Background: Personality Disorder treatment is a contentious subject in health care. Despite available research concerning the diagnosis itself and also available treatments, there is little research regarding treatment thresholds or defining how treatment decisions can be formulated. This problem has been identified by clinicians, patients, supervisors and specific organisations, particularly linked to recent healthcare changes associated with austerity measures. Research Question: How can mental health care staff use a formulated decision process concerning therapeutic interventions for people with PD, when considering the recent service changes and rationalisation of available treatments? Methods: An Action Research study has been conducted over a four year period, using predominantly qualitative methods including: a hermeneutic literature review (n=144 papers), patient questionnaires (n=15) and Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of clinician and supervisor semi-structured interviews (n=10). Results: Difficulties have been found when making decisions with people who either do not accept their diagnosis and/or do not accept the current evidence-based treatments for personality disorder. Other challenges have been identified regarding the patient/clinician relationship, the level of distress the patient presents with, and also the clinician view concerning the individual, the diagnosis, and the available treatments. The IPA produced five super-ordinate themes related to decision-making regarding treatment choices for people with personality disorder, including: difficulties with boundary management, diagnostic stigma, a focus upon time, metacognitive ability, and the potential for iatrogenic harm. Conclusions: Multiple factors require consideration when examining treatment choices for people with a personality disorder, concerning the patient's individual symptom profile, needs, attitude towards treatments; the clinician's profession, attitudes, opinions, and wellness on the day of the assessment, and also the treatments available within the locality. A diagram has been presented summarising these formulation factors. Recommendations have been made based upon the results, analysis, synthesis and discussion sections, indicating potential practice changes and areas for future research.

The following thesis explores construction policy discourses within the context of the United Kingdom (UK). The research was deemed both important and necessary as the construction sector represents a major portion of the UK economy, accounting for approximately seven per cent of GDP, and employing millions (Rhodes: 2015). Adopting an ontology of becoming and an interpretive epistemological perspective, it is argued that construction policy documents are best characterised as crystallised snapshots of a community s attempts at meaning making in time. Utilising a qualitative methodology, the thesis primarily achieves its aims through the textual analysis of three prominent construction policy documents ( Rethinking Construction - the Egan report, the Government Construction Strategy , and the Industrial Strategy: Construction 2025), as well as informational interviews with eleven contemporary, senior construction policy stakeholders, from nine different organisations. The empirical element was inspired by interpretive approaches to policy analysis, and in particular the works of Yanow (2000; 2003; 2007) and drew upon the Hermeneutical approach repopularised by Taylor (1971), and Gadamer (1975). Four primary discourses were discovered, these being: The discourse of the need to be competitive ; The discourse of the essentialness of efficiency ; The discourse of unfulfilled potential ; The discourse of fear of not being Modern . The analysis suggests that construction policy discourses at the time of writing are predominantly influenced by the dominant cultural trends known as neoliberalism and the enterprise culture , but that these too must be seen as emerging from, and as informed by, the super-ideology of political declinism (Tomlinson: 2000). It is from these cultural sources that the pools of meanings articulated in the texts are drawn (Marton: 1986). Furthermore, tracing the etymology of the word policy , it is suggested that construction policy documents police behaviour by shaping it towards particular directions in keeping with specific normative visions concerning the good life policy elites have. The findings are important as they suggest that contemporary construction policy discourses are in danger of becoming increasingly myopic, with alternative perspectives and visions increasingly marginalised, and so any potential for the flexible adaptation or reimagining of future policies is reduced. As a result, the thesis argues for greater involvement from a broader spectrum of social actors in all stages of construction policy, to both contribute to strengthening citizenry and democracy in the UK, whilst reducing the potential for myopia amongst policy elites.

