Exploring non-cancer pain conditions in a community sample : critiquing a current conceptual model of the acute to chronic pain transition and examining predictors of chronicity

This program of research examines the experience of chronic pain in a community sample. While, it is clear that like patient samples, chronic pain in non-patient samples is also associated with psychological distress and physical disability, the experience of pain across the total spectrum of pain conditions (including acute and episodic pain conditions) and during the early course of chronic pain is less clear. Information about these aspects of the pain experience is important because effective early intervention for chronic pain relies on identification of people who are likely to progress to chronicity post-injury. A conceptual model of the transition from acute to chronic pain was proposed by Gatchel (1991a). In brief, Gatchel’s model describes three stages that individuals who have a serious pain experience move through, each with worsening psychological dysfunction and physical disability. The aims of this program of research were to describe the experience of pain in a community sample in order to obtain pain-specific data on the problem of pain in Queensland, and to explore the usefulness of Gatchel’s Model in a non-clinical sample. Additionally, five risk factors and six protective factors were proposed as possible extensions to Gatchel’s Model. To address these aims, a prospective longitudinal mixed-method research design was used. Quantitative data was collected in Phase 1 via a comprehensive postal questionnaire. Phase 2 consisted of a follow-up questionnaire 3 months post-baseline. Phase 3 consisted of semi-structured interviews with a subset of the original sample 12 months post follow-up, which used qualitative data to provide a further in-depth examination of the experience and process of chronic pain from respondents’ point of view. The results indicate chronic pain is associated with high levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. However, the levels of disability reported by this Queensland sample were generally lower than those reported by clinical samples and consistent with disability data reported in a New South Wales population-based study. With regard to the second aim of this program of research, while some elements of the pain experience of this sample were consistent with that described by Gatchel’s Model, overall the model was not a good fit with the experience of this non-clinical sample. The findings indicate that passive coping strategies (minimising activity), catastrophising, self efficacy, optimism, social support, active strategies (use of distraction) and the belief that emotions affect pain may be important to consider in understanding the processes that underlie the transition to and continuation of chronic pain.

Changing the metaphor : the potential of online communities in teacher professional development

Belonging to an online community offers teachers the opportunity to exchange ideas, make connections with a wider peer group and form collaborative networks. The increasing popularity of teacher professional communities means that we need to understand how they work and determine the role they may play in teacher professional development. This chapter will map data from a doctoral study to a recentlydeveloped model of professional development to offer a new perspective of how online communities can add to a teacher’s personal and professional growth and, in so doing, add to the small number of studies in this field. This chapter will conclude with a call for a revision of the way we approach professional development in the 21st century and suggest that old models and metaphors are hindering the adoption of more effective means of professional development for teachers.

Harmonising procurement policy environment - identifying key themes towards the development of a conceptual model

Capital works procurement and its regulatory policy environment within a country can be complex entities. For example, by virtue of Australia’s governmental division between the Commonwealth, states and local jurisdictions and the associated procurement networks and responsibilities at each level, the tendering process is often convoluted. There are four inter-related key themes identified in the literature in relation to procurement disharmony, including decentralisation, risk & risk mitigation, free trade & competition, and tendering costs. This paper defines and discusses these key areas of conflict that adversely impact upon the business environments of industry through a literature review, policy analysis and consultation with capital works procurement stakeholders. The aim of this national study is to identify policy differences between jurisdictions in Australia, and ascertain whether those differences are a barrier to productivity and innovation. This research forms an element of a broader investigation with an aim of developing efficient, effective and nationally harmonised procurement systems. Keywords: capital works, procurement policy reform Acknowledgement: The research described in this paper carried out by the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation.

Fellowship plan and conceptual framework

This document is written to provide: (1) a brief plan of the intended directions of the ALTC program ‘A Pedagogy of Supervision in the Technology disciplines’; and (2) an overview of existing research outcomes which are likely to be of interest to the technology disciplines, including some cross disciplinary research and some focussed specifically on some part of the technology field.

Interpersonal pattern dynamics and adaptive behavior in multiagent neurobiological systems : conceptual model and data

Ecological dynamics characterizes adaptive behavior as an emergent, self-organizing property of interpersonal interactions in complex social systems. The authors conceptualize and investigate constraints on dynamics of decisions and actions in the multiagent system of team sports. They studied coadaptive interpersonal dynamics in rugby union to model potential control parameter and collective variable relations in attacker–defender dyads. A videogrammetry analysis revealed how some agents generated fluctuations by adapting displacement velocity to create phase transitions and destabilize dyadic subsystems near the try line. Agent interpersonal dynamics exhibited characteristics of chaotic attractors and informational constraints of rugby union boxed dyadic systems into a low dimensional attractor. Data suggests that decisions and actions of agents in sports teams may be characterized as emergent, self-organizing properties, governed by laws of dynamical systems at the ecological scale. Further research needs to generalize this conceptual model of adaptive behavior in performance to other multiagent populations.

