Achieving Consensus in the Development of an Online Intervention Designed to Effectively Support Midwives in Work-Related Psychological Distress: Protocol for a Delphi Study

BACKGROUND: The development of an online intervention designed to effectively support midwives in work-related psychological distress will be challenging due to the ethical, practical, and therapeutic issues surrounding its design. Related literature suggests that midwives may require an anonymous, confidential, and therapeutic platform that facilitates amnesty and nonpunitive approaches to remedy ill health. However, it is unclear which requirements may be most salient to midwifery populations. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper is to describe the design of a Delphi study, intended to achieve expert consensus on the needs of midwives in work-related psychological distress who may be supported via an online intervention. This protocol may also serve as a research framework for similar studies to be modeled upon. METHODS: A heterogeneous sample of at least thirty experts on psychological well-being and distress associated with midwifery work will be recruited. Their opinions regarding the development of an online intervention designed to support midwives in work-related psychological distress will be collected through 2 rounds of questioning, via the Delphi Technique. When 60% (≥18, assuming the minimum is 30) of panelists score within 2 adjacent points on a 7-point scale, consensus will be acknowledged. This Delphi study protocol will invite both qualitative and quantitative outcomes. RESULTS: This study is currently in development. It is financially supported by a full-time scholarship at the Centre for Technology Enabled Health Research at Coventry University (Coventry, UK). The implementation of this Delphi study is anticipated to occur during the autumn of 2015. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study will direct the development of an online intervention designed to support midwives in work-related psychological distress, summarize expert driven consensus, and direct future research

The Impact of a Professional Learning Community on Student Achievement Gains: A Case Study

Throughout the United States, public schools are looking for ways to raise student achievement levels in order to meet the accountability standards required by the No Child Left Behind legislation and other federal, state, and local accountability. This is a case study of one elementary school in North Carolina that raised its student achievement level from 56% to 84% over a five year period, and credited this increase to the creation of a professional learning community at the school. The purpose of this study was to verify the existence of a professional learning community at the school and to investigate its impact on the increase in student achievement. Hord's (1997) five components of a professional learning community were used as the framework of this study. These five components include: (a) Supportive and Shared Leadership, (b) Shared Values and Vision, (c) Collective Creativity, (d) Shared Practice, and (e) Supportive Conditions. A questionnaire was first given to all staff which looked at the presence and strength of a professional learning community at the site. Additional data were gathered from interviews, observations, and documents. Results of this study indicated that a professional learning community exists at the school site, and that this professional learning community did positively impact student achievement. Findings also suggest that a combination of factors contributed to the increase in student achievement, with some components of the professional learning community making more of an impact than others. As an increasing number of schools and school systems look to professional learning communities as a way to address accountability and raise student achievement, this study provides some evidence that such an approach can have positive and successful results.Doctor of Educatio

The Perils of Gender Beliefs for Men Leaders as Change Agents for Gender Equality

This article examines the potentially damaging role that gender beliefs can play in hindering women's equal representation in leadership positions. Based on a secondary analysis of a large‐scale EU‐wide survey (Eurobarometer 76.1), the article shows that essentialist gender beliefs lower support for equality interventions such as quotas or targets, particularly among men as leaders. The results show that discriminatory gender beliefs partially mediate this relationship and produce a more negative effect among men leaders. The paper contributes to understanding the role essentialist gender beliefs often lay the groundwork for gender discriminatory beliefs. Those in turn hinder support for effective gender equality measures. Gender essentialist beliefs can be held by everyone but are more prevalent among men leaders. We conclude that greater gender balance in leadership cannot be achieved without tackling underlying gender beliefs, particularly among men leaders since they are called upon to enact change. We thereby argue that simply asking for men to become change agents for gender equality is not an effective strategy if underlying gender beliefs are left unchallenged

