Being resilient as described by people who experience mental illness

Aim: The purpose of this research was to explore resilience as described by consumers of mental health services in Australia who have experienced mental illness.

Background: Most qualitative research pertaining to resilience has focused on child and adolescent groups. In relation to the Australian context there appears to be a paucity of qualitative studies on resilience and the experience of mental illness.

Method: The study utilized a phenomenological approach elucidated by Colaizzi as the philosophical underpinnings of the study. In keeping with Colaizzi’s (1978) approach to inquiry, information was gathered through in-depth, semi-structured individual interviews. Information analysis utilised Colaizzi’s (1978) original seven-step approach with the inclusion of two additional steps, making this study’s analysis a nine step process.

Findings: Emergent themes explicated from participant transcripts follow: Universality, Acceptance, Naming and knowing, Faith, Hope, Being the fool and, Striking a balance, Having meaning and meaningful relationships, and ‘Just doing it’. The emergent conceptualisation which encapsulated the themes was; Viewing life from the ridge with eyes wide open. - choosing to walk through the darkness all the while knowing the risks and dangers ahead and making a decision for life amid ever-present hardships.

Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest being resilient can be learnt and therefore, should be a fundamental consideration in guiding therapeutic interventions within the context of clinical practice.

Sharing community through singing : the Bosnian Behar Choir in Victoria, Australia

In 2008, the Australian Federal Minister for Ageing identified the importance of promoting social engagement amongst older Australians who frequently rely on community arts organizations to enhance quality of life, specifically in health, happiness and community. The arts are identified as a powerful catalyst in building strong communities that have the potential for connection, caring and social development. Greater active engagement in performing arts by older people is positively related to enhanced individual and community well-being. Our research study, Wellbeing and ageing: community, diversity and the arts (begun in 2008), explores cultural diversity and complexity within older Australian society through an examination of engagement with a community choir. In 2009 data were collected via semi-structured interviews that were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis which utilises a phenomenological approach that explores personal experience in the participant’s life-world. Our research study focuses on one community choir, the Bosnian Behar Choir, in Victoria, Australia, as a lens through which to explore active ageing. Three significant issues were identified from this research which will be reported under the themes of well-being, community and cultural diversity. The Bosnian Behar Choir demonstrates how community music making can enhance well-being and positive ageing in contemporary Australia.

The process of interpersonal perspective taking

Perspective taking, the main cognitive component of empathy, has a particularly important and complex role to play in the clinician-client relationship, particularly in mental health nursing. However, despite extensive investigation into the outcomes of this construct (e.g. sympathy, altruism), the process by which people take another's psychological point of view has received comparatively little attention. The purpose of this study was to investigate what the individual does when attempting to take the perspective of another person. The aims were to identify the specific strategies people used to accomplish this task, to consider how and why these strategies were chosen, and the relationship between the strategies and subsequent outcomes. Participants described an example of their own perspective-taking experience. Adopting an interpretive phenomenological approach, analysis resulted in the generation of several themes of direct relevance to both the perspective taking process and the wider empathic experience. Of particular importance were two superordinate themes, use of other-information and use of self-information. One significant subordinate theme (within use of selfinformation) to emerge was that of past experience, where the participant had experienced either (a) a similar role to that which they occupied in the present situation, or (b) a similar situation to that of the target person. Both of these experiences were determinants of how easy participants perceived the task of apprehending the target’s perspective. Within the wider empathic experience, themes included emotional manifestations (e.g. sympathy), as well as judgements of appropriate behaviours. Implications of findings when working in clinical and mental health settings are discussed.

Value-change and self-reflective practice in ecologically sustainable design

Ecologically sustainable design is a transformative design paradigm based on the theory of interdependence. This theory requires that the transformative agenda of design is holistic in practice. In effect, the requirement is for value-change on the part of the designer along with transformation of the built environment. This paper, based on recently completed research into design practice, argues that value-change rests on certainties that are drawn on intuitively while designing, and that this intuitive process is characteristic of design as praxis. It is further argued that design, as praxis, requires a phenomenological approach for inculcating value-change. A phenomenological approach relies on self-reflective practices exemplified by meditation and yoga that can focus on the designer’s ethical know-how. A model for this approach to value-change, the biopsychosocial approach, already exists within clinical medicine. This paper presents findings from interviews with key architects practising self-reflection and/or ecologically sustainable design. These highlight the premium placed by these architects on both certainty and empathy, and how these values influence design as praxis. Formalising techniques for closer scrutiny of these values will highlight design as praxis. Doing so will critically strengthen ecologically sustainable design as holistic, transformative practice.

