Tagged / Health

My experiences of the undergraduate research assistantship

I’m an Occupational Therapy student at BU, just going into my third year.  This summer I have been working with HSS Impact Champion, Zoe Sheppard, on the endeavour to monitor and measure the impact of research.  This has involved exploring methods of dissemination, investigating the demonstration of impact, and working on two research impact case studies.  As a result I have come to understand the value of reciprocal public engagement, and learnt that some of the best impact examples don’t happen by chance, but are within reach and in our control. I have collated my findings into a toolkit which will hopefully support you to plan and pursue your own research impacts.

I have really enjoyed the opportunity to explore the difference research can make, and this has inspired me to think about my own post-graduate research options. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Zoe in particular, and everyone else who have been so supportive of me over the last few weeks.

Jo George

New publication by BU PhD student Jib Acharya

Jib paper India 2015

Congratulations to FHSS Ph.D. student Mr. Jib Acharya, whose paper ‘Study of nutritional problems in preschool aged children in Kaski District in Nepal’  has just been published in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Healthcare [1].  The academic paper, based on his Ph.D. thesis, reports on his mixed-methods Public Health study addressing attitudes and knowledge of mothers of young children (pre-school aged) in one particular district in Nepal.  The research comprises a quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups.   Jib Acharya, who is originally from Nepal, compares and contrasts the attitudes, knowledge and behaviour of poor rural and poor urban women (=mothers) in that district.   The research is supervised by Dr. Jane Murphy, Dr. Martin Hind and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.

SAM_3423

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Reference:

  1. Acharya, J., van Teijlingen, E., Murphy, J., Hind, M. (2015) Study of nutritional problems in preschool aged children in Kaski District in Nepal, Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Healthcare 1(2): 97-118.

Introducing Jo George, Undergraduate Research Assistant

Hello, I will be working within the Health and Social Sciences Faculty with Impact Champion, Zoe Sheppard, over the next six weeks on the endeavour to monitor and measure the impact of research.

My work will involve:

  • Exploring methods of dissemination
  • Conducting literature searches to investigate the demonstration of impact
  • Working on two research case studies from the Health and Social Social Sciences Faculty

I can be found in R613 and contacted at jgeorge@bournemouth.ac.uk if you have any ideas or challenges you’d like to discuss. I will be sharing my findings towards the end of my six weeks here.

I look forward to meeting you,

Jo

Birth paper cited one hundred times in Scopus

We have just been alerted that our paper has been cited for the hundredth time in Scopus. The paper ‘Maternity satisfaction studies and their limitations: “What is, must still be best’ was published in Birth. The paper originated from the Scottish Birth Study which we were both part of in our previous academic posts at the University of Aberdeen.

This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of satisfaction studies in the field of maternity care, including the issues that service users tend to value the status quo (i.e. What is must be best) . The implications are that innovations, of which users have no experience, may be rejected simply because they are unknown. The paper warns that problems may arise if satisfaction surveys are used to shape service provision. We advised that satisfaction surveys should be used with caution, and part of an array of tools. While involving service users is important in designing and organizing health services, there is still the risk that using satisfaction alone could end up promoting the status quo.

 

Professors Vanora Hundley & Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Reference:

van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V., Rennie, A-M, Graham. W., Fitzmaurice, A. (2003) Maternity satisfaction studies and their limitations: “What is, must still be best”, Birth 30: 75-82.

New paper by PhD student Sheetal Sharma

Sheetal Sharma, PhD student in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health (CMMPH), published her latest paper this week in the Asian Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities [1].  The paper ‘Nepenglish’ or ‘Nepali English’: A New Version of English? raises the question whether we are beginning to see a new variant of English.

The paper is co-authored with Mrs. Pragyan Joshi from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Kathmandu and BU Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.   Sheetal’s PhD research focuses on the evaluation of a large-sclae maternity care improvement intervention in rural Nepal.

The paper is based on listening to people in Nepal speaking English and reading their writing in English.  English is a living language and different native and non-native speakers develop English in slightly different ways. This paper argues that it is time to consider whether we should study the English spoken by native-Nepali speakers (Nepenglish) as a separately developing variant of English. The question is particularly intriguing since Nepali English bears such a similarity with Indian English, as both are largely based on originally Sanskrit-based languages. The focus is particularly on how native-Nepali speakers express themselves in English.

 

 

Reference:

 

  1. Sharma, S., Joshi, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2015) ‘Nepenglish’ or ‘Nepali English’: A new version of English? Asian Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences 4(2): 188-193. www.ajssh.leena-luna.co.jp/AJSSHPDFs/Vol.4%282%29/AJSSH2015%284.2-21%29.pdf

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

 

NIHR Panels and Boards are Recruiting

NIHR research programme boards and panels select the most important research questions to commission, and make funding recommendations on project applications.

They are looking for additional expertise for the boards or panels of the following programmes:

  • Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) Programme
  • NIHR Health Services and Delivery Research (HS&DR) Programme
  • NIHR Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme

For more information please see: Opportunities to influence Health Research

 

We regret to inform you ….

It is always disappointing for an academic author to receive a rejection letter.   Today I received yet another one from Midwifery (published by Elsevier).   Sometimes I think academic publishing in good journal is not getting any easier over time.  Neither does the experience of having  over two hundred peer-reviewed academic papers make a rejection easier to deal with.  This was my third paper in a row that got rejected by Midwifery.  All three papers were rejected on resubmission, so a lot of extra work had gone into these papers after the initial peer review and the editor’s feedback.  These three papers where led by three different postgraduate students (Sharma, Baral & Burton) as first authors, and in each case co-authored by myself and different BU academics and/or from other universities.

Midwifery is the journal in which I have published more papers than any other journal (see top blue piece of pie in ‘Documents by source’) as reported on SCOPUS today (26 April 2015).  Moreover, I am co-author of one of the top five most downloaded papers in Midwifery for 2014 (see recent BU Research Blog), and this paper is also the most cited Midwifery paper since 2010!   Still I manage to have three papers rejected in a row.

What is does show to me is that the journal’s peer review system is robust (i.e. blind and impartial) because I am also a member of Midwifery’s editorial committee.  I think it is back to the drawing board and discuss with each set of authors what the next step should be for our papers.  To be fair we had a paper published already this year in Midwifery, namely:  Grylka-Baeschlin, S., van Teijlingen, E.R., Stoll, K., Gross, M.M. (2015) Translation and validation of the German version of the Mother-Generated Index and its application during the postnatal period. Midwifery 31(1): 47–53.

As an editorial board we try continuously to maintain a high quality of papers to be published in our journal, and we would like to encourage potential authors to keep submitting their papers to Midwifery.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH