A systematic narrative review of consumer-directed care for older people: implications for model development

Consumer-directed care is increasingly becoming a mainstream option in community-based aged care. However, a systematic review describing how the current evaluation research translates into practise has not been published to date. This review aimed to systematically establish an evidence base of user preferences for and satisfaction with services associated with consumer-directed care programmes for older people. Twelve databases were searched, including MedLine, BioMed Central, Cinahl, Expanded Academic ASAP, PsychInfo, ProQuest, Age Line, Science Direct, Social Citation Index, Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library. Google Scholar and Google were also searched. Eligible studies were those reporting on choice, user preferences and service satisfaction outcomes regarding a programme or model of home-based care in the United States or United Kingdom. This systematic narrative review retrieved literature published from January 1992 to August 2011. A total of 277 references were identified. Of these 17 met the selection criteria and were reviewed. Findings indicate that older people report varying preferences for consumer-directed care with some demonstrating limited interest. Clients and carers reported good service satisfaction. However, research comparing user preferences across countries or investigating how ecological factors shape user preferences has received limited attention. Policy-makers and practitioners need to carefully consider the diverse contexts, needs and preferences of older adults in adopting consumer-directed care approaches in community aged care. The review calls for the development of consumer-directed care programmes offering a broad range of options that allow for personalisation and greater control over services without necessarily transferring the responsibility for administrative responsibilities to service users. Review findings suggest that consumer-directed care approaches have the potential to empower older people.

Elite girls' schooling, social class and sexualised popular culture

Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations of normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies.

Narrative inquiry and auto-ethnography: Interpretive approaches to research

Hermeneutic phenomenology informed two qualitative methodologies used in my doctoral research: narrative case studies and auto-ethnography. Through these methodologies I investigated the phenomenon of place and identity in visual artistic practice. Four narrative case studies of four artists were developed using experience-focused narrative inquiry and thematic analysis. Auto-ethnography was used to investigate the phenomenon of place and identity within my own practice as visual artist. This involved analysis of my artworks that encompassed place and identity and writing from different contexts of my past. Rather than relying on memory recall. This became textural writing in the phenomenon rather than describing what I already knew. This enabled me to challenge conventional ways of telling my story (big stories) and produced “small stories” from which new insights could be interpreted. The insights gained from my auto-ethnography in turn assisted me to encourage story telling to find the small stories of my artist participants.

Light the towel: narrative and the negotiated unconscious

The thesis consists of a creative component: a novel in multiple first-person voices, and a theoretical component: investigating the interaction between conscious and unconscious processes, in creative writing. The concept of alterity as ‘otherness’, at the heart of the theoretical inquiry, derives its momentum from the experience of the operation of the ‘other’ in the ‘I’ in narrative composition.

Midwifery work and the making of narrative

This paper draws on a study of birth support conducted across three Melbourne maternity units. Midwife informants were asked to participate in semistructured interviews with two researchers and describe the activity and role of lay birth support people. In the course of the study, the activity of the midwives themselves became a research focus. The study found that one of the key tasks midwives described was assisting birthing women to develop and negotiate satisfactory birth narratives that could encompass the intense and sometimes difficult experience of birth. Midwife informants offered strategies for the development of such narratives as part of their professional and personal labour in the birth room.

The ‘Australian Girl’ and the domestic ideal in colonial women’s fiction

The vast majority of novels and periodicals read by colonial Australian girls were written and published in Britain. ‘Daughters of the Southern Cross’ were more likely to have access to the Girl’s Own Paper by subscription or to imported fictions that had proven popular with British girl readers than any locally produced depictions of girlhood. From the 1880s, however, Australian authors produced several milestone fictions of girlhood for both adult and juvenile audiences. Rosa Praed's An Australian Heroine (1880) and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890)  gave voice to the lived experience of Australia for young women, and their publication in Britain contributed to an emergent reciprocal transpacific flow of literary culture.

Two canonical Australian novels that focus on the maturation of girl protagonists who live on bush homesteads were also published in this period. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894) and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) feature intelligent girls who are not able to be effectively socialised to embrace domesticity. Turner’s Judy Woolcot is distinct among her six siblings as a plucky girl who instigates trouble, while Franklin’s aspiring writer Sybylla Melvyn is informed that ‘girls are the helplessest, uselessest, troublesomest little creatures in the world.’

The 1890s saw an agricultural depression in Australia that only fuelled the urban perpet-uation of the idealised and nationalistic bushman myth in literary and popular culture. The ubiquity of the myth problematised any attempt to situate women heroically within the nation outside of the home. British fictional imaginings of Australian girls lauded their lack of conformity and physical abilities and often showed them bravely defending the family property with firearms. In contrast, Australian domestic fiction, this chapter argues, is unable to accommodate bracing female heroism, postulating ambiguous outcomes at best for heroines who deviate from the feminine ideal.

Judy’s grandmother describes her ‘restless fire’ as something that ‘would either make a noble, daring, brilliant woman of her’, or ‘would flame up higher and higher and consume her’. Turner does not allow Judy’s unconventionality to prosper. Instead, she is killed by a falling gum tree while saving the life of her brother, leaving the future fulfilment of the domestic ideal to her sister, Meg, whose subsequent story occupies Little Mother Meg (1902). Franklin’s Sybylla expresses her inability to be content with the simple pleasures of keeping a home, and this informs her decision to reject a marriage proposal from a wealthy suitor. The novel’s indeterminate conclusion does not allow fulfilment of Sybylla’s writing aspirations, situating her outside the feminine ideal yet not affirming the merits of her desire to reject married life.

While Sharyn Pearce suggests that Judy’s tragic end follows a narrative pattern that sup-ports the glorification of male heroes and renders ‘over-reaching women’ as ‘noble failures’, the novel might also productively be read within the context of other fictions featuring girl protagonists of the period, such as Praed and Martin's novels. This chapter makes the case that Turner and Franklin’s thwarted heroines critique the containment of Australian girls to the banalities of the home by exposing the negative and uncertain outcomes for those who desire the freedoms and aspirations permitted to boys and men. Unlike British fictions that champion adventurous girls, these Australian fictions critique the continuation of gendered restrictions in the colonies by proposing that girls who desire excitement and independence ‘should have been…boy[s]’ (as Sybylla’s mother remarks).

The dark ride : The history of the thematic ride as a unique model for new media and cinematic installation

This research examines the translation of the visual language of cinema into a spatial experience. An investigation into early moving images reveals the role that amusement parks played in exploring narratives using architectural spaces. The exegesis will address the history of entertainments, in particular the ‘dark ride’, which have an emphasis on narrative over and above effect.

Extensive field research was undertaken including historical sites across the east coast of the US, in search of new approaches to new media. Over twenty key popular entertainments were experienced first-hand, from Coney Island’s legendary ‘Spookarama’, to the earliest dark ride in operation, ‘The Old Mill’ at Kennywood in Pittsburgh.