Human resource management activities on the front line : a nursing perspective

Objective: To identify the practical human resource management (HRM) issues that may impact on job satisfaction, nurse retention and ultimately quality of patient care of the nurse unit manager's (NUM) role.
Background: NUMs are in the unique position within the healthcare industry to impact upon and effect large numbers of people, including nurses, doctors, patients and their families, and processes on a daily basis. More effective HRM practices could improve performance in terms of staff satisfaction, positive patient outcomes and the cost effectiveness of staff retention.
Method: Two focus groups, one group of nine NUMs and one group of five staff nurses, were conducted at an Australia public hospital. A descriptive phenomenological approach informed data generation and data analysis.
Results: The NUMs reported that they were not adequately trained in the skills required to effectively manage staff conflict such as manipulation and bitterness, requiring disciplinary intervention on an ongoing basis. The consequences included reduced staff morale, decreased staff satisfaction, increased stress to the NUM and ultimately retention issues for both the NUM and Unit staff.
Conclusion: This study highlights the potential impact of inadequate implementation and understanding of HRM policy and practice by NUMS on the front line. Further research is required to understand why this phenomenon exists and how it can be remedied.

Three Australian community choirs : ageing, singing and well-being

The promotion of social engagement amongst older Australians is a national priority. Music is a powerful social mechanism that allows individuals and communities to affirm identity, gain a sense of belonging, and share history and culture. Community choir membership offers older people opportunities to connect with others and share a sense of purpose that can enhance their sense of well-being and potentially reduce their experience of social isolation. This paper explores the understandings of well-being, positive ageing and community music making held by members of three choirs in Victoria; Australia. The choirs selected for this discussion are the Coro Furlan, the Skylarkers and the Bosnian Behar Choir. Data have been collected via semi-structured interview with members of the three choirs and analyzed using interpretative Phenomenological Analysis which employs a phenomenological approach that explores personal experience in the participant's life-world. analysis of the combined data identified two broad common themes: First is the personal impact that choir membership has for the individual which includes the building of friendships and opportunities to learn and share music. The second theme concerns the contribution that the choir can make to others in their local community. Thus older singers are provided with a way to be both engaged, validated and appreciated by their contemporary society. Choir participation is an effective way for individuals to express themselves, engage with each other, improve their quality of life, transmit cultural heritage, and build community.

Phenomenology and the online : the importance of studying experience

 Phenomenological research into the online experience offers real value to Internet Studies and Digital Humanities scholars for three key reasons. Firstly, as an explicitly qualitative approach, it offers a way to gain insights into the experience of going online that are not identified by those who study behaviour alone. Secondly, as phenomenological studies focus on the individual rather than the collective, the resulting small sample size means that the investment required in terms of time spent with participants is minimised. Finally, the interpretation that emerges through the phenomenological research process produces categorisations that could form the basis on which larger scale, Big Data, quantitative research projects could be built.
This paper will explore the above ideas through the lens of my doctoral research, which uses hermeneutic phenomenology to investigate the experience of persona construction by artists on the fringes of the traditional art world, specifically craftivists, tattoo artists, street artists, and performance poets. By incorporating the interpretive categorisations that have come from my early discussions, I will demonstrate the strength of a phenomenological approach to investigating the experience of using the world and social media to present the self to the world.

Finding the edge : online persona creation by fringe artists

Self-presentation through the creation of profiles and pages on digitally networked spaces is becoming ever more ubiquitous. In order to develop greater depth of understanding of the place of social media in our self-identification practice, my dissertation investigates the experiences of online persona creation by eight artists. Drawing on sociological and cultural studies approaches to understanding identity as performance, I tie current artists’ presentational and representational practices to historically grounded, socio-culturally constructed discourses of ‘artistness’. Through this connection, I argue that the creation of online persona has not radically changed notions of what it means to be an artist, or how artistness is represented and understood by audiences of fans or followers, but rather that digital technology has allowed for renegotiation of the boundaries of artistness that still draws from historical understandings of the role and persona of the artist. This shifting of boundaries, allowing for more inclusivity within the art world, is demonstrated by my focus on ‘fringe’ artists: those whose creative practice places them outside of the traditional art world and its existing structures of representation, distribution and consumption. The eight fringe artists who participated in this study are drawn from street art, performance poetry, craftivism and tattoo.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis drives the methodological focus on the experiences of the artists. Rather than a consideration of behaviour and habit, or what the artists do, this phenomenological approach allowed me to instead focus on what it is like for the artists to create persona, what drives particular types of representational practices. Using unstructured interviews, and online listening as an extension of participant observation, the artists’ narratives of experience are expressed through transcript extracts and screenshots: both are necessary to fully explore the nature of online persona creation.

