Suchergebnisse

De wetenschap lijkt tegenwoordig steeds meer te functioneren als een soort snelkookpan. De resultaten van onderzoek dienen liever gisteren dan vandaag beschikbaar te zijn. Onderzoekers zien zich in toenemende mate geconfronteerd met prestatie-indicatoren, rankings, impactfactoren en andere instrumenten die de productiviteit meetbaar moeten maken. Het is dus niet zo gek dat uit een recent nieuwsbericht (nos.nl/artikel/2152150) blijkt dat de grote meerderheid van universitair docenten een te hoge werkdruk ervaart en ondanks fysieke klachten tóch doorwerkt.

The Imitation Game as a 'tin opener': practice experiences with patients with an eating disorder and their therapists
In this article the Imitation Game is introduced as a new qualitative research method. The Imitation Game method allows for an investigation into the extent to which various social and cultural groups are able to develop insights into each other's lifeworld. I explain the procedure and application of the method on the basis of an example. The pilot study shows that the Imitation Game forms an interesting addition to the existing repertoire of qualitative research methods.

Methodological reflections on video observation
In various ways, the five research cases discussed in this volume show some characteristics of video observation as method: its intimate view on practices, the subtlety it allows in the analysis, and the variety in methodological elaboration and application. It brings us to discuss three methodological issues in the application of video observation: its presumed 'natural' character, the tensions between description, interpretation and intervention, and the extent to which ethical considerations are taken into account.

Inclusion and exclusion processes in community engagement do not take place in a vacuum, but are embedded in social, political and institutional contexts. To better capture the interplay between the individual agency of community participants and organizational structures in health research, we use a Bourdieusian framework. The notions of capital, habitus and field allow us to analyse how inclusion and exclusion of older persons in a Dutch healthcare research- and improvement programme are processually shaped overtime. The findings demonstrate that due to the influence of the medical and policy field, older persons with social, cultural and symbolic capital were included in target group panels. Frail older persons lacking these types of capital were often excluded. Despite the high amount of capital, the formally 'included' participants still experienced difficulties in engaging effectively in a medical research setting. We distinguish various strategies that older persons developed during the course of the programme to deal with this problem: (1) professionalization, (2) responsibilization, (3) pluralization, (4) opting out. Using these strategies older participants were able to incrementally change the medical field by shifting the focus to quality of life and welfare. We conclude that it is by definition impossible to 'exclude exclusion' at the start of care improvement programmes. It is only in the many pragmatic and mundane choices of 'doing participation' that more inclusive engagement can be realized.

Despite the "turn to values" in Public Administration, there is still a lack of empirical research in situ that investigates how various stakeholders in interaction develop strategies to deal with conflicting values over time. By using a new pragmatist approach, this article fills in this gap by investigating policy experiments in Dutch healthcare. The results show how professionals, citizens, and policymakers differently valued the worth of policy experiments, which manifested itself in multiple value conflicts. To deal with these conflicts, stakeholders adopted different strategies: colonization, compromising, prioritization, short-cutting, organizational enmeshing, and pilotification. The results show a shift from exclusive top-down strategies to inclusive multi-value strategies over time.

While recent science and technology studies literature focuses on "projectification" and its felt tensions for researchers, a surprising scarcity of empirical work addresses experiences at the "other end," such as funding bodies often held "responsible" for tensions encountered by researchers. Actors in funding bodies experience similar tensions, however. While projectification necessitates predictability and individual project objectives, research funding is also increasingly organized in networks promoting local experimentation. Moreover, funding bodies are part of a system of accountability in which investments are legitimized politically in often reductionist ways. We argue for the salience of more detailed empirical investigations into the work of funding bodies as they navigate these tensions. We apply a dramaturgical perspective to investigate the "staging work" of program committees responsible for the management of funded programs, identifying three forms of staging work: setting the scene, temporal narration, and signifying success. All come with discursive, material, and symbolic dimensions. We develop the notion "adaptive coherence" to show how the program committee sought to maintain the coherence of the overall program despite continuous risks of fragmentation due to projectification, local experimentation, and divergence in interests. "Adaptive coherence" proves productive in incorporating the temporal and spatial dimensions of staging work in networked contexts.

While recent science and technology studies literature focuses on "projectification" and its felt tensions for researchers, a surprising scarcity of empirical work addresses experiences at the "other end," such as funding bodies often held "responsible" for tensions encountered by researchers. Actors in funding bodies experience similar tensions, however. While projectification necessitates predictability and individual project objectives, research funding is also increasingly organized in networks promoting local experimentation. Moreover, funding bodies are part of a system of accountability in which investments are legitimized politically in often reductionist ways. We argue for the salience of more detailed empirical investigations into the work of funding bodies as they navigate these tensions. We apply a dramaturgical perspective to investigate the "staging work" of program committees responsible for the management of funded programs, identifying three forms of staging work: setting the scene, temporal narration, and signifying success. All come with discursive, material, and symbolic dimensions. We develop the notion "adaptive coherence" to show how the program committee sought to maintain the coherence of the overall program despite continuous risks of fragmentation due to projectification, local experimentation, and divergence in interests. "Adaptive coherence" proves productive in incorporating the temporal and spatial dimensions of staging work in networked contexts.

Researchers are increasingly expected to deliver "socially robust knowledge" that is not only scientifically reliable but also takes into account demands from societal actors. This article focuses on an empirical example where these additional criteria are explicitly organized into research settings. We investigate how the multiple "accountabilities" are managed in such "responsive research settings." This article provides an empirical account of such an organizational format: the Dutch Academic Collaborative Centres for Public Health. We present a cross-case analysis of four collaborative research projects conducted within this context. We build on (and extend) Miller's notion of "hybrid management." The article shows that the extended concept of hybrid management is useful to study the different accountabilities encountered in such settings. We analyze how the collaboration developed and which conflicts or dilemmas arose. We then focus on the different hybrid management strategies used in the collaboration. The empirical material shows how the different aspects of hybrid management feature in various configurations in the four projects. We highlight that hybrid management strategies may be used by different groups or at different moments, may reinforce or contradict each other, and may be more or less effective at different points in time.

While much research utilisation literature shows an increasing emphasis on the added value of structural partnerships, which should facilitate prolonged interactions between researchers, policy makers and professionals, the question of how such collaborative structures develop over time and what consequences that has in terms of collaboration is usually neglected. This paper offers an empirical analysis of a Dutch partnership format developed over a period of four years, based on two interview rounds conducted between 2007 and 2010, supplemented with document analysis and a focus group. It focuses on changing challenges and dilemmas in different development stages and outlines which strategies are used.

In recent years, the healthcare field welcomed an emerging field of practices captured under the umbrella term 'Big Data'. This term is surrounded with positive rhetoric and promises about the ability to analyse real-world data quickly and comprehensively. Such rhetoric is highly consequential in shaping debates on Big Data. While the fields of Science and Technology Studies and Critical Data Studies have been instrumental in elaborating the neglected and problematic dimensions of Big Data, it remains an open question how and to what extent such insights become embedded in other fields. In this paper, we analyse the epistemological claims that accompany Big Data in the healthcare domain. We systematically searched scientific literature and selected 206 editorials as these reflect on developments in the domain. Through an interpretive analysis, we construct five ideal-typical discourses that all frame Big Data in specific ways. Three of the discourses (the modernist, instrumentalist and pragmatist) frame Big Data in positive terms and disseminate a compelling rhetoric. Metaphors of 'capturing', 'illuminating' and 'harnessing' data presume that Big Data are benign and leading to valid knowledge. The scientist and critical-interpretive discourses question the objectivity and effectivity claims of Big Data. Metaphors of 'selecting' and 'constructing' data illustrate another political message, framing Big Data as limited. We conclude that work in the critical-interpretive discourse has not broadly infiltrated the medical domain. Ways to better integrate aspects of the discourse in the healthcare domain are urgently needed.

In recent years, citizen engagement in policy and research has gained considerable momentum. In the healthcare domain, patient narratives, through various mediums, have emerged as a valuable source of insight into the experiences of patients and the healthcare system. Recognizing the value of such textual data, diverse analytical methods have been developed, spanning from text mining to narrative analysis. This article presents experiments that combine computational methods, qualitative methods and citizen science for analyzing patients' stories. In this article, we reflect on two experiments in which we combined these approaches, which we analyze through a generative lens. We distinguish three main effects of the experiments: they provide a platform for discussions as a 'site of controversy'; they act as 'mediator', fostering new connections and mutual understanding among participants; and they serve as 'tin opener', stimulating substantive discussions about methodological development and substantive healthcare matters. Narrative reduction, which occurs when rich narrative data is simplified into structured quantifiable forms, is not inherently problematic; instead, it can be meaningful when combined with qualitative methods and citizen science, emphasizing the importance of utilizing diverse methods to balance authenticity and gaining broader insights. The study highlights the significance of collaborative sense-making and meaning-making in interdisciplinary research. Engaging patients, their relatives, and professionals in the analytical process, facilitated by tools like word clouds, promotes engaged discussions that yield actionable insights. Further development of such interdisciplinary approaches holds promise for a more nuanced understanding of patient experiences, fostering epistemological pluralism, and refining healthcare practices.