Search results for "Field research"
showing 10 items of 25 documents
Understanding the Health Disaster: Research Design for the Response to the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak
2015
International audience; The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest ever in history, affecting multiple countries and to this date, the World Health Organization has registered more than 6,500 deaths attributed to Ebola. The challenges arising from this outbreak to responders worldwide do not follow the standard characterisation or response patterns of natural sudden onset vs. conflict disasters. Rather, it is a medical emergency, which is intertwined with multiple challenges in the sectors decision-making, coordination, logistics and information management. In this paper, we present our research framework, which is based on desk research and initial interviews with responders. Th…
Significance and Current Status of Wastewater Reuse in Sicily
1991
In Sicily wastewater is being regarded as a supplemental source of water, especially for agricultural use, which represents the greatest demand at present and in the future. That is because water demand is already approaching total usable resources, and severe shortage is experienced almost everywhere and in every sector. To help overcome possible implementation problems due to high salinity and pollutant concentrations, lack in monitoring capabilities, and emotional public perception of possible health risks, major field research programs have been undertaken, including an experimental station with a pilot plant and a series of field plots.
Towards Adult Information Literacy Assessment in Latvia: UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Competency Matrix in Practice
2014
The study presents conclusions regarding the possibility of adapting the UNESCO MIL Competency Matrix and developing methodology for information literacy assessment of the adult population. During field research in a sample territory (Kekava district) and within an adult population target group, the levels of information literacy are assessed, and information literacy education needs are clarified. The research results can be used for the development of diagnostic instruments for regional growth, planning of adult education, elaboration of information literacy training programmes, as well as for self-evaluation of information literacy competencies. The study has been carried out within the …
Innovative Research Design – A Journey into the Information Typhoon
2014
Abstract Disasters are often characterized by their sudden onset and complex nature. The need for innovative and trans-disciplinary research that starts from the practice of disaster response is uncontested. Yet, the realities of field research require a rework of research design and processes. In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines in November 2013, a small team of researchers with different backgrounds came together in an innovative setting to investigate information management for decision support and sensemaking in the field. We combined the research in the field with remote support for logistics, communication and spot analyses. This letter describes our findings i…
Pirates or entrepreneurs? Informal music distributors and the Nigerian recording industry crisis
2020
This paper is based on field research in Lagos and seeks to examine a group of actors that is often neglected in the literature as well as in local discourses. I refer to these actors as informal m...
Managing in-country transportation risks in humanitarian supply chains by logistics service providers: Insights from the 2015 Nepal earthquake
2017
International audience; Humanitarian supply chains (HSCs) play a central role in effective and efficient disaster relief operations. Transportation has a critical share in HSCs and managing its risks helps to avoid further disruptions in relief operations. However, there is no common approach to or culture of risk management that its applicability has been studied through recent cases. This paper incorporates an empirical research design and makes a threefold contribution: first, it identifies in-country transportation risks during Nepal response. Second, we evaluate afore identified risks through an expert driven risk assessment grid. Third, we use our field data to study how some humanita…
Teachers’ training and inclusive processes in the kindergarten, primary and secondary school: a field research
2020
Inclusion is a continuous process aimed to promote learning and participation of all students, opposing every kind of exclusion and helping educative contexts to take charge diversity of life contexts, interests, experiences, knowledges and competences of students. For development of inclusive processes, teachers’ training represents a necessary change of paradigm in the secondary school that has to be even more organic and systemic. In fact, already in the report by OCSE in 2005, called “Teachers matter: attracting, development and retaining effective teachers”, it affirms that “improvement of quality of teachers’ training is a priority for the single national politics”. To renew the schol…
Structuring Humanitarian Supply Chain Knowledge Through a Meta-Modeling Approach
2017
To develop decision support systems (DSS) that improve humanitarian supply chain (HSC) performance, there is a need for methods that support on field data gathering and knowledge structure. We propose a meta-model to structure the knowledge of HSC and to obtain a shared vision of the HSC. It has been developed to provide a framework to class gathered data by connecting it to HSC concepts. The meta-model includes four packages, defining the collaborative ecosystem (context, actors, objectives, and behavior). The concepts gathered during our field research experiences, added to the HSC core literature, have permitted to build the HSC meta-model layer. Models built from this meta-model can be …
Before and After Science: Radcliffe-Brown, British Social Anthropology, and the Relationship Between Field Research, Ethnography, and Theory
2020
In Radcliffe-Brown’s theoretical program of social anthropology as a “natural science of society” empirically grounded and making extensive use of the “comparative method” for aims of generalization about social phenomena, the ethnographical method according to Malinowski’s principles was seen as a fundamental research tool useful not only for guaranteeing scientific reliability to the work of collecting and recording ethnographic documentation but also for empirically testing theoretical hypotheses. It was thus often supposed that ideally the latter had to orientate the selection of particular research topics before starting fieldwork and while carrying out it. In the first part of the pap…
A shifting yet grounded transnational social field: Interplays of displacement and emplacement in African migrant trajectories across Central America
2021
In this article, we draw on the volatile complexity of African migrant trajectories in Central America to broaden the scope of transnational scholarship. These trajectories are characterised by mobilities as well as immobilities, taking shape in particular local contexts. By focusing on the interplays between displacement and emplacement that are part of these trajectories, we aim to increase our understanding of the extent to which migrants still ‘on the move’ experience both temporal embeddedness and cross-border connectedness, thereby acknowledging and unravelling transnational lives as they ‘touch the ground’ en route. To do so, we build on long-standing scholarly commitments in Central…