Category / Publishing

Congratulations to BU Visiting Faculty on latest publication

Congratulations to Bournemouth University’s Visiting Faculty Dr. Bibha Simkhada and Prof. Padam Simkhada for the paper on financial barriers to the uptake of antenatal care in a rural community in Nepal.1   The first author (a native Nepali-speaker) conducted 50 face-to-face interviews with women and their families in rural Nepal.  These interviews were thematically analysed after transcription.

This latest paper adds to our knowledge into user costs related to maternity services in Nepal as we had already published our findings on users costs in the largest obstetric hospital in the capital. 2

 

Professor Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

References:

  1. Simkhada, B., van Teijlingen, E.R., Porter, M., Simkhada, P. & Wasti, S.P. (2014) Why do costs act as a barrier in maternity care for some, but not all women? A qualitative study in rural Nepal International Journal of Social Economics 41 (8), 705-713

 

  1. Simkhada, P.P., van Teijlingen, E., Sharma, G., Simkhada, B., Townend, J. (2012) User costs and informal payments for care in the largest maternity hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, Health Science Journal 6(2): 317-334.  www.hsj.gr/volume6/issue2/6212.pdf

 

Congratulations to Dr. William Haydock

 

Congratulations to William Haydock, researcher in HSC, for his recently published paper in Capital & Class 38 (3): 583-600

The paper “‘20 tins of Stella for a fiver’: The making of class through Labour and Coalition government alcohol policy” is available from: http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/38/3/583.abstract

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Beware of rogue journals.

Open Access: not every new journal is rogue!

Open Access publishing is the hot topic in academic publishing.  It comes from the idea that publicly funded research used to end up in expensive journals which are difficult to access and which are expensive to users.  It also made for real ivory tower research and it did not give the general public, often the funder of research through taxation or charity access to the studies which they ‘paid’ for in the first instance.   The success shows in (a) the rising Impact Factors of online Open Access journals, such as, for example BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth; (b) the requirement for the UK funding bodies that all research its funds needs to be published as Open Access by 2016; and (c) the growing number of traditional academic journals that now offer authors the option to pay for online Open Access in addition to the traditional paper-based journal publication, for example Midwifery.  Two further signs of success are:  (d) the growing popularity of Open Access Week, this month (20-26 Oct.) we celebrate for the 7th time Open Access Week ( http://www.openaccessweek.org/); and (e) the growing number of rogue journals trying to cash in on the Open Access trend.

 

The latter is the ugly face of capitalism whereby opportunists, i.e. unscrupulous publishers jump on the bandwagon cashing in on a successful service.  BU librarian Jean Harris recently shared an interesting article about Predatory Publishers (see: www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/blog/are-we-doing-enough-warn-users-about-predatory-journals?utm_source=Communicator_membership_list&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=Untitled21&utm_campaign=Weekly+News+from+CILIP%2c+18+Sept+2014).   Predatory publishers create a convincing looking scientific journal on the web, often borrowing details from other journals. They then email academics and researchers for both manuscripts and the offer to sit on the journal’s editorial board.  Submissions are then “peer reviewed” and an invoice for Open Access publishing emailed by return. No submission is rejected!  Many of us will have received such spam emails.

The message is not the fall for the scam.  Prospective authors should check the webpages of the journal (although some fake ones can be convincing).  Talk to more experienced colleagues in your field or your librarian to find out what they know about the ‘new’ journal, do they know someone on the editorial board.   Is the journal listed in reputable electronic databases such as SCOPUS?  Please, do not rely on information from Google on the journal you are trying to suss out!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

 

 

eBU – helping to develop academic papers for the new academic year

With the new academic year about to go into full swing, I’m sure everyone has many papers planned for the year ahead.

In the last 14 months eBU: Online Journal has a build up a steady track record of helping early career academics and more established scholars to gain feedback on their work before submitting to external journals. In fact, not only does eBU have a track record in helping academics gain feedback, but BU academics are using eBU feedback to help them publish in external journals.

From immediate publication to open peer review in a safe internal environment in weeks instead of months, eBU is ideally placed to help early career and established academics to break through the barriers that stand in the way of publication – surely you’d be foolish not to consider using eBU for your next paper!