My analysis of the artists experiences has demonstrated that there are three somewhat distinct registers of performance with which an artist’s persona can engage: the professional register, where one demonstrates ones proficiency, experience, popularity, and professionalism; the personal register, where one connects with
wider social and political interests and activities; and the intimate register, where one allows the audience in to one’s private world. These three registers occupy the same performance space, but are implicitly or explicitly for different segments of the digitally networked audience of fans, followers, friends and family. The complexity of the performance and reception of these registers is influenced by the shared nature of the performance space – where previously different roles would be performed for different audiences without reference to one another, the networked nature of online social media influences decisions of how much, and when, to share with whom.

Interpreted here using themes of strategy|happenstance, specialisation|diversification, visibility|self-protection,
self|others and work|play, the professional, personal and intimate registers of performance enable us to see the consideration and care with which each participant creates their artists persona. The experiences of performing the self in these three registers, as presented here, provides an insight into the complexities involved in creating online persona, while also demonstrating that this type of presentation of self is, in itself, no different from the types of role play and performance of self that has arguably always occurred in our physical world. Despite focusing on the role and performance of artistness, this dissertation speaks to the creation and performance of online persona more broadly. 

Early career teacher attrition: new thoughts on an intractable problem

Early career exit from teaching has reached epidemic proportions and appears intractable. Previous attempts to find solutions are yet to make much of an inroad. The aim of the research was to discover what nine beginning teachers required to remain in the classroom, by adopting a phenomenological approach. The authors identified participants’ common experiences through semi-structured interviews and unprompted written narratives. Data were examined for trustworthiness by reference to the literature. Key words from the narratives were synonyms, or broadly synonymous with, optimism, arrested development or disillusionment. The process of leaving involved entry, characterised by optimism; early experiences, characterised by arrested development; pre-exit, characterised by disillusionment; and exit.

Gestão de pessoas em organizações em processo de transformação: a experiência da Rede Ferroviária Federal em liquidação

This study apprehends the living experiences of the RFFSA employees who still remain in the organization until its final moments of existence. In order to comprehend and analyze these experiences to generate knowledge related to personnel relationships in critical management realities as it is the case in a process of organizational liquidation. Due to the fact that the case study focus on a railroad enterprise, the presence of which is inherent to the history of the nation, social implications related to that liquidation process were investigated under cultural concepts, new organization context, added to a phenomenological approach. Through the consideration of that philosophical dimension of the relationships which constituted the object of this study, the railroader being could be more broadly understood. The employed methods include bibliographic and documental research to describe the organization and to reinforce sources for a deeper study of the railroad employee¿s culture and values. The posture assumed in that investigation was participation with the subjects including the researcher. Some characteristics were extracted out of questionnaires and interviews as a means of answering questions which would not come out trough numbers. What emerges as a fundamental learning in the conclusions can be summarized as follows: the understanding of an organization as a slice detached from society, is a deviation from human relevance paths, since implications of human actions in leabenswelt are ignored and their impacts are not considered concrete. That especial learning which the case study helped to clarify and which is an alert to liquidators and employees, independently of hierarchy, is not limited to liquidation processes. The phenomenon which shows itself in that strategic category of management is that its deviation from human relevance appears in higher dramaticism.

Privatização da Vale do Rio Doce: valores, manifestações e implicações

Este estudo investigou, na Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), como os funcionários perceberam as mudanças ocorridas na empresa, as ações da alta administração e o que ocorreu com os valores na organização após o processo de privatização. O objetivo final da pesquisa foi verificar que valores norteiam as propostas administrativas da Vale após a privatização, e como se manifestam nas ações e na postura dos agentes na sede da empresa. O referencial teórico incluiu mudança organizacional, teoria dos valores e responsabilidade das ações administrativas, para compreender o contexto atual da empresa após a privatização. A pesquisa de campo foi concebida sob o paradigma do construtivismo, em busca de percepções e sentimentos subjacentes e manifestos em entrevistas e questionários a fim de explicitar os valores passados e presentes na organização e possibilidades de uma nova realidade. Uma abordagem fenomenológica complementar favoreceu a inserção da autora no mundo da vida dessa organização, facilitando a fluência do diálogo para a apreensão de manifestações e implicações dos valores das pessoas no processo de transição. As reflexões finais indicam a necessidade de um trabalho organizacional que envolva funcionários e alta administração com o propósito comum de redescoberta do significado próprio da organização. O Programa Vale Viver surge como uma tentativa nessa direção. Os valores "vestir a camisa", "valorizar a prata da casa" e "vencer desafios" acompanham o tempo de vida da cultura da Vale. O valor "vestir a camisa," cujo significado é compartilhamento autêntico, na atualidade é mais uma expectativa a ser retomada do que uma vivência. O valor "vencer desafios" está mais presente na área operacional e o valor "valorizar a prata da casa" aparece mais relacionado a programas como o Banco de OpOliunidades, reavivado pelo Vale Viver. Não significa que o Vale Viver seja a única saída para a retomada da confiança, da elevação da auto-estima e de uma articulação empregados e nova administração na construção de uma base comum de valores, mas é a possibilidade mais visível no momento em que a retomada do espírito da V ALE é fundamental para essa nova etapa de sua vida.

