Judith Sligo

'Professionalising' Participation: From Rhetoric to Practice

Local government is increasingly seeking to encourage young peoples participation in local government planning and decision-making. This paper examines the relationship between professionals in local government and the young people who are the focus of local government participatory initiatives. We argue that whilst the move towards developing participation initiatives is welcome, there is a need to adopt a process of critical reflection with regard to these initiatives. The case of one New Zealand city is examined where young people express their views on the effectiveness or otherwise of their councils participation initiatives. Our findings suggest that whilst well intentioned these initiatives have had limited success in facilitating meaningful participation and perhaps the participation process as currently practised is in urgent need of review.

A literature review for large-scale health information system project planning, implementation and evaluation

Information technology is perceived as a potential panacea for healthcare organisations to manage pressure to improve services in the face of increased demand. However, the implementation and evaluation of health information systems (HIS) is plagued with problems and implementation shortcomings and failures are rife. HIS implementation is complex and relies on organisational, structural, technological, and human factors to be successful. It also requires reflective, nuanced, multidimensional evaluation to provide ongoing feedback to ensure success. This article provides a comprehensive review of the literature about evaluating and implementing HIS, detailing the challenges and recommendations for both evaluators and healthcare organisations. The factors that inhibit or promote successful HIS implementation are identified and effective evaluation strategies are described with the goal of informing teams evaluating complex HIS.

Vocational imagination and labour market literacy: young New Zealanders making education–employment linkages

This paper explores the concepts of vocational imagination and labour market literacy, arguing that these are important elements in the crafting of effective education–employment linkages. Evidence of truncated understandings of both is found in the talk of 93 young New Zealanders in transition from secondary school to their post‐school lives. We argue that development of labour market literacy and vocational imagination requires that young people crafting career pathways are able to work on identity formation, to discover and develop their abilities, and to recognise relevant opportunities and constraints, all within an infrastructure that allows clear career pathways to be mapped. Changes in New Zealands economic and educational landscape, together with forms of career education that are ill‐matched for this developing landscape, have inhibited such an approach and so contributed to the truncation observed. We suggest that this analysis points to ways of enabling young people to make links between education and employment more effectively.

Does Being an Older Parent Attenuate the Intergenerational Transmission of Parenting

Evidence that the transition to parenthood is occurring at older ages in the Western world, that older parents provide more growth-facilitating care than do younger ones, and that most prospective studies of the intergenerational transmission of parenting have focused on relatively young parents led us to evaluate whether parental age might moderate-and attenuate-the intergenerational transmission of parenting. On the basis of the seemingly commonsensical assumption that as individuals age they often become more psychologically mature and have more opportunity to reflect upon and free themselves from the legacy of childhood experiences, we hypothesized that deferring parenting would weaken links between rearing experiences in the family of origin and parenting in the family of procreation. To test this proposition we repeated analyses reported by Belsky, Jaffee, Sligo, Woodward, and Silva (2005) on 227 parents averaging 23 years of age linking rearing experiences repeatedly measured from 3 to 15 years of age with observed parenting in adulthood; we added 273 participants who became parents at older ages than did those in the original sample. Although previously reported findings showing that rearing history predicted mothering but not fathering reemerged, parental age generally failed to moderate the intergenerational transmission of parenting. Other investigators prospectively following children and adults into adulthood and studying the intergenerational transmission process should determine whether these null results vis-à-vis the attenuation of transmission with age obtain when parents with older children are studied or when other methods are used. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing groups experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.

Alternative Ways of Expressing and Reading Identity.

This paper explores the use of an ‘anti-CV’ (anti-Curriculum Vitae), or identity portfolio, as a data collection instrument in research with young people. We analyse four visually based anti-CVs created by participants in a project on youth transitions, exploring their use of symbolism and space to show how these young people reworked public narratives in their crafting of identity at the child–adult border. We use Gillian Roses framework from 2001 for the analysis of visual material to interpret the portfolios in terms of the context of their production, their content and the audience for their performance. We argue that the anti-CV offered a more participant-led research process than the standard interview, but at the same time led to methodological and ethical complexities: respectively, concerning the significance of the research team as audience for the anti-CVs, and the intrusion into participants’ lives that photographs in these portfolios offered.

How do we capture 15 years of complex and meaningful data about young people's lives?

Abstract This paper describes the development of a method of data collection, which captures the complexity of living situations, family dynamics and key life events of teenagers. This ‘Life History Calendar’ was adapted from earlier life history calendar methods for a multidisciplinary intergenerational study. The new calendar is able to record details of 15 years of teenage participants’ lives and can be administered to teenagers and their parents to show changes over individual lives and difference between individuals in a cohort. Referring to some preliminary data, we show that the calendar is a practical and effective method of data collection, which will be useful to researchers and practitioners working with young people and their families.

Rethinking integration in mixed methods research using data from different eras: lessons from a project about teenage vocational behaviour

Abstract Mixed methods research requires integration of qualitative and quantitative data. However, there is debate about how to define integration and what is required for integration to occur. This paper describes a mixed methods research project which revisits datasets from different eras, which were originally instigated for different purposes and had different theoretical frameworks. Using selected results about the relationship between teenagers’ vocational aspirations and adult occupations we show how the research topic and question integrated the projects within a constructivist theoretical position. We argue that reanalysing and comparing historical datasets can provide new insights into a topic even with minimal integration of the data. We recommend a broad definition of integration and reflexive research practice to encourage innovation and diversity in mixed methods research, particularly with regard to reanalysis of datasets from different eras.