Slim just left town: decisionmaking on an intensive care unit

The title of this paper comes from an incident that occurred while I was participating in morning rounds on the pediatric and surgical intensive care unit of a large, midwest tertiary care center. The patient under discussion was an eight-week-old girl who had been born without kidneys, and who had been cared for on the unit for seven weeks. In the previous week, the baby's condition had gone steadily downhill, as she experienced on medical catastrophe after another. One of the nurses asked the staff doctor who was leading rounds that morning, "What are the baby's chances?" The physician replied, "Her chances are slim." To which one of the young residents immediately answered, "Slim just left town."     

Gender Differences in Self-Perceptions and Academic Outcomes: A Study of African American High School Students

There is increasing divergence in the academic outcomes of African American males and females. By most accounts, males are falling behind their female peers educationally as African American females are graduating from high schools at higher rates and are going on to college and graduate school in greater numbers. Some have suggested that school completion and performance is associated with how students feel about themselves. The purpose of this study was to explore gender differences in the relationship between self-perceptions and 2 academic outcomes among a sample of 243 African American high school sophomores. The results suggest that, overall, females are more favorably oriented toward high school completion. Both male and female students with more positive self-perceptions have stronger intentions to complete the current year of high school. Higher grade point averages were more strongly associated with greater self-efficacy for females than for males. Given these findings, increased attention to educational programming, societal messages, and future research is warranted.     

Integrating Rigor and Relevance in Public Administration Scholarship: The Contribution of Narrative Inquiry

A traditional view of scholarly quality defines rigor as the application of method and assumes an implicit connection with relevance. But as an applied field, public administration requires explicit attention to both rigor and relevance. Interpretive scholars' notions of rigor demand an explicit inclusion of relevance as an integral aspect of quality. As one form of interpretive research, narrative inquiry illuminates how this can be done. Appreciating this contribution requires a deeper knowledge of the logic of narrative inquiry, an acknowledgement of the diversity of narrative approaches, and attention to the implications for judging its quality. We use our story about community-based leadership research to develop and illustrate this argument.     

From Resettled Refugees to Humanitarian Actors: Refugee Diaspora Organizations and Everyday Humanitarianism

ABSTRACT

This article describes the everyday humanitarianism of refugees resettled in Australia who form small voluntary organizations to help “their people” displaced elsewhere in the world. The people involved in refugee diaspora organizations (RDOs) are animated by forces that reflect their distinct history, positionality, and relationship to the “suffering others” they help. What the everyday humanitarianism of RDOs suggests is that we live in a world of many-humanitarianisms, where there are different possibilities to care and connect to strangers in need. While “humanitarianism” has become synonymous with a set of dominant practices and actors, there is need for other actors – including refugee diaspora humanitarians – to be given space within both humanitarianism discourse and practice.     

Networks and problem recognition: advancing the Multiple Streams Approach

This paper responds to recent calls for more theoretically driven advancements of the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA). It does so by bringing networks theorizing into dialogue with the MSA; highlighting the inclusionary and exclusionary power of networks for determining problem frames and issue recognition. Subsequently, the paper argues that the addition of networks provides a clearer articulation of the role of institutions in steering problem stream processes, which have often been neglected within the MSA at the expense of a focus on agency. The paper puts forward two propositions. The first is that an issue is more likely to be recognised as a problem if it is considered compatible with the ‘appreciative system’ of the network's dominant coalition. The second proposition is that the more organisations a network consists of and the more varied these organisations are, the more likely it is that the dominant coalition alters a condition’s category if there are changes in the problem stream. These propositions are explored through a comparative analysis of recognition of quality of life as a problem in two local level transport sector networks in the UK. Support for these propositions in the findings suggest that the introduction of networks into the MSA can reduce ambiguity and therefore fortuity in relation to problem recognition; second, that the power of the policy entrepreneur can be facilitated or constrained by the institutional context; and third, that comparing multiple issues and their interactions is important for further advancement of the MSA.