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For the career development of postdocs in academia, universities in Germany are offering mentoring programs to postdocs. They aim to encourage, support and mentor the postdocs toward professorship via face-to-face mentoring, workshops, and networking support. The mentoring programs are carefully designed; however, their success is dependent on multiple factors. The study explores the communication patterns in mentoring between professors and postdocs, and its impact on their professional development. Data was collected and analyzed using Grounded Theory. The data was collected from twenty-five semi-structured in-depth interviews with professors and postdocs across Germany. Classicand Constructivist Grounded Theory was used for data analysis. The paper presents a Communication in Mentoring Model for the professional development of postdocs. The model can be used as a tool to ensure successful communication for better professional relationships in mentoring as well as in professional environments. The paper recommends a longitudinal study to further explore Communication in Mentoring and its impact on postdocs over a period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assuming that policy design can impact gender equity in caretaking, this paper examines how expectant mothers and fathers understand and respond to specific parental leave policy elements when shaping their parenting practices. Taking Germany as a case study, this research draws on semi-structured interviews conducted between October 2019 and March 2020 with 18 couples, who were expecting their first child at the time of the interview. Germany's parental leave policy has shifted substantially since 2007, most notably with the establishment of non-transferable parental leave months for fathers. Exploring the link between policy design at the macro-level and parental involvement at the micro-level, this paper focuses on how mothers and fathers make sense of their leave entitlements when dividing leave, which (policy) aspects they consider as helping or hindering an equal leave division and how mothers and fathers anticipate using parental leave benefits. Results indicate that the current parental leave policy design enables greater equity in caretaking by normalizing some leave-taking by fathers. However, by providing an option for fathers' leaves to be split and to be taken concurrently with mothers the policy limits fathers' solo parenting responsibility and consequently prevents a transformation of gendered parenting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration among health care providers is intended to dissolve boundaries between the sectors of health care systems. The implementation of adequate augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) care of people without natural speech depends highly on collaboration among multiple stakeholders such as speech and language pathologists, teachers, or physicians. This paper examines existing barriers to and facilitators of collaboration from a stakeholder perspective. Five heterogeneous focus group interviews were conducted with N= 32 stakeholders including speech and language pathologists, AAC consultants, teachers, employees of sheltered workshops, parents, and relatives of AAC users, and other educational professionals (e.g., employees of homes for persons with disabilities) at three AAC counseling centers in Germany. Interview data were analyzed by structured qualitative content analysis. The results show very different experiences of collaboration in AAC care. Factors were identified that can have both positive and negative effects on the collaboration between all stakeholders (e.g., openness toward AAC, knowledge about AAC, communication between stakeholders). In addition, stakeholder-specific influencing factors, such as working conditions or commitment to AAC implementation, were identified. The results also reveal that these factors may have an impact on the quality of AAC care. Overall, the results indicate that good collaboration can contribute to better AAC care and that adequate conditions such as personnel, and time-related resources, or financial conditions need to be established to facilitate collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transparency has occupied a central place in the marketing management literature since the early 2000s, and its rise relates closely to the paradigm shift in corporate marketing, from consumer seduction to consumer engagement. In this paper we address the concept of transparency from the perspectives of law, communication science, and corporate marketing. Given that it is unclear how transparency can be achieved in practice, we conducted a qualitative empirical investigation among stakeholders of the transparency of legal information written by businesses for consumers, which has been an essential part of EU consumer legislation since the 1990s, with a view to further refining and concretizing this concept. We carried out 75 interviews with stakeholders in Germany, the largest national consumer market in the European Union. The results reveal the principles and benefits of transparent online consumer information according to these stakeholders and provide guidance for businesses and marketing professionals who wish to improve the clarity and accessibility of their online disclosures. The study concludes with an annotated, actionable definition of the transparency concept in corporate marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on research undertaken as part of the EU funded EPPIC project, this paper aims to update and elaborate on the relationship between drug use and offending behaviours by exploring variations within a cross-national sample of drug-experienced young people in touch with criminal justice systems. Adopting a trajectory-based approach, interviews were undertaken with 198 young people aged 15–25 in six European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, and UK). Data were analysed by applying the Bennett and Holloway categorization