Information security culture : a behaviour compliance conceptual framework

Understanding the complex dynamic and uncertain characteristics of organisational employees who perform authorised or unauthorised information security activities is deemed to be a very important and challenging task. This paper presents a conceptual framework for classifying and organising the characteristics of organisational subjects involved in these information security practices. Our framework expands the traditional Human Behaviour and the Social Environment perspectives used in social work by identifying how knowledge, skills and individual preferences work to influence individual and group practices with respect to information security management. The classification of concepts and characteristics in the framework arises from a review of recent literature and is underpinned by theoretical models that explain these concepts and characteristics. Further, based upon an exploratory study of three case organisations in Saudi Arabia involving extensive interviews with senior managers, department managers, IT managers, information security officers, and IT staff; this article describes observed information security practices and identifies several factors which appear to be particularly important in influencing information security behaviour. These factors include values associated with national and organisational culture and how they manifest in practice, and activities related to information security management.

Dancing the Thesis : Potentials and Pitfalls in Practice-led Research

Practice-led or multi modal theses (describing examinable outcomes of postgraduate study which comprise the practice of dancing/choreography with an accompanying exegesis) are an emerging strength of dance scholarship; a form of enquiry that has been gaining momentum for over a decade, particularly in Australia and the United Kingdom. It has been strongly argued that, in this form of research, legitimate claims to new knowledge are embodied predominantly within the practice itself (Pakes, 2003) and that these findings are emergent, contingent and often interstitial, contained within both the material form of the practice and in the symbolic languages surrounding the form. In a recent study on ‘dancing’ theses Phillips, Stock, Vincs (2009) found that there was general agreement from academics and artists that ‘there could be more flexibility in matching written language with conceptual thought expressed in practice’. The authors discuss how the seemingly intangible nature of danced / embodied research, reliant on what Melrose (2003) terms ‘performance mastery’ by the ‘expert practitioner’ (2006, Point 4) involving ‘expert’ intuition (2006, Point 5), might be accessed, articulated and validated in terms of alternative ways of knowing through exploring an ongoing dialogue in which the danced practice develops emergent theory. They also propose ways in which the danced thesis can be ‘converted’ into the required ‘durable’ artefact which the ephemerality of live performance denies, drawing on the work of Rye’s ‘multi-view’ digital record (2003) and Stapleton’s ‘multi-voiced audio visual document’(2006, 82). Building on a two-year research project (2007-2008) Dancing Between Diversity and Consistency: Refining Assessment in Postgraduate Degrees in Dance, which examined such issues in relation to assessment in an Australian context, the three researchers have further explored issues around interdisciplinarity, cultural differences and documentation through engaging with the following questions:  How do we represent research in which understandings, meanings and findings are situated within the body of the dancer/choreographer?  Do these need a form of ‘translating’ into textual form in order to be accessed as research?  What kind of language structures can be developed to effect this translation: metaphor, allusion, symbol?  How important is contextualising the creative practice?  How do we incorporate differing cultural inflections and practices into our reading and evaluation?  What kind of layered documentation can assist in producing a ‘durable’ research artefact from a non-reproduce-able live event?

A conceptual framework for a systematic mapping of layout design principles by using Yin and Yang theory

There are various principles for layout design such as balance, rhythm, unity and harmony, but each principle has often been introduced as a separate concept rather than within an integrated and systematic structure, so that designers and design students have to keep practices for the acquisition of skills. The paper seeks to develop a conceptual framework for a systematic mapping of layout design principles by using Yin and Yang and the Five Elements. Yin and Yang theory explains all natural phenomena with its own conceptual model and facilitates finding harmony and balance between the visual elements in terms of systematic and organic relations. Most common and well-known layout design principles are defined with 10 different resources such as design books and articles, and have been remapped following with the structure of Yin and Yang and the Five Elements. A systematic framework explaining the relationships of design principles was created and 32 design students participated in its efficiency test. The outcome suggests there is a high possibility that the framework can be used in professional fields and design education.

Conceptual Modelling in 3D Virtual Worlds for Process Communication

Traditionally, conceptual modelling of business processes involves the use of visual grammars for the representation of, amongst other things, activities, choices and events. These grammars, while very useful for experts, are difficult to understand by naive stakeholders. Annotations of such process models have been developed to assist in understanding aspects of these grammars via map-based approaches, and further work has looked at forms of 3D conceptual models. However, no one has sought to embed the conceptual models into a fully featured 3D world, using the spatial annotations to explicate the underlying model clearly. In this paper, we present an approach to conceptual process model visualisation that enhances a 3D virtual world with annotations representing process constructs, facilitating insight into the developed model. We then present a prototype implementation of a 3D Virtual BPMN Editor that embeds BPMN process models into a 3D world. We show how this gives extra support for tasks performed by the conceptual modeller, providing better process model communication to stakeholders..