges. Les données cinétiques ont été obtenues par l’entremise de plateformes de force intégrées aux appuis de l’ergomètre NMR à 10 Hz et les données cinématiques ont été amassées à l’aide du système Optitrack et du logiciel Motive Tracker à 120Hz. Nous avons effectué un test de corrélation linéaire (Corrélation linéaire de Pearson) pour déterminer la relation entre les données cinétiques et cinématiques (p < 0,05). L’analyse des données a révélée (1) une corrélation positive entre la moyenne d’amplitude articulaire à la cheville et la moyenne des pics de puissance développés (W/kg) lors de la phase de maintien (r = 0,62), (2) une corrélation négative entre l’extension maximale moyenne (calculé à partir de l’angle de flexion le plus petit) à la hanche et la moyenne de pics de puissance développées en fin de poussée lors de la totalité et de la phase de maintien (r = -0,63 et r = -0,69 respectivement), et finalement (3) une corrélation négative entre la différence de dorsiflexion maximale à la cheville et la différence des pics de puissance développés aux MI lors du contact du pied au sol en phase de maintien ( r = -0,62). Les résultats obtenus dans cette étude permettront d’améliorer l’intervention des préparateurs physiques et la pratique des athlètes de sport de puissance en plus d’aider au développant de nouvelles technologies et outils d’entrainement complémentaire au sprint et particulièrement à la phase d’accélération.

L’analyse biomécanique du sprint sur ergomètre non-motorisé : interaction entre les asymétries cinétiques et cinématiques lors d’un sprint de 40 verges

Au sprint 100 mètres et dans de nombreux sport de puissance, la phase d’accélération est un déterminant majeure de la performance. Toutefois, les asymétries cinétiques et cinématiques peuvent avoir une incidence sur la performance. L’objectif de cette étude était d’identifier la présence d’interaction entre différentes variables cinétiques et cinématiques angulaires aux membres inférieures (MI) d’un sprint de haute intensité sur un ergomètre non-motorisé avec résistance (NMR). Suite à une rencontre de familiarisation, 11 sujets ont exécuté des sprints de 40 verges. Les données cinétiques ont été obtenues par l’entremise de plateformes de force intégrées aux appuis de l’ergomètre NMR à 10 Hz et les données cinématiques ont été amassées à l’aide du système Optitrack et du logiciel Motive Tracker à 120Hz. Nous avons effectué un test de corrélation linéaire (Corrélation linéaire de Pearson) pour déterminer la relation entre les données cinétiques et cinématiques (p < 0,05). L’analyse des données a révélée (1) une corrélation positive entre la moyenne d’amplitude articulaire à la cheville et la moyenne des pics de puissance développés (W/kg) lors de la phase de maintien (r = 0,62), (2) une corrélation négative entre l’extension maximale moyenne (calculé à partir de l’angle de flexion le plus petit) à la hanche et la moyenne de pics de puissance développées en fin de poussée lors de la totalité et de la phase de maintien (r = -0,63 et r = -0,69 respectivement), et finalement (3) une corrélation négative entre la différence de dorsiflexion maximale à la cheville et la différence des pics de puissance développés aux MI lors du contact du pied au sol en phase de maintien ( r = -0,62). Les résultats obtenus dans cette étude permettront d’améliorer l’intervention des préparateurs physiques et la pratique des athlètes de sport de puissance en plus d’aider au développant de nouvelles technologies et outils d’entrainement complémentaire au sprint et particulièrement à la phase d’accélération.

An investigation of contact transmission of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus

Hand hygiene is critical in the healthcare setting and it is believed that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), for example, is transmitted from patient to patient largely via the hands of health professionals. A study has been carried out at a large teaching hospital to estimate how often the gloves of a healthcare worker are contaminated with MRSA after contact with a colonized patient. The effectiveness of handwashing procedures to decontaminate the health professionals' hands was also investigated, together with how well different healthcare professional groups complied with handwashing procedures. The study showed that about 17% (9–25%) of contacts between a healthcare worker and a MRSA-colonized patient results in transmission of MRSA from a patient to the gloves of a healthcare worker. Different health professional groups have different rates of compliance with infection control procedures. Non-contact staff (cleaners, food services) had the shortest handwashing times. In this study, glove use compliance rates were 75% or above in all healthcare worker groups except doctors whose compliance was only 27%.