A goal in implementing health research is to change behavior and workplace culture. Realist methods are being used increasingly in healthcare research. While these methods provide context-based pragmatic recommendations, the data can be dense. Thus, making the transfer of knowledge into practice challenging for researchers and clinicians. This paper offers a novel approach to studying complex issues, communicating and motivating behavior change in healthcare using a realist approach to narrative analysis and producing synthesized narratives. A realist lens to research enables researchers to understand what works, with whom, and under what conditions. When used alone, realist methods can result in complex findings that can prove challenging to translate into practice. However, combining a realist approach with narrative analysis can enable a better understanding of the topic and promote practice change. This paper employs a case study on speaking up in healthcare to illustrate this novel method. This case study reports on a longitudinal interview study with a cohort of allied health new graduates to illustrate these methods and discuss the benefits and limitations of their application. We will provide researchers with clear steps to support replication. We argue that this method can aid the implementation of research findings across various contexts within and outside healthcare settings.

In response to Van Hoogdalem and Bosman (2024) who advocate abandoning the use of intelligence tests at the individual level, we argue that their conclusions are too absolute and insufficiently substantiated. While we acknowledge some of the concerns they raise regarding measurement error and contextual influences, we argue that the complete dismissal of standardized intelligence tests overlooks their practical utility. Drawing on empirical evidence and established psychometric theory, we demonstrate that intelligence tests provide valuable information for clinical and educational decision-making. We further argue that replacing standardized testing with purely non-standardized methods introduces greater subjectivity and risk of error, ultimately undermining the quality of professional judgments. We argue that intelligence tests remain a valuable source of information in many cases of clinical and educational decision making, when interpreted carefully and integrated with other relevant sources of valid information using predefined decision rules.

Social responsibility has emerged as one of the predominant topics in public discourse since the beginning of the century, not only at the level of social organizations but also within corporate spheres. Since the 1990s, many methods have been developed to measure social impact, showing the extent to which there is a need to evaluate this complex and multidimensional reality. However, despite these multiple efforts, none of these methodologies has become a reference standard. An exhaustive literature review was conducted to carry out a classification of SIA models, aimed at understanding their strengths and weaknesses, as well as identifying any gaps within the sector. The work encompassed both mapping and classifying SIA models along with identifying indicators related to these models. Later, efforts were made to harmonize indicator nomenclature through a combination of manual and automated methods. 144 methodologies and 1361 indicators were listed. First, the study concluded that there is no universally accepted definition of the concept of Social Impact. Second, the study concluded that no existing measurement fully meets the three fundamental characteristics outlined in the literature: producing a quantitative output , being exhaustive (i.e., considering all stakeholders), and enabling comparability over time and across (social and business) organizations or projects with differing characteristics.

This paper offers a reflexive, practice-based process evaluation of arts-based participatory methods (ABM) within a community-led violence prevention project in an Indigenous Andean community on Amantaní Island, Peru. Working within a Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework, the project engaged women and men through six creative methods – problem and solution trees, life history mapping with stones and petals, role play, body mapping, visioning drawings and Most Significant Change storytelling – drawing on visual, narrative and embodied modalities. These methods supported participants to articulate structural harms, strengthen confidence and public voice and co-design locally grounded solutions. By tracing how these activities unfolded in practice, we explore the relational, affective and political dimensions of ABM, showing how creative practices enabled trust-building, emotional expression and shifts in dialogue and power. We also reflect critically on the ethical tensions that emerged when working within externally funded, time-limited structures in a setting marked by high levels of gendered violence and marginalisation. This study contributes to growing scholarship on feminist and decolonial approaches to participatory research, offering concrete insights into the transformative potential and limitations of arts-based practice in under-resourced contexts marked by gendered and structural violence.

Diary methods are recognized as a valuable tool in qualitative research, however researchers have yet to take advantage of the many possibilities offered by social media platforms. This article demonstrates the potential of social media-based diary methods, specifically WhatsApp and Facebook diary groups, for researching everyday lived experience, by outlining the key advantages that this methodological innovation offers. Researchers can obtain insight into everyday repetitive behaviors, like eating and cooking, they can benefit from real-time reporting since participants can share information as and when it happens, and they can gain access to multi-modal data, as social media platforms support a variety of data types, including text, photos, audio, and video. Social media-based diary methods also make data collection more practical since the platforms are widely known and interacted with, and where they are supported by both smartphones and computers, transcription becomes a straightforward process too. A final benefit which could be taken advantage of is group discussions, so this article also explores the benefits of conducting diary methods in a group setting. This article is based on a research project exploring the everyday lived experiences of faith vegans which made use of private WhatsApp and Facebook groups to collect diary data from participants, including photos of meals, reflections on events and experiences, and group discussions. The findings in this article are thus grounded in methodological innovation and advance current scholarship on diary methods in a way that aligns well with contemporary trends and preferences.

