‘Our voice started off as a whisper and now it is a great big roar’ : The Salford Dementia Associate Panel as a model of involvement in research activities

This paper presents the work of the ‘Salford Dementia Associate Panel’, based at the Salford Institute for Dementia, Salford University (UK). We discuss the roles of the Dementia Associates, in particular around the areas of engagement and research. The panel is made up of people living with dementia, and current and former care partners. It highlights the development of this group over a four-year period and demonstrates over time how the role of a Dementia Associate member has evolved. The panel is involved in research, education and public engagement activities conducted by staff and students within the Institute. The motivations for becoming involved are clearly articulated and demonstrate how the personal backgrounds of individuals have driven the collective involvement and desire to bring about change. The benefits and challenges associated with working as part of a panel are discussed. We conclude by bringing together our experiences as a set of suggestions for others who may wish to create a similar forum to promote the involvement of people living with dementia and former and current care partners

Spectral reflectances of natural targets for use in remote sensing studies

A collection of spectral reflectances of 156 natural targets is presented in a uniform format. For each target both a graphical plot and a digital tabulation of reflectance is given. The data were taken from the literature and include laboratory, field, and aircraft measurements. A discussion of the different measurements of reflectance is given, along with the changes in apparent reflectance when targets are viewed through the atmosphere. The salient features of the reflectance curves of common target types are presented and discussed

ASPIRE-2-PREVENT: a survey of lifestyle, risk factor management and cardioprotective medication in patients with coronary heart disease and people at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease in the UK.

OBJECTIVE: To determine in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) and people at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) whether the Joint British Societies' guidelines on CVD prevention (JBS2) are followed in everyday clinical practice. DESIGN: A cross-sectional survey was undertaken of medical records and patient interviews and examinations at least 6 months after the recruiting event or diagnosis using standardised instruments and a central laboratory for measurement of lipids and glucose. SETTINGS: The ASPIRE-2-PREVENT survey was undertaken in 19 randomly selected hospitals and 19 randomly selected general practices in 12 geographical regions in England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. PATIENTS: In hospitals, 1474 consecutive patients with CHD were identified and 676 (25.6% women) were interviewed. In general practice, 943 people at high CVD risk were identified and 446 (46.5% women) were interviewed. RESULTS: The prevalence of risk factors in patients with CHD and high-risk individuals was, respectively: smoking 14.1%, 13.3%; obesity 38%, 50.2%; not reaching physical activity target 83.3%, 85.4%; blood pressure ≥130/80 mm Hg (patients with CHD and self-reported diabetes) or ≥140/85 mm Hg (high-risk individuals) 46.9%, 51.3%; total cholesterol ≥4 mmol/l 52.6%, 78.7%; and diabetes 17.8%, 43.8%. CONCLUSIONS: The potential among patients with CHD and individuals at high risk of developing CVD in the UK to achieve the JBS2 lifestyle and risk factor targets is considerable. CVD prevention needs a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach, addressing all aspects of lifestyle and risk factor management. The challenge is to engage and motivate cardiologists, physicians and other health professionals to routinely practice high quality preventive cardiology in a healthcare system which must invest in prevention

Research Project as Boundary Object: negotiating the conceptual design of a tool for International Development

This paper reflects on the relationship between who one designs for and what one designs in the unstructured space of designing for political change; in particular, for supporting “International Development” with ICT. We look at an interdisciplinary research project with goals and funding, but no clearly defined beneficiary group at start, and how amorphousness contributed to impact. The reported project researched a bridging tool to connect producers with consumers across global contexts and show players in the supply chain and their circumstances. We explore how both the nature of the research and the tool’s function became contested as work progressed. To tell this tale, we invoke the idea of boundary objects and the value of tacking back and forth between elastic meanings of the project’s artefacts and processes. We examine the project’s role in India, Chile and other arenas to draw out ways that it functioned as a catalyst and how absence of committed design choices acted as an unexpected strength in reaching its goals

Five sepharose-bound ligands for the chromatographic purification of Clostridium collagenase and clostripain

Social media data have provoked a mixed response from researchers. While there is great enthusiasm for this new source of social data – Twitter data in particular – concerns are also expressed about their biases and unknown provenance and, consequently, their credibility for social research. This article seeks a middle path, arguing that we must develop better understanding of the construction and circulation of social media data to evaluate their appropriate uses and the claims that might be made from them. Building on sociotechnical approaches, we propose a high-level abstraction of the ‘pipeline’ through which social media data are constructed and circulated. In turn, we explore how this shapes the populations and samples that are present in social media data and the methods that generate data about them. We conclude with some broad principles for supporting methodologically informed social media research in the future

Using MCDA to generate and interpret evidence to inform local government investment in public health

Smoking is the single biggest cause of preventable death in the Uited Kingdom (UK) and is a major cause of coronary heart disease, some cancers, and respiratory disease, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. At the time of initiating the project, smoking prevalence had not changed across four local government areas in South Yorkshire for some years. Most spending had been focussed on helping people quit, an intervention where there was clear evidence of effectiveness. A number of changes occurred in public health structures and targets, requiring a reappraisal of the range of interventions offered. This was challenging due to a lack of clear evidence for some of the areas’ alternative interventions. The aim of this paper is to describe the use of a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach to support the health priority setting in local authorities to reduce smoking prevalence. There were three phases to this process: (1) problem structuring; (2) the multiple criteria decision analysis; (3) and using the MCDA results to influence decision making at the local government level. The MCDA approach was used to collate information in a consistent and transparent manner, using expert, stakeholder and public opinion to fill known gaps in evidence. Fifteen interventions (such as stop smoking support services, smoke-free spaces, communication and marketing exercises, and increased investment in enforcement) were ranked across eight criteria (relating to reductions in prevalence across relevant groups, as well as aspects relating to equity and feasibility), allowing a range of relevant concerns to be incorporated. Subsequent steps were taken to translate the results of this stage into workable policy options. The results differed significantly from current practice. Sensitivity analysis showed that the findings were robust to changes in preference weights. These results informed subsequent changes to the interventions offered across the four boroughs. The ability of MCDA techniques to incorporate data and both qualitative and quantitative judgements in a formal manner mean that they are well suited to support public health decision making, where evidence is often only partially available and many policies are value driven. MCDA methods, if used, should be chosen carefully based on their resource/time constraints, scientific validity, and the significance and broader context of the decision problem.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40070-016-0059-

Scraping the Social? Issues in live social research

What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a ‘medium-specific’ technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce ‘alien’ methodological assumptions into social research (such as an pre-occupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with ‘external’ analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a ‘problem’ with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘real-time’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of ‘austerity’. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?)

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

What’s Sex (Composition) Got to Do with It? The Importance of Sex Composition of Gangs for Female and Male Members’ Offending and Victimization

Sex composition of groups has been theorized in organizational sociology and found in prior work to structure female and male members’ behaviors and experiences. Peer group and gang literature similarly finds that the sex gap in offending varies across groups of differing sex ratios. Drawing on this and other research linking gang membership, offending, and victimization, we examine whether sex composition of gangs is linked to sex differences in offending in this sample, further assess whether sex composition similarly structures females’ and males’ victimization experiences, and if so, why. Self-report data from gang members in a multi-site, longitudinal study of 3,820 youths are employed. Results support previous findings about variations in member delinquency by both sex and sex composition of the gang and also indicate parallel variations in members’ victimization. These results are further considered within the context of facilitating effects such as gender dynamics, gang characteristics, and normative orientation