This thesis sheds new light on the study of law in Japan by exploring legislative interventions and dispute resolution processes in the Japanese field of employment. The academic literature about the legal system of Japan has produced valuable research about various areas of Japanese law, from attempts at explaining patterns of rights assertion in the country to more recent studies about the legal reforms launched by the government of Japan starting from the 2000s. However, it has rarely considered the employment field as a fruitful subject for research. Nonetheless, in the past thirty years, employment has been one of the areas of Japanese law to experience considerable reform. Against the backdrop of the changes in the composition of the Japanese workforce and the bursting of the economic bubble of the beginning of the 1990s, the government of Japan assumed a more prominent role in the regulation of employment relations. In light of these developments, this thesis contributes to the debate on the role of law in Japan by examining this rarely investigated area of the Japanese legal system. Specifically, it focuses on the legislative interventions of the Japanese government to regulate the peripheral workforce of the labour market, namely women and part-time workers, and procedures for the resolution of employment disputes. In doing so, it demonstrates that the efforts of the legislators to enhance the creation of a more inclusive labour market have been fundamentally constrained by ideological and institutional factors, and resulted in an uneven distribution of legal resources among workers which exacerbated existing employment status divisions. This, in turn, has translated into unequal access to justice, affecting the extent to which different categories of workers can obtain redress through the legal apparatus.

Submitted by Maria Medeiros (maria.dilva1@ufcg.edu.br) on 2018-07-25T12:35:45Z No. of bitstreams: 1 GILLIARD DE OLIVEIRA JUSTINO - DISSERTAÇÃO (PPGCS) 2016.pdf: 3433421 bytes, checksum: 74e3e9ad3c909ab3bad6f5e5ff9990f6 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-25T12:35:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 GILLIARD DE OLIVEIRA JUSTINO - DISSERTAÇÃO (PPGCS) 2016.pdf: 3433421 bytes, checksum: 74e3e9ad3c909ab3bad6f5e5ff9990f6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016 / Capes / Saúde, doença e cura são concepções que abrangem não somente os aspectos biológicos, mas também diversos elementos sociais em suas construções. As religiões, além de constituírem parte importante no processo de construção destas concepções, atuam diretamente nas práticas de manutenção da saúde, de enfrentamento da doença e de obtenção da cura. Este trabalho analisa, a partir dos Modelos Etiológicos e Terapêuticos de Laplantine, bem como da Análise de Retórica de Cura apresentada por Csordas, a construção destas categorias entre os praticantes do Culto a Jurema Sagrada, crença esta que abrange elementos indígenas, cristão e afro-brasileiros. Seu objetivo é compreender como estas concepções são expressadas e construídas, bem como apreender as estratégias e práticas curativas, religiosas ou não. A metodologia utilizada articulou levantamento bibliográfico, observação participante e entrevistas temáticas acerca das questões de saúde, doença e cura vividas pelos sujeitos da pesquisa, analisando os discursos obtidos e absorvendo daí suas concepções e as práticas relacionadas. / Health, illness and cure are conceptions that not only enclose the biological aspects, but also diverse social elements in his constructions. The religions, beyond constituting important part in the process of construction of these conceptions, act directly in the practical ones of maintenance of the health, confrontation of the illness and attainment of the cure. This work analyzes, from the Laplantine’s Etiologic/Therapeutics Models, as well as of the Analysis of The Rhetoric of Transformation in Ritual Healing, presented for Csordas, the construction of these categories between the practitioners of the Culto a Jurema Sagrada, belief this that encloses Aboriginal elements, Christian and afro-Brazilians. The used methodology articulated bibliographical survey, participant observation and thematic interviews concerning the questions of health, illness and cure lived by the citizens of the research, analyzing the gotten speeches and absorbing from there its directions.

This research examined how men and women experience stress and coping during the early stages ofIVF, focusing on time, gender and couples. Both members of three heterosexual couples took part separately in two or three semi-structured interviews over a six-month period, producing fourteen accounts. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to preserve participants' unique experiences alongside interpretation and generation of broader themes by the researcher. Infertility and fertility treatment were not always seen as stressful, but often as a problem to be tackled in the best way, both emotionally and practically. Stress arose from specific, time-limited issues. Participants' emotional responses were shaped by perceptions of the effect of stress on fertility, a desire to stay positive, and downward comparison with other fertility patients who were perceived to be coping poorly. Participants emphasised their choices as logical, careful decisions, weighing up multiple factors including alternatives like adoption, and temporal and financial investments. Over time, perceptions of IVF changed from a precise, technical process to one subject to luck-and chance, although the process itself was perceived as becoming easier with experience. The study was originally positioned within the transactional stress and coping model, but a self-regulatory perspective provided a better fit for the data The fmdings are linked to each model where appropriate, and the implications suggest use of the transactional model to understanding specific, time- limited events, and a self-regulatory framework to explore general fertility treatment experiences. Suggestions for future work include greater use of the self-regulatory framework to study infertility and fertility treatment; paying attention to couples' willingness to adopt in shaping infertility experiences; conducting interviews at different times during treatment cycles, and during different treatment cycles; and using alternative data gathering methods including Internet Mediated Research.