Sport Management Researcher and Students Create Impact on International Field

Last weekend, Dr Tim Breitbarth (Senior Lecturer in Sport Management) and MSc Sport Management students Lisa Kaisner, Manuel Perez Vehi, Chih-Heng Kwan and Junbeom Kim returned from their 8-day trip attending the 22nd European Association for Sport Management (EASM) Conference, EASM Masters Seminar and EASM PhD Student Seminar. Following various successes at the 21st EASM conference in Istanbul last year, the BU travel party again made strong contributions to this leading international sport management conference.

Together with 60 students from around the globe, the students worked in mixed groups on three different sport marketing cases and had to present their findings and plans in front of a critical jury over the period of 4 days before the main conference. Lisa and her team won the case competition on the Olympic legacy of the Coventry Ricoh Arena and, therefor, were invited to present at the main conference. Feedback from the students on the Masters Seminar in particular was largely positive – especially in terms of networking, making new friends, learn from one another and visiting sport venues/matches like the Rugby School and the season opening of the Leicester Tigers.

 

Invited Keynote and Conference Workshop Convener

Besides tutoring at the Masters Seminar, Dr Tim Breitbarth was invited to provide a keynote at the PhD Student Seminar titled “Book or articles? Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the form of your PhD thesis”. His contribution was very well received and awarded during the conference dinner. He also mentored three PhD researchers from Belgium, South Africa and Mexico at the Seminar and gave advise on their research.

At the main conference, Tim together with his small international team organized and convened a workshop on corporate social responsibility in and through sport. Again, the workshop was the second most popular in terms of submissions and all five sessions attracted a great audience. The academic workshop was spiced-up by inviting Nico Briskorn (Head of CSR at German professional football club VFL Wolfsburg) and Chris Grant (CEO, Sported Foundation – the London 2012 charity legacy) to contribute their expert insights into the application of CSR and sport.

 

Highly Cited Paper and Special Issue Editor

The relevance of the topic is also manifested by the fact that the paper “The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility in the Football Business: Towards the Development of a Conceptual Model” by Tim Breitbarth and Phil Harris from 2008 published in European Sport Management Quarterly (second highest ranked sport management journal in the world) has been the journal’s most cited article over the past 3 years. Also, Tim is the lead editor of the Special Issue “Governance and CSR Management in Sport” in ‘Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society’ which will be published early/mid 2015.

In addition, Tim presented two research papers, one of which based on an awarded Bachelor dissertation by last year’s graduate David Thomas whom he supervised.

In general, despite being a rather small party at a 500+ delegates conference, the BU team created awareness for our sport programs in particular and Bournemouth in general. Travelling Masters students were somewhat lukewarm about the practical value of the main conference (e.g. as a means to find a job), but overall enjoyed the experience and talking to experts from various fields. Several visits from renown (inter-)national scholars, academics from partner universities and PhD students are already in planning for 2015.

Please contact Dr Tim Breitbarth at tbreitbarth@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

F.l.t.r.: Lisa Kaisner, Chih-Heng Kwan, Manuel Perez Vehi, Tim Breitbarth

F.l.t.r.: Nico Briskorn (VFL Wolfsburg), Christos Anagnostopoulus (Co-Convenor, University of Central Lancashire), Frank van Eekeren (Co-Convenor, Utrecht University), Tim Breitbarth (Lead-Convenor, Bournemouth University), Wojtek Kulczycki (Technische Universität München), Chris Grant (Sported Foundations), Stefan Walzel (Co-Convenor, German Sport University Cologne)

Group of Masters students at Rugby School

Say it once, say it right: Seven strategies to improve your academic writing (Patrick Dunleavy)

Whether writing a research article or a grant proposal, it can be difficult to pinpoint the sections and areas that need further improvement. It is useful to have a set of tactics on hand to address the work. Patrick Dunleavy outlines seven upgrade strategies for a problematic article or chapter: Do one thing well. Flatten the structure. Say it once, say it right. Try paragraph re-planning. Make the motivation clearer. Strengthen the argument tokens. Improve the data and exhibits.