"Cultura" pedagógica: a influência do status do professor

O objetivo deste estudo foi o de investigar a criação de uma "cultura" pedagógica, com e sem a influência do professor, sujeito de status definido institucionalmente. Com tal finalidade, foi montado um cenário experimental com sujeitos distribuídos em Grupos de Controle e Experimentais, estes últimos contando com a participação de uma professora, previamente instruída, para exercer influência. Segundo a estratégia usada, os sujeitos realizaram o Exercício de Decisão por Consenso, através de interpretações e classificações, que foram consideradas as "culturas" criadas pelos grupos, com e sem a influência do professor. Os dados empírico recolhidos e analisados segundo uma Abordagem Fenomenológica permitiram concluir que a atuação do professor é decisiva para influenciar o comportamento dos alunos e que esta influência pode ser atribuída preponderadamente ao status a ele conferido. A literatura revista possibilitou ainda uma análise crítica do papel de modelador exercido pelo professor (Abordagem Modernizante), bem como do processo de reprodução da cultura dominante nesta tarefa (Abordagem Alternativa). Desta forma, os dados empíricos e as teorias analisadas permitiram concluir que a "cultura" pedagógica, criada seja na presença seja na ausência do professor, não é isenta e tampouco apolítica.

O professor-ator ou o jogo da sedução na relação professor-aluno

Todos nós conhecemos vários tipos de atores: os de cinema, os de televisão, os de teatro, os de circo... porém há um outro tipo de ator a quem as pessoas não se referem: o ser humano. Este ator em especial representa vários papéis ao longo de sua vida. Um deles, para muitos de nós, é o de professor. O professor-ator representa para uma platéia específica - os alunos - com um objetivo também específico -seduzi-los para que haja êxito no processo ensino-aprendizagem. O presente estudo aponta para as contribuições deste processo ator no processo educativo. Da mesma forma, ressalta o tipo de relação estabelecida com os alunos, a partir do ponto de vista, tanto do professor, como do aluno. Trata-se de uma abordagem fenomenológica sobre a relação professor-aluno e suas consequências para o processo ensino-aprendizagem.

A parturiente: um estudo psicológico

Este trabalho teve por objetivo identificar as vivências femininas no decorrer de seu primeiro parto normal. Pressupondo-se uma abordagem baseada nos ensinamentos fenomenológicos, foi planejada uma pesquisa exploratória de campo em que 30 puérperas de parto normal, poucas horas após terem dado à luz. As entrevistas seguiram o modelo metodológico da técnica de histórias de vida e, através destas, as puérperas contribuíram com um relato acerca de seu parto. Os relatos serviram para nos dar informes a respeito de quatro aspectos básicos acerca da parturiente no processar do seu parto normal: a) vivências físicas; b) vivências emocionais; c) significado da experiência e d) percepção da conduta médica. A experiência de gerar um filho para praticamente todas as mulheres entrevistadas mostrou-se altamente importante e plena de gratificações. Apenas um pequeno número de mulheres apresentou considerações negativas à chegada da criança.

The gay subject in business and its discursive formation: an exploration on power, knowledge and sexuality

Issues related to the reality of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals are being incorporated into institutional and social discourses, and show the challenges that must be overcome towards citizenship. The inclusion of gay rights in the domain of institutions like the United Nations and the Brazilian Secretariat of Human Rights are a response to broader movements that places the gay subject as an important topic of debate in the social-political sphere. In this scenario, some institutions deserve close attention from researchers related to gay issues, the business environment being a good example. In this domain, diversity has become an important topic of debate between scholars, where the question of sexual identity in most cases does not appear. The literature that actually focuses on the theme is explored through approaches that are not able to break with universalisms and a normatized vocabulary. Therefore, this research explores discursive structures related to sexuality and examines the meanings construed throughout these structures as described by gay individuals working in business. Furthermore, it investigates patterns of discursive normative structures and consequential challenges faced by gay people in the working environment, and also complements the current debate both in the socio-political sphere and in academic reality on LGBT challenges. The Foucauldian notions of discourse, knowledge and power, and the main concepts of queer theory are incorporated to the analysis, as well as concepts related to the politics of post-colonial sexuality, subordination, and hegemonic forces, together with role of reflexivity in modernity and its impacts on secularized mental structures. The research design takes a phenomenological approach and bases its knowledge claim on a participatory perspective, where the sample chosen for data collection consisted of gay individuals working in the business environment, aiming at generate categories of meanings through the description of their experiences.