Conclusions

The conclusion considers multiple constructive, theological vistas opened up by the analysis offered in the rest of the book. A provisional analysis of the “Market” as an emergent mythological person is sketched. Various trajectories for constructive hamartiology are explored. The ontology of mythological persons is described in terms of Hartshorne’s dipolar theism; Sin as a false deity can be understood as having only a consequent, and not an antecedent, nature. It is proposed that this multilevel approach to sin can help facilitate ecumenical work against sin in our cities, providing a framework in which we can value ecclesial actions that target each of the three levels of Sin’s dominion—personal discipleship, social action, and ministries of deliverance—and theorize the interactions between these various interventions.</p

Emergence

Emergence theory in philosophy of science is introduced, first in modest terms of the emergent properties exhibited by complex wholes that are not exhibited by their constituent parts. Then, emergence is treated as a trans-ordinal theory that stakes out a middle ground between reductionism and dualism. The tension between supervenience and downward causation is described as the generative dialectic of emergence. The coherence of downward causation is debated and ultimately affirmed on account of the prevalence of downward causation in the sorts of accounts produced by fields like systems biology. Racism is treated as a case study of the sorts of causal feedback loops generated by complex causal structures that operate at multiple levels of hierarchy.</p

Sin, Gender, and Empire

This chapter places Paul’s discourse of the “Body of Hamartia” within the context of various ancient discourses regarding the social body. These discourses are shown to be oriented around a central ideology of self-mastery that frames ancient Greco-Roman ideas about both gender and empire. It engages especially with the Roma cult in the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire as an instance of an ancient collective “person” emergent from a complex social system. (The case of “Legion” in Mark 5 is considered as well.) This comparison allows for a discussion of Hamartia in Paul in terms of ancient political and gender ideology.</p

The Emergence of Sin

This book aims to solve an age-old problem in New Testament scholarship: namely, how to understand the relationship between “sins” as human misdeeds, and “Sin/Hamartia, ” the cosmic tyrant, in Romans. It appropriates the critical framework of emergence in philosophy of science to describe the emergence of cognition and agency at the individual, social, and mythological levels. The cosmic tyrant Sin is described as a real person, emergent from a complex system of human transgressions. The work argues that this emergence is analogous to the emergence of mind from the complex neurological system that is the brain. The dominion of Sin is described as downward causation exercised on Sin’s supervenience base (individual sinners), in dialog with liberationist accounts of social sin. This interdisciplinary engagement sets the table for placing Paul’s discourse of the “Body of Sin” within the context of various ancient discourses regarding the social body. The Roma cult in the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire serves as an instance of an ancient collective “person” emergent from a complex social system to compare with Paul’s description of Sin/Hamartia. This comparison allows for a discussion of Sin/Hamartia in Paul in terms of ancient political and gender ideology.</p

The Emergence of Persons Great and Small

This chapter turns specifically to the question of personhood, offering an emergent ontology of human persons at both the biological and psychological levels. These “individuals” prove to be internally composite and externally open to further combination. The discussion then moves to consider these “external” combinations. In somatic terms, this involves discussion of biology’s history of determining the biological “individual,” and the discussion of “superorganisms” that blur the distinction between parts and wholes. Various theories of “group mind” are evaluated in order to consider the relevance of the presence of group cognition in identifying the emergence of “persons” at higher levels of complexity. The hypothesis is presented that Sin should be understood as a mythological person—a superorganism with a group mind—supervening on the transgressions of individual human persons and sinful social systems.</p

s/Sin

The problem of how to understand the personal language Paul uses to describe s/Sin is introduced. Literary personification is distinguished from what we might call “person-identification” by an element of self-conscious fiction that recognizes a gap between the personal language deployed and the “actual state of affairs.” The problem is that, for readers of Paul, his construal of the “actual state of affairs” is precisely what is at issue. Three emphases in the history of scholarship are considered: Bultmann’s focus on the sins of the individual; Käsemann’s focus on Sin as a cosmic power; and the liberationists’ focus on social sin. Each school demonstrates that the interpreter’s sense of the “actual state of affairs” cannot be removed from the process of interpretation. This sets the stage for careful consideration of our own readerly sense of how individual, social, and cosmic realities might coexist and interact.</p