I guess every researcher and academic writer has often faced the task of trying to upgrade a piece of work that just will not come out right. Sometimes it’s clear what the problem is, and colleagues, friends or supervisors who read the article or chapter can make concrete suggestions for change. But often it’s not so clear-cut. Readers are cordial but obviously unenthused. There’s nothing massively wrong, but the piece feels thin or unconvincing in some diffuse way.

Sometimes too the problem occurs well before you want anyone else to read your text. If it is a one-off piece of research then maybe it can just be filed for later reconsideration. But often the research plan in a grant bid, or the book contents page crafted a year ago, or the PhD structure devised two or more years ago, mean that an article or chapter just has to get done. Here an unsatisfactory first draft is not just much less than you’d hoped for at the distant planning stage, but instead a depressing roadblock to completing a whole, long-term project.

At times like these it is handy to have a set of standard things to try to improve matters — familiar strategies that you can frequently use, deploying them quickly because you’re deliberately not treating each article or chapter as sui generis or unique. Everyone has their own moves for coping with the upgrade task. Here are my top seven, in hopes that some of them work for you.

1. Do one thing well. Many writing problems stem from trying to do too much within the same few pages, causing texts to inflate beyond journal length limits (often fatal for passing review), or just introducing ‘confuser’ themes that referees love to jump on. ‘I’m not clear if the author is advocating X, or trying to do Y’. Keeping it simple (within well defended boundaries) makes things clearer, so long as your paper is also substantive i.e don’t go from this point to try and ‘salami slice’ a given piece of research across multiple journal articles. A nice blog by Pat Thomson puts this point alongside other common mistakes.

2. Flatten the structure. All articles in social science should be 8,000 words or less and most chapters are similar or verge up to 10,000 words. Given the attention span of serious, research readers, you need a sub-heading about every 2,000 words or so — that’s just four or five main sub-headings in total. They should all be first-order sub-heads, at the same level, and preferably dividing the text up into similar-sized chunks, that come in a predictable way and have a common rhythm. If you have two or three tiers of sub-headings in a hierarchy, make it simpler.

In other fields, length limits are much less — e.g. just 3,000 words for medical journal articles. So the numbers of subheadings needed here will be correspondingly reduced. Each of your section headings should be substantive (not just formal, conventional, vacuous or interogative). Ideally they should give readers a logically sequenced set of narrative cues, about what you did, and what you have found out. You can add a short Conclusions section with its own smaller kind of heading. Also, never label the beginning bit of text ‘Introduction’ — this is already blindingly obvious.

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Image credit: Nic McPhee (Flickr, CC BY-SA)

Many structural problems and inaccessible text are caused by people using outliner software to create overly hierarchized sets of headings at multiple levels, made worse still by adding complex numbering systems (e.g section 2.1.4.3) to ‘help’ readers. At an extreme, an analytic over-fragmentation of the text results, with sections, sub-sections and sub-sub sections proliferating in bizarre complexity. The text can become like the traditional British tinned desert called ‘fruit cocktail’, which contains many different kinds of fruit, but all in small cubes and smothered in a syrup so thick that you cannot taste at all what any component is.

The writing coach, Thomas Basboll, shrewdly remarked that :

A well-written journal article will present a single, easily identifiable claim; it will show that something is the case… The [typical academic] article will consist of roughly 40 paragraphs. Five of them will provide the introductory and concluding remarks. Five of them will establish a general, human background. Five of them will state the theory that informs the analysis. Five of them will state the method by which the data was gathered. The analysis (or “results” section) will make roughly three overarching claims (that support the main thesis) in three five-paragraph sections. The implications of the research will be outlined in five paragraphs. These are ball-park figures, not hard and fast rules, but “knowing” something for academic purposes means being able to articulate yourself in roughly these proportions.

3. Say it once, say it right. Nothing is so corrosive of readers’ confidence in a writer than repeating things. Academic readers are not like soap opera fans — they do not need a thing previewed, then actually said, then resaid, and then summarized. So it a bad idea to take one decent point and fragment it across your text in little bits. If your current structure is forcing you to do this, recast it to make this problem go away.

