Metaphors and Methods

It is widely understood that the development of a teacher identity for individuals transitioning into teaching is important, and therefore substantial research has been produced looking at teacher identity development. Much of this research is conducted using the possible selves theory as its framework. Nevertheless, with the self and identity being widely interpreted concepts with no consentaneous definition, researchers lean on metaphorical language at times to semantically represent the meaning of the future selves. This chapter reviews contemporary literature, discussing how different metaphors used to talk about the self, influence the methodological choices made within the study. Different types of metaphors used led to a heavier emphasis on either the integrative, temporal, or dynamic nature of the possible selves theory.

Employing Self-Study Research Across the Curriculum

Self-study is a research methodology focused on improvement of teacher education practice and exploring personal, practical, and professional transformation by the practitioner. Utilizing many qualitative methods, this interactive and often collaborative form of inquiry is well suited to study curriculum, considered broadly, as both the written and enacted, and all impacts of this curriculum. This chapter discusses the use of self-study in teachers' inquiries into curriculum. It presents the background and theoretical underpinnings of self-study research showing how this research genre emerged out of teacher practice and is rooted in the notion of teacher as curriculum maker. Guidance for forming research design is outlined, as well as various questions and topics for which self-study of curricula is well suited. Specific examples are expanded to include rationales for methodological choices and demonstrate how this research has been carried out in real-life practical situations.

Towards harmonization of DNA metabarcoding for monitoring marine macrobenthos: the effect of technical replicates and pooled DNA extractions on species detection

DNA-based monitoring methods are potentially faster and cheaper compared to traditional morphological benthic identification. DNA metabarcoding involves various methodological choices which can introduce bias leading to a different outcome in biodiversity patterns. Therefore, it is important to harmonize DNA metabarcoding protocols to allow comparison across studies and this requires a good understanding of the effect of methodological choices on diversity estimates. This study investigated the impact of DNA and PCR replicates on the detection of macrobenthos species in locations with high, medium and low diversity. Our results show that two to three DNA replicates were needed in locations with a high and medium diversity to detect at least 80% of the species found in the six DNA replicates, while three to four replicates were needed in the location with low diversity. In contrast to general belief, larger body size or higher abundance of the species in a sample did not increase its detection prevalence among DNA replicates. However, rare species were less consistently detected across all DNA replicates of the location with high diversity compared to locations with less diversity. Our results further show that pooling of DNA replicates did not significantly alter diversity patterns, although a small number of rare species was lost. Finally, our results confirm high variation in species detection between PCR replicates, especially for the detection of rare species. These results contribute to create reliable, time and cost efficient metabarcoding protocols for the characterization of macrobenthos.

Relacja, zobowiązanie, współpraca. Założenia i wyzwania badań etnograficznych wśród osób niewidomych

The article presents the main assumptions and conditions of collaboration between the author and the vision-impaired research participants over several years of ethnographic research (2011–2017). Adopting the perspective of philosophy of dialogue, the author follows different stages of rapport, focusing on mutual expectations and emotions, as well as relationship dynamics and its underlying conditions in general. The author’s long-term research was inspired by concepts developed by Luke Lassiter in his collaborative ethnography and by Anna Wyka in her social research through shared experience, both of which marked the author’s ethical and methodological choices, including invitation extended to research participants to comment on the research findings. The second part of the article is based on research participants’ impressions and reflections on their role, engagement and relationship with the researcher.

A framework for improving understanding of volunteers' motivations to monitor and control invasive alien species

Citizens make an important contribution to the study and management of biological invasions, as many monitoring and control projects rely heavily on volunteer assistance. Understanding the reasons why people participate in such projects is critical for successful recruitment and retention of volunteers. While research attention for this topic is growing, it is published in journals from different disciplines. We used a meta-synthesis approach to extract, analyze and synthesize the available information from 28 selected studies investigating motivations of volunteers to engage in monitoring and control of invasive alien species (IAS). Our findings show how motivations fit three broad themes, reflecting environmental concerns, social motivations, and personal reasons. An important outcome of this study is the description of motivations that are unique to the IAS context: supporting IAS management, protecting native species and habitats, and livelihood/food/income protection or opportunities. In addition, our study reflects on important methodological choices for investigating volunteer motivations as well as ethical issues that may arise in practice. We conclude with a set of recommendations for project design and future research on volunteer motivations in IAS contexts, emphasizing the importance of collaboration with social scientists.

Methodological recommendations for assessing scleractinian and octocoral recruitment to settlement tiles

Quantifying recruitment of corals is important for evaluating their capacity to recover after disturbances through natural processes, yet measuring recruitment rates in situ is challenging due to the minute size of the study organism and the complexity of benthic communities. Settlement tiles are widely used in studies of coral recruitment because they can be viewed under a microscope to enhance accuracy, but methodological choices such as the rugosity of tiles used and when and how to scan tiles for recruits post-collection may cause inconsistencies in measured recruitment rates. We deployed 2,880 tiles with matching rugosity on top and bottom surfaces to 30 sites along the Florida Reef Tract for year-long saturations during a three year study. We scanned the top and bottom surfaces of the same tiles for scleractinian recruits before (live scans) and after treating tiles with sodium hypochlorite (corallite scans). Recruit counts were higher in corallite than live scans, indicating that scleractinian recruitment rates should not be directly compared between studies using live scans and those scanning tiles which have been processed to remove fouling material. Recruit counts also were higher on tile tops in general, but the proportion of settlement to the top and bottom surfaces varied significantly by scleractinian family. Thus, biases may be introduced in recruitment datasets by differences in tile rugosity or by only scanning a subset of tile surfaces. Finally, we quantified octocoral recruitment during live scans and found they preferentially settled to tile tops. We recommend that recruitment tile studies include corallite scans for scleractinian skeletons, deploy tiles with matching rugosity on top and bottom surfaces, and scan all tile surfaces.