Policymakers increasingly seek to use systematic reviews to inform policy decisions in a wide variety of policy areas. The use of rigorous methods for assessing the available evidence makes systematic reviews a key tool in this context. However, the emphasis on rigorous methods can also pose challenges for policymaking, as this can constrain systematic reviews from adapting to complex and localised policy needs. Subsequently, commentators have argued that systematic reviews need to be more accommodating of policymakers’ interests. In this paper, we aim to show how researchers and policymakers can work together to produce systematic reviews which are useful for policy purposes, using hermeneutics as a theoretical framework. Specifically, we describe the central processes of a systematic review with reference to hermeneutics, with a view to developing an understanding of what is happening when researchers and policymakers work together. This draws attention to the importance of shared interpretive decisions that shape the development and conduct of systematic reviews, but which are typically unacknowledged in conventional methodological accounts. Furthermore, we argue that hermeneutics can provide reassurance that the inevitable interpretive decisions which take place in this context are not deviations from best practice, but in fact strengthen a systematic review for policy purposes. The paper sets out this account in several stages which align with key systematic review tasks relating to planning, carrying out and reporting a systematic review.

Conversations about inclusivity in anatomy education are at a critical juncture. While the need for a more equitable discipline is widely recognised, significant challenges remain. As this project aimed to reimagine what a truly inclusive learning experience could like and how it might be best achieved, an inclusive approach to research methodology was essential to ensure robust and representative results. Due to the paucity in anatomical literature on this topic, the authors applied concepts from sociological research methodology and innovative methods of demographic data collection to their own discipline. The study utilised questionnaires and focus groups to collect diverse data on lived experiences of inclusivity and exclusion in anatomy education. A convenience sample gathered quantitative and qualitative data through questionnaires and semi-structured focus groups. Guided by inclusive research practices including participatory research, this study makes use of inductive reflexive thematic analysis with critical orientation to situate inclusivity in its social, historical and political contexts. This paper discusses how the authors incorporated these inclusive methods, explores the challenges this type of research generates, and acts as a framework for those wishing to conduct more inclusive research in their discipline. Application of these methods yielded richer and more nuanced data, thus increasing the validity of the study. Although anatomy education may not currently represent diverse populations, positive action towards change is underway, with many in the discipline eager to actively confront exclusion. The existing dataset is predominantly Eurocentric. As such, the next phase of this research will translate recruitment literature and questionnaires into other languages to collect more global perspectives. To encourage further anti-exclusion research, the data will be made widely accessible for analysis.

This article presents a methodology that combines methods of architectural representation with qualitative social science research to study housing, particularly, home-based work. Studies of home-based work have specialised in discussing the complexities of sharing the domestic and productive spaces. However, the literature shows that there is a methodological gap in approaching these complexities. Specifically, both social science and architectural techniques separately fail to represent the relationships and conflicts between these two spheres. This article addresses the following question: how to achieve a representation that corresponds to the complexity of the relationship between domestic and productive space in dwellings? To answer this question, our methodology combines the techniques of architecture (sketches, plans, maquettes and axonometries) and social science (observation, interviews and focus groups) to capture the relationship between domestic (reproductive) and work (productive) spaces in households. The method presents three scales of analysis: the micro (household), the meso (part of the neighbourhood) and the macro (neighbourhood). These different scales of analysis were applied in two case studies to test the performance of the method. These are the transitional emergency neighbourhoods built after the 2015 floods in Atacama (Chile). These cases were selected because, for many families, housing is also a place of income generation, and often emergency housing is a place of work, contributing to the economic recovery process after a disaster.

IQ scores are used in the Netherlands to determine whether an individual qualifies for special education or has access to healthcare. The term for this use of IQ is referred to as “slagboomdiagnostiek” (doorway diagnostics). Criticism has been voiced from the professional field regarding this policy. In this article, we will discuss whether the current Dutch policy is justified by examining the validity and reliability of IQ tests. Specifically, we will address whether the IQ test can be used in clinical decision-making regarding the individual. We argue that while the validity and reliability have been demonstrated at a group level, they do not hold true for the individual, leading to the conclusion that the current Dutch policy is not justified.

This paper introduces the open-source Urban Belonging (UB) toolkit, designed to study place attachments through a combined digital, visual and participatory methodology that foregrounds lived experience. The core of the toolkit is the photovoice UB App, which prompts participants to document urban experiences as digital data by taking pictures of the city, annotating them, and reacting to others’ photos. The toolkit also includes an API interface and a set of scripts for converting data into visualizations and elicitation devices. The paper first describes how the app’s design specifications were co-created in a process that brought in voices from different research fields, planners from Gehl Architects, six marginalized communities, and citizen engagement professionals. Their inputs shaped decisions about what data collection the app makes possible, and how it mitigates issues of privacy and visual and spatial literacy to make the app as inclusive as possible. We document how design criteria were translated into app features, and we demonstrate how this opens new empirical opportunities for community engagement through examples of its use in the Urban Belonging project in Copenhagen. While the focus on photo capture animates participants to document experiences in a personal and situated way, metadata such as location and sentiment invites for quali-quantitative analysis of both macro trends and local contexts of people’s experiences. Further, the granularity of data makes both a demographic and post-demographic analysis possible, providing empirical ground for exploring what people have in common in what they photograph and where they walk. And, by inviting participants to react to others’ photos, the app offers a heterogeneous empirical ground, showing us how people see the city differently. We end the paper by discussing remaining challenges in the tool and provide a short guide for using it.