Simple, big block structures are generally best. Complex structures, with points developed recursively on in frequent discrete iterations, are easier to mess up. Close to every nuance of your own argument, you may well feel that you are thematically advancing, embroidering and extending your arguments each time you come back to a linked point. But readers will just see repetition. So, say each point once— and say it right first time.

This motto also has resonance at the micro-level. Fellow scientists or academics normally do not need points to be so hammered home that every tiny scintilla of meaning has been triple-locked in case some doubt remains. This way lies turgid prose. (As Voltaire shrewdly remarked: ‘The secret of being a bore is to say everything’).

4. Try paragraph re-planning, as discussed in my separate blogpost. This is a great technique for really helping you understand what you have done/got in the existing draft of your article or chapter. Rachael Cayley has a similar approach, which she calls ‘reverse outlining’. The core idea is to start with your finished text and then to resurface a detailed, paragraph-by-paragraph structure from that. Looking at this synoptic view of your whole text, you should find it easier to come up with an alternative Plan B sequence for your text. Unless you are a genius writer already, re-modelling text is an inescapable burden at multiple stages of securing acceptance by a journal.

5. Make the motivation clearer. Give readers a stronger sense of why the research has been done, why the topic is salient and how the findings illuminate important problems. Researchers who live with their topic over months and years often lose track of why they started, why they shaped the study as they did, and what the significance of their findings is for a larger audience. If a text is not working, or not quite working, the author is often too close-up to the detail of the findings, too convinced that the study could only have been done this way and that its importance is ‘obvious’. Being unable to write an effective conclusion is a good ‘tell’ for this problem — an apparently separate symptom that is actually closely linked.

Trying to achieve a high impact start for an article (or a clean, forward-looking beginning to each chapter in a book or PhD) can help readers to better appreciate a motive for reading on. A quick start usually helps readers commit to learning more.

6. Strengthen the argument tokens. At research level every paragraph draws on ‘tokens’ to sustain the case being made — which might be literature citations, supportive quotations, empirical evidence, or systematic data presented in charts or tables (see point 7). On citations, quotes or evidence it is usually worthwhile to ask if your search and presentation could be made more convincing — for instance, by multiplying references, showing evidence of systematic and inclusive search, more methodical evidence-gathering, or simply updating and refreshing a literature search that is now a little dated. People often do a literature search at an early stage of their research, when they only understand their topic rather poorly — but then neglect to do a ‘top up’ search just before submission, when they are likely to be much better at recognizing material that is relevant.

7. Improve the data and exhibits. This works at two levels. First, at an overall level it is important to design effective exhibits that display in a consistent way and follow good design principles. Second, at the level of each chart, table or diagram, make sure you provide full and accurate labelling of what is being shown, and that the data being reported are in a form that will matter to readers — not ‘dead on arrival’.

This post has been taken from LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog and is available from this linkThis piece was originally published on the Writing For Research blog and is reposted with the author’s permission.

To follow up these ideas in more detail see this book: Patrick Dunleavy, ‘Authoring a PhD’ (Palgrave, 2003) or the Kindle edition, where Chapter 5 covers ‘Writing clearly’ and Chapter 6 ‘Developing as a Writer’.

There is also very useful advice on Rachael Cayley’s blog Explorations of Style and on Thomas Bassboll’s blog ‘Research as a second language’.

September: A good month for CMMPH publications

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health started well this September with four publications in academic and practitioners’ journal.  Starting with final-year student midwife Joanna Lake who just had an article published in The Practising Midwife.1

Secondly, BU midwifery staff Jen Leamon and Sue Way together with HSC Visiting Fellow Suzie Cro also have had an article published this month in the same journal.2

Susanne Grylka-Baeschlin, a midwife from Switzerland who spent time at BU as an international visitor (see http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/07/02/latest-hsc-midwifery-paper-in-open-access/) had her paper published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth this month.3

And last, but not least, Wendy Marsh, based in HSC’s Portsmouth office had a paper in the September issue of the British Journal of Midwifery.4

 

Congratulations,

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

 

References:

  1. Lake J., 2014. Witnessing the art of woman-centred care by and exceptional mentor. The Practicing Midwife. 17(8), 24-26.
  2. Leamon J, Way S. & Cro S., 2014. Supervision of midwives and the 6Cs: exploring how we do what we do. The Practicing Midwife. 17(8), 41-42.
  3. Grylka-Baeschlin  S., van Teijlingen,  E. & Mechthild, G.M., 2014. Cultural differences in postnatal quality of life among German-speaking women: a prospective survey in two countries. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 14:277    www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2393/14/277
  4. Marsh, W. 2014. Removing babies from mother’s at birth: Midwives experiences. British Journal of Midwifery. 22(9):620 – 624.