Why is the city's responsibility for its air pollution often underestimated? A focus on PM_2.5

While the burden caused by air pollution in urban areas is well documented, the origin of this pollution and therefore the responsibility of the urban areas in generating this pollution are still a subject of scientific discussion. Source apportionment represents a useful technique to quantify the city's responsibility, but the approaches and applications are not harmonized and therefore not comparable, resulting in confusing and sometimes contradicting interpretations. In this work, we analyse how different source apportionment approaches apply to the urban scale and how their building elements and parameters are defined and set. We discuss in particular the options available in terms of indicator, receptor, source, and methodology. We show that different choices for these options lead to very large differences in terms of outcome. For the 150 large EU cities selected in our study, different choices made for the indicator, the receptor, and the source each lead to an average difference of a factor of 2 in terms of city contribution. We also show that temporal- and spatial-averaging processes applied to the air quality indicator, especially when diverging source apportionments are aggregated into a single number, lead to the favouring of strategies that target background sources while occulting actions that would be efficient in the city centre. We stress that methodological choices and assumptions most often lead to a systematic and important underestimation of the city's responsibility, with important implications. Indeed, if cities are seen as a minor actor, plans will target the background as a priority at the expense of potentially effective local actions.

A Six-Step Model for Developing Competency Frameworks in the Healthcare Professions

Competency frameworks are developed for a variety of purposes, including describing professional practice and informing education and assessment frameworks. Despite the volume of competency frameworks developed in the healthcare professions, guidance remains unclear and is inconsistently adhered to (perhaps in part due to a lack of organizing frameworks), there is variability in methodological choices, inconsistently reported outputs, and a lack of evaluation of frameworks. As such, we proposed the need for improved guidance. In this paper, we outline a six-step model for developing competency frameworks that is designed to address some of these shortcomings. The six-steps comprise [1] identifying purpose, intended uses, scope, and stakeholders; [2] theoretically informed ways of identifying the contexts of complex, “real-world” professional practice, which includes [3] aligned methods and means by which practice can be explored; [4] the identification and specification of competencies required for professional practice, [5] how to report the process and outputs of identifying such competencies, and [6] built-in strategies to continuously evaluate, update and maintain competency framework development processes and outputs. The model synthesizes and organizes existing guidance and literature, and furthers this existing guidance by highlighting the need for a theoretically-informed approach to describing and exploring practice that is appropriate, as well as offering guidance for developers on reporting the development process and outputs, and planning for the ongoing maintenance of frameworks.

Frequency, informativity and word length: Insights from typologically diverse corpora

Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which posits a negative correlation between word frequency and length, is one of the most famous and robust cross-linguistic generalizations. At the same time, it has been shown that contextual informativity (average surprisal given previous context) can be more strongly correlated with word length, although this tendency is not observed consistently, depending on several methodological choices. The present study, which examines a more diverse sample of languages than in the previous studies (Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish), reveals intriguing cross-linguistic differences, which can be explained by typological properties of the languages. I use large web-based corpora from the Leipzig Corpora Collection to estimate word lengths in UTF-8 characters, as well as word frequency, informativity given previous word and informativity given next word, applying different methods of bigrams processing. The results show consistent cross-linguistic differences in the size of correlations between word length and the corpus-based measures. I argue that these differences can be explained by the properties of noun phrases in a language, most importantly, the order of heads and modifiers and their relative morphological complexity, as well as by orthographic conventions.

Comparing Rates of Sexual Assault Between Panel Quota and Social Media Samples: Findings Across Sexual Orientation Categories

Sexual assault is prevalent and may be even more prevalent among sexual minorities. However, prevalence rates vary, in part, due to discrepancies in sampling methods. Given this, we assessed whether two popular non-probability sampling types (panel quota vs. social media recruitment) produced different sexual assault prevalence rates when holding all other methodological choices (definitions, measures, scoring) constant in a sample of lesbian, bisexual, queer, and heterosexual adults, excluding cisgender men. Two phases of data collection occurred—a panel quota sample ( n = 1366), recruited from an online sample aggregator, and social media sample ( n = 1102), recruited through lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social media sites. Participants were asked about sexual assault and rape experiences in both childhood and adulthood using a modified form of the Sexual Experiences Scale-Short Form Victimization. Both phases used the same definitions of sexual assault, prevalence measures, and prevalence scoring. Overall, the sample recruited via LGBTQ social media yielded statistically higher sexual assault prevalence rates for all four types of victimization experiences measured: lifetime sexual assault (LSA), rape-specific LSA, childhood sexual assault (CSA), and adulthood sexual assault. However, when parsing out subgroups, this finding only held for heterosexual participants who had rates > 30% higher in the social media sample compared with the panel quota sample. These findings suggest that researchers studying sexual assault in lesbian, bisexual, or queer adults may be able to use social media sampling techniques, which require less resources, without concern that the sampling technique is inflating prevalence when compared to panels.