of the drugs-crime link, with a focus on the concept of social exclusion as developed by Seddon. Three main types of mechanisms (economic, pharmaceutical, and lifestyles) are used to interpret the data, showing how the relationship between drugs and offending can vary according to type of substances and over time. Furthermore, it can be associated with very different degrees of social exclusion and needs. The results suggest that while economic inequalities still play key roles in explaining drug use and offending, both behaviours can originate from a state of relative deprivation, resulting from the contradictions inherent in 'bulimic societies' that raise aspirations and desires while providing young people scarce opportunities for self-realisation and social recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: There is a growing consensus worldwide that palliative care needs to be both more inclusive of conditions other than cancer and to improve. This paper explores some common challenges currently faced by professionals providing palliative care for patients with either cancer or dementia across five countries. Method: One focus group (n = 7) and 67 interviews were conducted in 2012 across five countries: England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway, with professionals from dementia, cancer and palliative care settings. Results: The interviews revealed five common challenges faced across the five countries: communication difficulties (between services; and between professionals, and patients and their families); the variable extent of structural/functional integration of services; the difficulties in funding of palliative care services; problematic processes of care (boundaries, definitions, knowledge, skills and inclusiveness) and, finally, time constraints. Conclusion: These are not problems distinct to palliative care, but they may have different origins and explanations compared to other areas of health care. This paper explored deeper themes hidden behind a discourse about barriers and facilitators to improving care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that acquiring competencies in different approaches and procedures in qualitative or interpretative social research provides a strong foundation for case analysis in professional social work practice. When students of social work become familiar with such research and are encouraged to engage in their own supervised projects they develop skills for a circumspect and sensitive practice with clients. The paper reports on work with students of social work in Germany, which can be described as an attempt to help them to become self-reflective ethnographers in their own affairs, of their own emergent social work practice. It spells out different phases of a process in which they learn to make their own practice strange. This process consists of developing different competencies in observing, analysing and writing, and requires a setting in which students' written observations and reflections can be shared and discussed by their peers in a critical, egalitarian and supportive manner. The author thinks that such a critical and self-critical discourse which addresses professional issues in general, as well as the individual student's (or practioner's) experiences and reflections, can have important implications for the collective development of social work and its relationship with other professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the methodological issues encountered in a comparative case study, which investigated how discourses shaped and legitimated policy maintenance and policy change in Germany before and after unification. The research strategy involved discourse analysis of party political and parliamentary documents, integrating detailed textual and contextual analysis of the institutional framework within which discourses were articulated. The paper examines the possibility of using comparative case studies to develop concepts, and reviews the relationship between concepts and context in qualitative comparative research. A critique is then offered of the process of analysis, ranging from the initial data analysis using NUD*iST, to the re-contextualisation of the textual analysis, and the reintegration of context, theory and textual analysis in writing up the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the risks associated with direct payments to users enabling them to purchase social care. These payments are intended to enable people with disabilities to make choices and increase their autonomy. However, there is little evidence in the existing literature about the risks involved in direct payments as seen by service users. In this paper, we draw on data from a qualitative study of direct payments for people with disabilities in a federal state of Germany. We interviewed 37 individuals involved in direct payment schemes including individuals receiving payments, care assistants, members of organisations providing care and the administrative officers of the local authorities between December 2011 and January 2014. In this article, we use a governmentality perspective to explore how individuals who received the payments saw and sought to manage the risks associated with the scheme. We found that while users reported that direct payments reduced the risk associated with being directly dependent on the care providers and hence increased their desired self-determination, they identified new risks linked to their liability for the transferred money, problems associated with their liquidity and cash flow, challenges presented by budget cuts, and sanctions resulting from violation of norms of ‘appropriate use’ and the difficulties of negotiating with the funders. To manage these perceived risks users indicated that they had subjected themselves to a new way of active self-control and self-management, normalising their behaviour. We note that risk to service users has been neglected in policy design and should be acknowledged more explicitly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]