BU research is ‘Editor’s Choice’ in Journal of Consumer Culture

An article by researchers in the Emerging Consumer Cultures Group (ECCG), Media School, has been selected as one of the ‘Editor’s Choice Collection’ in the Journal of Consumer Culture – a top ranked journal in Cultural Studies and Sociology.  The article is highlighted as one of eleven ‘most noteworthy manuscripts’ since the journal launched in 2001 and has been selected alongside the work of internationally esteemed scholars including Daniel Miller, Richard Wilk and Alan Warde.

Dr Rebecca (Becky) Jenkins (Corporate and Marketing Communications, Media School) and ex-Bournemouth colleagues Elizabeth Nixon and Mike Molesworth first presented the paper at the 2010 Consumer Culture Theory Conference in Wisconsin, where it was selected to be published in a special edition of the journal.  Several revisions later and the article was published in 2011.

‘“Just normal and homely”: the presence, absence and othering of consumer culture in everyday imagining’ is based on an aspect of Becky’s PhD thesis, which was a larger study of consumption in the everyday imagination.  It focuses on the different ways in which consumption features in positive imagined futures.  By broadening the methodological framing of existing studies, the study seeks to contextualise consumption in the imagination – exploring how and where consumption may be seen in everyday imagining – a departure from previous research which tends to make consumption the starting point.  Focusing on the lived experience of imagining (using phenomenological interviews) the findings reveal that material goods take a back seat to common cultural desires (for instance, successful relationships, happiness and love) with goods often assumed, simply as part of the background.  Although goods may take a back seat, consumer culture is shown to be the only real choice when it comes to constructing social relationships and cultural ideals – that is, whilst one may desire and imagine a happy family life, that life takes place in a certain kind of house, with particular goods and consumer based activities.  So whilst not always focusing on it directly, the imagination may be restricted by our consumer culture such that we cannot imagine outside it.

The full paper – and others in the Editor’s Collection – can be  downloaded here: http://joc.sagepub.com/cgi/collection/editors_choice_collection

Open Access Salons! – Phil Ward

In June Research Professional reported that Prof Adam Tickell, successor to Dame Janet Finch, will be holding a series of salons to discuss Open Access.

Open Access salons! What a great idea.

A hairdressing salon. A row of women sit under hard hat dryers along the back wall, flicking through out of date copies of Grazia magazine. At the front a stylist fusses around a client in front of a large mirror.The bell on the door tinkles as a woman enters. Everyone turns to look at her.

STYLIST: Can I help you, love?
WOMAN (nervously): Yes, I was wanting a quick trim..?
STYLIST: Open Access, is it?
WOMAN: Pardon?
STYLIST: Do you want your haircut to be Open Access?
WOMAN: I don’t really understand…
STYLIST: Do you want your hair to be freely viewed by members of the public? Or do you want to wear this over your head?

She holds up a paper bag.