In a recent article Ulrich Brand has discussed how best to perform policy analysis. I reflect upon the paper as an interdisciplinary researcher experienced in public policy problems and their analysis with a particular interest in the relationship between social, economic and environmental problems. At the centre of the paper is the contrast between two existing methodologies prevalent in political science and related disciplines. One is the rationalist approach, which takes on the character of a natural science, that believes in a fully knowable objective reality which can be observed by an independent investigator. The other is a strong social constructivist position called interpretative policy analysis (IPA), where knowledge and meaning become so intertwined as to make independence of the observer from the observed impossible and all knowledge highly subjective. Brand then offers his model as a way forward, but one that he closely associates with the latter. My contention is that policy analysis, and any way forward, needs to provide more of a transformative combination of elements from both approaches. Indeed I believe this is actually what Brand is doing.

The Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) approach is a sport psychology programme aimed at performance development in athletes. This study set out to gain an understanding of how adolescent equestrian athletes experienced this programme, using an in-depth qualitative approach called interpretive phenomenology analysis (IPA). Four equestrians, three females and one male, ranging in age from 16 to 18 years, completed an experiential learning-based programme over a two-day period. Semi-structured interviews were subsequently conducted with each participant to gain an understanding of their experience of the programme in terms of (1) their learning regarding the programme; (2) possible application of the learning to equestrian sport; and (3) possible transference of the learning to other areas of their lives. The interviews were transcribed and analysed according to the principles of IPA and the findings pertaining to each participant are discussed in terms of the most significant themes identified during the interviews. The concluding chapter discusses both the common and the unique findings obtained from the participants’ accounts in relation to the existing literature. The findings of this study highlight the importance of the partnership between equine and human when applying MAC in equestrian sport and also illustrate the applicability of MAC, not only in equestrian sport, but also in other areas of an adolescent’s life. This project contributes to sport psychology since it is the first qualitative study describing the experiences of adolescent equestrians regarding the MAC approach. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / lk2014 / Psychology / MA / Unrestricted

The advances in online technology has revolutionised online communication. As a result of new emerging web technologies virtual interactions have taken a much more interactive structure. These improvements in technology provide richer communication experiences for the users. Online communities, with the aid of new web 2.0 technology, provide the ideal environment for knowledge sharing. It is the interaction and communication between users of such communities that triggers information and knowledge sharing. Knowledge and information sharing sets the foundation for knowledge creation and co-creation. Meanwhile knowledge is known to be one of the greatest assets of any company or organisation. A significant amount of research has been dedicated to knowledge management. Nevertheless little research has been done to explore knowledge creation and co-creation, particularly in an online community setting. This research is investigating the idea of knowledge co-creation within an online community environment. Knowing that knowledge itself is a subjective entity, which cannot be objectively measured or quantified, the research takes an interpretive approach to finding out how this knowledge is co-created by the users of online communities. One of the main significant factors of this study is that it has used a unique and novel research method to tackle what appears to be a difficult subject. The research uses an interpretive case study method, however without any data collection. The investigation will be exclusively interpretive and philosophically evaluated based on the relevant literature and a set of principles introduced by Klein and Myers (1999). These principles were introduced as a guideline for conducting and evaluating interpretive studies in information systems. Using Klein and Myers’ principles has the advantage of being based on a well-established contemporary literature in information systems (IS) research methodology. The principles have not been used in an exclusively exploratory and interpretive research before. This itself is a major methodological contribution for future researchers to utilise as a practical example. The study develops a conceptual framework around knowledge co-creation, online communities and the technology. This framework is based on a proposed RECI model offered for knowledge creation in online communities. It also investigates the role of technology in the co-creation process. Finally it proposes a set of characteristics and guidelines that facilitate knowledge co-creation in online communities. These characteristics and guidelines would help design and implement future knowledge co-creating online communities, for example, e-learning and knowledge management systems. Furthermore the research lays the foundations for introducing the knowledge co-creation theory within online communities by proposing the initial hypothesis. Subject to appropriate future research and testing, the hypothesis can be developed into a practical theory.

This thesis explores the problem of information systems evaluation by conceptualising it as a process in which the manager comes to an understanding about a system. In other words, information systems evaluation is a hermeneutic process. The thesis explicates this notion through an argument that is itself hermeneutic in its development, beginning with the mainstream functionalist view of information systems evaluation, and then considering an interpretive view of IS evaluation, each of which points to one of two stereotypes of IS evaluation and the manager engaged in this process: the objective/rational manager utilising objective/rational methods versus the subjective/political manager engaged in political manoeuvring, utilising objective/rational methods only as ritual or symbolism. Neither of these opposing stereotypes is satisfactory. Instead, this thesis proposes a dialectic view of information systems evaluation, in terms of which, rather than being a decision maker, the manager is in-the-world, evaluating systems in order to get the job done, on the basis of her thrownness in-the-world. This conceptualisation provides an intuitively appropriate account of evaluation on the part of an individual manager, but we must still consider how managers as members of the organisation, reach a common understanding about a system. This they do through a process of organisational learning as encultured knowing, in terms of which a narrative, situated, pragmatic knowledge is most useful in evaluation. Evaluation, in other words, happens in the course of skilful conversation. Such conversation is, however, not always skilful because the organisation is not just a collection of individuals but also a network of power relations. Conversations as generators of meaning are never held outside of power: systems evaluations as conversations cannot take place outside of a regime of truth. A post-dualist view of action as both constituted by and constituting structure, however, suggests that there is always the potential for genuinely hermeneutic and ethical conversation, provided it is both improvisatory and deconstructive. Having understood the requirement for improvisation and deconstruction, it is possible to suggest some heuristics for information systems evaluation based on these ideas. / Dissertation (Phd (Information Technology))--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Informatics / unrestricted

Background: This thesis explores, in-depth, the experience and sense-making of transactional analyst psychotherapists working with clients who present with Internet addiction (IA). It engages with the therapist’s broad experience and understanding of Internet addiction presentation, therapeutic assessment, ‘diagnosis’ and ‘treatment’ rather than the singular experience, expression, and meaning-making of the individual client. Method: As a counselling psychologist trainee, I was particularly interested in sampling highly experienced therapists, with an extensive range of skills developed through a robust clinical training. Four therapist participants, all professional members of the European Association of Transactional Analysis (EATA), were interviewed using semi-structured, one-to-one interviews and the material was analysed using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Findings and Discussion: Four higher-order concepts emerged within this study. They concerned: the complexity of IA; aetiological and predisposing factors; functions and features of IA; and treatment factors. Practical and theoretical implications for future research, clinical supervision, treatment, psycho-educational and political programmes are presented. Of the key emergent findings the Internet was understood by participants as a conduit or medium for addiction given a high prevalence of an underlying ‘disorders’. All of the participants believed in the existence of childhood aetiological roots which underpinned comorbidity with IA. Attachment difficulties in childhood would often predispose individuals to develop issues around loneliness, low self-esteem, control, loss and instability, and cognitive dissonance later in life. Participants believed a relationship existed between depression, low self-esteem and escapism as contributing factors. Conclusion: A systematic review of the extant research is proposed, along with quantitative studies to specifically evaluate the strength of this relationship. Further empirical research is particularly recommended to explore how these factors can predispose individuals to developing sub-types of IA, and especially in the context of historic childhood abuse and / or neglect. The complex nature and aetiology of IA can demand a high level of clinical expertise from professionals who would benefit from specific trainings concerning childhood attachment difficulties. Integrating a psychodynamic approach, or being aware of transference processes, could possibly enhance treatment effectiveness, and help safeguard both clients and therapists from counter-therapeutic interventions.