CONTEXT Professional identity formation plays a crucial role in the transition from medical student to doctor. At McMaster University, medical students maintain a portfolio of narrative reflections of their experiences, which provides for a rich source of data into their professional development. The purpose of this study was to understand the major influences on medical students' professional ...

Group-based Decision and Knowledge Support Systems have the potential to assist Information Technology Service Managers make sound decisions. We use narrative enquiry and reflective processes to review two recent projects that designed decision support tools for IT Service Management. The Software Mediated Process Assessment project includes a group decision support system to enable the selecti...

The indiscriminate use of drugs by the youth is growing steadily in Brazil and worldwide. This study was aimed at reflecting about the professional nursing practice's ethical approach in providing care to adolescents who are users of legal and illegal drugs. This is a theoretical and reflective study based on narrative literature review, using books and scientific articles. Reflections about ad...

Small group supervision is a powerful venue for generative conversations because of the multiplicity of perspectives available and the potential for an appreciative audience to a practitioner's work. At the same time, the well-intentioned reflections by a few practitioners in a room can inadvertently duplicate normative discourses that circulate in the wider culture and the profession. This art...

Objective. The purpose of this study is to investigate the meaning of living with an insulin pump for the management of type 1 diabetes during the period of emerging adulthood. Through a phenomenological narrative, this study contributes to the reflective understanding of the everyday life experiences of this population. Methods. A hermeneutic phenomenological design was used for this study of ...

The 'Axial Age' (500-300 BCE) refers to the period during which most of the main religious and spiritual traditions emerged in Eurasian societies. Although the Axial Age has recently been the focus of increasing interest,(1-5) its existence is still very much in dispute. The main reason for questioning the existence of the Axial Age is that its nature, as well as its spatial and temporal bounda...

This paper explores Jacques Derrida's strategy of deconstruction as a way of understanding and critiquing nursing theory and practice. Deconstruction has its origins in philosophy, but I argue that it is useful and relevant as a way of challenging the dominant paradigm of any discipline, including nursing. Because deconstruction is notoriously difficult to define, I offer a number of examples o...

This paper is a reflective narrative exploring the introduction of a modular inservice programme, using the device of the Hero’s Journey (features of which are described). The programme is a response to an Irish government initiative which aims to integrate IT into the education system. Pedagogical and curriculum issues, rather than skills or technical matters, are central to the programme; it ...

The Reflective Functioning scale (RF) is a narrative-based assessment of the capacity to coherently conceptualize one's own and others' subjective motivations, emotions, beliefs, and desires. We report the preliminary results of an effort to develop a computerized text analysis version (CRF) of the RF assessment system. A sample of 113 clinical and non-clinical Adult Attachment Interviews (AAI)...

This article presents some of the emergent methods developed to fit a study of quality in inclusive research with people with learning disabilities. It addresses (i) the ways in which the methodology was a response to the need for constructive, transformative dialogue through use of repeated focus groups in a design interspersing dialogic and reflective spaces; and (ii) how stimulus materials f...