You’ll only be allowed to take it off if people pay to view it, or have bought a general subscription to my salon. Could get quite complicated.
WOMAN: But that’s crazy!
STYLIST: I’m just allowing others to benefit from this salon whilst protecting my business. It’s a tough world out there. It’s not as easy to make money out of hairdressing these days, you know.
WOMAN (patting her hair, and looking at the women at the back): Well, I guess I don’t really have a choice, do I? If I want others to see my hair.
STYLIST: You’ve made the right choice, love. Right then: if you want it to be Open Access, you’ll have to pay me a Hair Processing Charge, in addition to any other money I might get from you.
WOMAN: How much is that?
STYLIST: It varies. Averages about a thousand pounds.
WOMAN: A thousand pounds! But that’s outrageous!
STYLIST: It’s actually very good value. There’s a huge amount of unseen work involved in haircutting. Of course, we do offer a discount for pre-payment. If you buy 10 haircuts up front, we’ll give you a 20% reduction.
WOMAN: But still that’s £800!
STYLIST: Take it or leave it. You could go for the green option, of course.
WOMAN: What’s that?
STYLIST: You submit your hair to your local wig shop. However, it can’t be the final version. It might include bits I’ve missed, and won’t include any final changes we might make.
WOMAN: So my option is to have an incomplete haircut and put it on display in a wig shop, or pay a grand so that other people can look at it?
STYLIST: Essentially yes. Alternatively you could opt not to go Open Access. But then you will have to wear the paper bag.
WOMAN: But…but…
STYLIST: Look, love, it’s for your benefit! We need to protect your reputation and uphold the esteem and profile of this salon. And think what Open Access hair will do for you: More people will see your hairstyle, and will mention it to others. And people from the poor parts of town will be able to freely look at your hair.
WOMAN: And…and what if the people who see my hair decide they don’t like it? What if they disagree with my choices?
STYLIST: Well, if they make a good case we might have to retract it.
WOMAN: Retract it?
STYLIST: Yes. We might say we no longer agree with the hair and the underlying decisions which informed it. We might even decide to glue back any hair we’ve removed to restore the cut to its previous state. And I’ll put an apology note in the window.
WOMAN: This is ridiculous! I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want a trim any more.

She storms out of the salon.

STYLIST: I don’t know. No pleasing some people. (She returns to the client in the chair). So what style do you want, my love? A David Sweeney, you say? Right you are.

Written by Phil Ward, Deputy Director, Research Services, University of Kent.

Educational Research Workshop and ‘Drop-In’ times in CEL

To launch the new cross-BU educational research group, a workshop will be held in the new Centre for Excellence in Learning space (PG30a) on Thursday October 2nd, from 9.30 to 12.30.

The session will firstly offer an overview of educational research journals and conferences, funding opportunities and REF criteria (including the provisional BU strategy for entering the education UoA). Secondly, participants will have the opportunity to work together to share research, ideas and / or plans, with the aim of generating some collaborative approaches.

Please come along if you have educational research to share, are starting out in educational research, need advice on getting started or are just interested. There will be no obligation to join the research group.

In addition, I will be basing myself in the CEL space for people to ‘drop in’ and chat about educational research one Friday a month. The next one is Friday October 31st (10 – 3).

Once the group is established, further meetings and workshops will be arranged through CEL.

For some context / detail, have a look at this provisional overview and strategy Education UoA position paper  and / or contact me – julian@cemp.ac.uk

 

 

Going to America? Open Access Conference Funding for ECRs & Students

On the 15-17 November the Right to Research Coalition and SPARC will launch OpenCon, a new conference to support, connect, and catalyze student and early career researcher-led projects across Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data in Washington, DC.

The full cost of attendance for the majority of participants will be covered by travel scholarships provided through the generous support of sponsor organizations. However, application deadline is midnight PDT on Monday, August 25th.

All students and early career researchers with an interest in Open Access, Open Education and Open Data are encouraged to apply at www.opencon2014.org/apply. The application includes the ability to apply for a travel scholarship.

Further information on the conference can be found here – http://www.opencon2014.org/

If anyone is interested in applying, please liaise with me (Shelly Anne Stringer) by 9am Thursday (20th).

Surrogate mother producing faulty goods: commodification of childbirth

Over the weekend an interesting story appeared on the BBC news and in the Sunday papers.  The story goes that an Australian couple left a Thai surrogate mother with a baby who is genetically their child.  The reason for this abandonment is that the baby is not perfect.  If that is not bad enough the couple has taken the healthy twin sister of this baby back home to Australia.  Some newspapers reported that the Australian parents knew that the baby had Down’s syndrome from the fourth month of gestation onwards, but that they did not ask until the seventh month  – through the surrogacy agency – for selective abortion of the affected fetus.    The surrogate mother, Pattaramon Chanbua, says that the couple were told: (a) that she was carrying twins and (b) that one of the twins had Down’s syndrome as well as heart problems. The surrogate mother refused the intervention on the grounds of her Buddhist beliefs.

Surrogacy is often a commercial transaction e.g. in the USA, although such a ‘business contract’ is not legal in the UK (Ireland 2011) and some parts of Australia as widely reported in the media.  However, in this case the Australian couple had paid Pattaramon Chanbua (a mother of two) to grow and carry the baby for them. She told the BBC that she had engaged in the surrogacy deal to get money to pay for the education of her other children.

This case epitomises several aspects of life that are of interest to sociology: (a) the commodification and commercialization of life (and health); (b) inequality and exploitation; and (c) globalisation.  Commodification refers to the process by which something that was not originally bought and sold becomes a good or service, i.e. a commodity that is for sale.  As we become more modern and with economic progress/the rise of capitalism, more and more parts of our lives become commodified.  Modernisation changes society and its social institutions and organisations. Economic development is based on industrialisation, but is also strongly linked to urbanisation, mass education, occupational specialisation and communication development, which in turn are linked with still broader cultural and social changes (Inglehart 1997).

The second key issue sociologists are interested in is inequality and the link between poverty and poor health.  In a global perspective where we, people in high-income countries, or so-called developed countries exploit people in low-income countries (or Third World, developing countries or under-developed countries).

Thirdly, globalisation refers to the world becoming a smaller place, both in terms of physical travel as well as the way we perceive it (Simkhada & van Teijlingen 2009).  It takes us less time to travel to London, Paris, Kathmandu than it took our parents’ or grandparents’ generation, and at the same time the information about a disaster or a  human tragedy story such as this one in Thailand reaches us more or less instantaneously.  At the same time, modernisation and globalisation, particularly in many low-income societies, are contributing to rapid socio-cultural changes.

Surrogacy as commodification

Surrogacy is the commodification of a couple having a baby themselves.  Other social solutions from the past to the problem of not being able to conceive include: (a) having more than one wife, a solution for men in a patriarchal society; (b) for women sleeping with their husband’s brother, to increase the likelihood that the baby ‘looks like’ the husband; and (c) adopting someone else’s child.

We must remember that aspects of maternity care have always been commodified.  Rich British families in the nineteenth century would have been paying a wet nurse to breastfeed their babies and a nanny to look after their children whilst instant formula baby milk bought from a shop has been replacing breastmilk supplied by the baby’s mother for nearly a century.

We don’t think surrogacy is the interesting issue here, we should ask ourselves the more basic question ‘What makes us think that every birth and every baby is going to be perfect or even okay?’

One explanation is, of course, that we have seen a rapid decline in the number and the proportion of babies dying in high-income countries such as the UK over the past century and a half.  Women having better nutrition, fewer children, having one’s first child later (but not too much later), better sanitation, and improved obstetric care have all contributed to making childbirth safer now for both mother and baby than ever before in the history of humanity.   However, these changes have also affected our ways of thinking about childbirth (Mackenzie Bryers & van Teijlingen 2010).

Social scientists recognise a social model and a medical model of childbirth (van Teijlingen 2005; van Teijlingen & Ireland 2013).  The former sees childbirth as a physiological event in women’s lives.  Pregnant women need psycho-social support, but not necessarily high-technology interventions by doctors.    The medical model stresses that childbirth can be pathological, i.e. every pregnant woman is potentially at risk.  The medical model argues that every birth needs to be in hospital with high-technology screening equipment supervised by expert obstetricians.  In other words, pregnancy and childbirth are only safe in retrospect.  In terms of social changes, we have moved from a more social model to a more medical model in a society which is more risk averse.

 

 

Edwin van Teijlingen1 & Jillian Ireland2

  1. Professor of Reproductive Health Research, Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health, Bournemouth University.
  2. Visiting Faculty, Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health, Bournemouth University; Midwife & Supervisor of Midwives, RCM learning Rep. Poole NHS Hospitals Trust.

 

 

References:

Inglehart R. (1997). Modernisation and post modernisation: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Ireland, J. (2011) Reflections on surrogacy-using the Taylor model to understand and manage the emotions in clinical practice, Essentially Midirs, 2(9): 17-21.

Ireland, J., van Teijlingen, E. (2013) Normal birth: social-medical model, The Practising Midwife 16(11): 17-20.

MacKenzie Bryers, H., van Teijlingen, E. (2010) Risk, Theory, Social & Medical Models: a critical analysis of the concept of risk in maternity care, Midwifery 26(5): 488-496.

Simkhada, P.P., van Teijlingen, E. (2009) Health: a global perspective, In: Alder, B. et al. (Eds.) Psychology & Sociology Applied to Medicine (3rd edn.), Edinburgh: Elsevier: 158-159.

Teijlingen van, E. (2005) A critical analysis of the medical model as used in the study of pregnancy and childbirth, Sociological Research Online, 10(2) Web address: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/2/teijlingen.html

 

HSC student Jonny Branney’s main PhD findings published –

HSC PhD student Jonny Branney and his first supervisor Professor Alan Breen have had a paper published in the open-access online journal Chiropractic & Manual Therapies. It is entitled, “Does inter-vertebral range of motion increase after spinal manipulation? A prospective cohort study.” This is an important question in the field of manual therapy where the mechanisms behind the clinical effects of manual treatment are often poorly understood. This PhD aimed to shed some light on the mechanism of this particular therapy commonly utilised by chiropractors, physiotherapists, osteopaths and some doctors. It is hoped that improving our understanding of the mechanism will ultimately improve the targeting of spinal manipulation to those expected to benefit from it.

Please click on the link if you’d like to read the study:

http://www.chiromt.com/content/22/1/24

And email Jonny if you’d like to find out more!

jbranney@bournemouth.ac.uk

This PhD was funded by a grant from the European Chiropractors’ Union and Jonny is also very grateful to the BU Graduate School for a PGR Development Award and a Santander Mobility Award that allowed him to present his work at international conferences. His supervision team included Professor Jenni Bolton (AECC) and Dr Sarah Hean (HSC).

Want to know how you target high impact journals?

My Publishing Experience: Prof. Matthew Bennett

Wed 23rd July 12:30-14:00 Russell Cotes Museum, Bournemouth

On Wednesday 23rd July, Prof. Matthew Bennett will be hosting a Writing Academy lunchbyte session at the Russell Cotes Museum.

In this session, Matthew will talk about his personal publishing experience, his approaches to research and writing, how to develop a publication strategy and the challenges of working with colleagues and dealing with both reviewers and editors.  He will talk about all type of publishing from journal articles, to books via edited compilations.  Drawing on personal experience he will also focus on how you target high impact journals.   After the presentation, attendees are invited to stay and discuss the topic with the speaker over lunch.

To book a place on either of these workshops, please email staffdevelopment@bournemouth.ac.uk

If you have any questions relating to these sessions then please contact Shelly Anne Stringer

South Asian midwifery at ICM 2014

Photo from UNFPA Lao PDR

In early June I published a short overview of Bournemouth University’s contribution to the ICM (International Congress of Midwives) conference in Prague (Czech Republic) (see: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/06/05/cmmph-strong-presence-at-icm-conference/ ).  In addition we highlighted the Nepal contribution in a separate BU Research Blog (http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/06/03/46-sharma-s-sicuri-e-belizan-jm-van-teijlingen-e-simkhada-p-stephens-j-hundley-v-angell-c-getting-women-to-care-in-nepal-a-difference-in-difference-analysis-of-a-health-prom/ ).   Today a belated update of our presence at the Special Session on South Asian Midwifery at the ICM conference last month, as I just received photos from our friends at UNFPA Lao PDR.

South Asia posters at ICM conference (photo: UNFPA Lao PDR)

One of the speakers at the South Asian Midwifery session was our friend Kiran Bajracharya, president of the Midwifery Society of Nepal (MIDSON).  Several of our posters describing our work in Nepal were on display.  Bournemouth University friends were involved in the organisation of the event, such as Swedish midwife Malin Bogren and the editor of the newly launched midwifery journal Journal of Asian Midwifery, Dr. Rafat Jan. The session was concluded by another BU collaborator Petra the Hoope-Bender of Integrare.

Professor Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH