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Much is known about the role of vocabulary in reading and the instructional procedures that improve vocabulary. Relatively less is known about feasible approaches to implement vocabulary interventi...

Vocabulary skills are important for overall reading competence, but vocabulary assessment approaches that inform instructional decision-making and are sensitive to improvement are limited. This article describes a process for developing vocabulary measures designed to facilitate data-driven decision-making for kindergarten and first-grade students who are at risk in vocabulary. A pilot study suggested the measures could be administered and scored with fidelity, and also produced promising data for indices of reliability, criterion-related validity, and sensitivity to growth, particularly for a rating-based scoring metric. Implications and considerations for developing instructionally relevant vocabulary measures are discussed.

There was a highly publicised cluster of at least ten suicides in South Wales, United Kingdom, in 2007–2008. We carried out a qualitative descriptive study using cross-case thematic analysis to investigate the experiences and narratives of eight individuals who lived in the area where the cluster occurred and who survived an episode of near-fatal self-harm at the time of the cluster. Interviews were conducted from 01.01.2015 to 31.12.2015. All interviewees denied that the other deaths in the area had affected their own suicidal behaviour. However, in other sections of the interviews they spoke about the cluster contributing to difficulties they were experiencing at the time, including damage to social relationships, feelings of loss and being out of control. When asked about support, the interviewees emphasized the importance of counselling, which they would have found helpful but in most cases did not receive, even in the case of close contacts of individuals who had died. The findings suggest that effective prevention messaging must be subtle, since those affected may not be explicitly aware of or acknowledge the imitative aspects of their behaviour. This could be related to stigma attached to suicidal behaviour in a cluster context. Lessons for prevention include changing the message from asking if people ‘have been affected by’ the suicide deaths to emphasising the preventability of suicide, and directly reaching out to individuals rather than relying on people to come forward.

To increase our understanding of the role gender plays in spousal loss, this qualitative study analyzes bereavement narratives of 33 recent widowers, aged 45–89 years, all of whom accessed the National Widowers’ Organization website. In particular, we look at how these widowers’ lives changed, the impact of changing gender norms, and coping strategies. To illuminate the temporal process evident in these narratives, we utilize Silverman’s nonlinear characteristics of bereavement and the anthropological concept of liminality. In contrast to studies of widowers in earlier decades, our analysis reveals questioning and rejection of stereotypical masculine gender norms, a wide variety of creative responses to spousal loss, and the need for individualized support.

The foremost ethical obligation and therefore the first duty of scholars is the ethical treatment of people affected by our research, particularly its human subjects. Our working group's report discusses the implications of the primacy of the ethical treatment of human participants – our term for "human subjects" – for empirical research in political science. Although research ethics encompasses a broader range of issues (including honesty, integrity, competence, and the respectful treatment of students and colleagues, among others), we focus on the primacy of human participants both because the human costs of violating this obligation are likely much higher than, for example, plagiarism, and because this principle may conflict with evolving norms of transparency in the social sciences. We acknowledge that "transparency" frequently has benefits, but nonetheless focus on the tensions between it and the primary obligation to human subjects and other ethical obligations in a wide range of research contexts, including settings of violence and repression. To support our ethical positions, we advance a broad and distinct approach of "reflexive openness" that incorporates sustained reflection on the ethics of research practices, what ethnographers term "reflexivity." This approach has three important elements. First, it promotes ongoing reflexivity by the author vis-a-vis her research participants. Second, it encourages all scholars to provide a reasoned ethical justification of their research practices, especially when seeking to publish their analysis. Finally, the ethical expectations guiding reflexive openness are universal, and thus the approach is inclusive of researchers regardless of subfield, methodology, topic, and empirical context.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. This essay is the introduction to a symposium that crystallizes the central findings of a three-year deliberative process – the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) – involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. The symposium’s centerpiece is a series of summaries of the QTD Working Group’s final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate – as understood by relevant research communities – to the forms of inquiry being assessed.

RÉSUMÉUne population vieillissante et la croissance de la population sur la base de l’immigration nécessitent que la recherche, la pratique et la politique doivent se concentrer sur la santé mentale des immigrants âgés, surtout parce que leur santé mentale semble se détériorer au fil du temps. Cette revue se concentre sur: Qu’est-ce que l’on sait sur les déterminants sociaux de la santé mentale chez les immigrants âgés, et quels sont les obstacles à l’accès aux services de santé mentale confrontés par les immigrants âgés? Les résultats révèlent que (1) les déterminants sociaux décisifs de la santé mentale sont la culture, le sexe et les services de santé; (2) que les immigrants plus âgés utilisent les services de santé mentale de moins que leurs homologues nés au Canada à cause des obstacles tels que, par exemple, les croyances et les valeurs culturelles, un manque de services culturellement et linguistiquement appropriées, des difficultés financières, et l’âgisme; et (3) quelles que soient les sous-catégories dans cette population, les immigrants âgés éprouvent des inégalités en matière de la santé mentale. La preuve des recherches disponibles indique que de combler les lacunes des service de santé mentale devrait devenir une priorité pour la politique et la pratique du système de soins de santé au Canada.

This article emerges from a scoping review of over two decades of relevant literature on immigrants' access to mental health services in Canada. Key online databases were searched to explore the gaps and opportunities for improving access to mental health services using a review framework provided by Arksey and O'Malley (Int J Soc Res Methodol 8:19-32, 2005). Immigrants and refugees came from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds and had complex mental health-related concerns that were not currently being adequately addressed by existing services. The major barriers to the utilization of mental health services included: those related to the uptake of existing health information and services; those that were related to the process of immigrant settlement; and barriers related to availability of appropriate services. A thematic analysis of the range of recommendations that emerge from these studies for improvement of research, practice and policy is provided.

This article analyses the problem-solving networks of young refugee women from Somalia between the ages of 13 and 19 through the concepts of ‘muted voice’ and ‘silence’. Based on life history interviews and participant observation with young refugee women living in the Eastleigh neighbourhood of Nairobi in 2011 and 2012, it investigates the ways in which young Somali women exercise their individual agency through carefully selected strategies of silence and muted voice as conscious forms of agency. The research finds that they rarely use their voice in naming and speaking out about their daily hardships, meaning they do not practice the obvious forms of agency that ‘voice’ implies. Instead, these young women gained strength and personal power through their network-type relationships with other young refugee women in the form of ‘muted voice’, meaning they exhibited a strategic capacity to determine when to speak and when to remain silent in the face of the daily oppression they experience, usually at the ...

Comparing pre- and post-genocide Rwanda, this article argues that clear continuities exist between the regimes of Juvénal Habyarimana and Paul Kagame. Both have projected a remarkably similar image of ‘benevolent leadership’. Presenting themselves as harbingers of an ‘improved’ or ‘new’ Rwanda, both leaderships have claimed to be best able and willing to guide Rwanda along the right path to peace, security, ethnic unity and development. ‘Benevolent leadership’ in both periods has also served as a tool to try and shape regime relationships with international and domestic audiences. Internationally, each government has worked to promote Rwanda and its authorities as a good development partner. Domestically, these projections have served to establish norms of order and obedience. We argue that projections of ‘benevolent leadership’ have been a tool designed to win over the international community and discipline the Rwandan population.

��� This article argues that the gacaca courts represent the darker side of transitional justice in seeking to impose a specific form of justice and reconciliation on its intended beneficiaries –Rwandans who lived through the violence of the genocide. My purpose is to illuminate the formal structures of power that shape individual participation before the gacaca courts to nuance the general consensus that local justice is better than its international counterpart. Analysis of the power dynamics behind Rwanda’s gacaca courts not only illustrates the near-total state control of the process, but also provides a bottom-up analysis that centres the lived-through experiences of violence of those individuals who survived it as a critical, yet largely absent, component of the transitional justice toolkit –of national and international actors alike. While international donors and diplomats recognize that implementing an effective transitional justice strategy is a formidable challenge given the intimacy, scale and sheer brutality of the 1994 genocide, they fail to appreciate adequately the power relations that structure individual participation in traditional justice mechanisms like gacaca –which they praise as a model for other post-conflict societies to emulate in re-establishing the rule of law through trust, truth telling and access to justice for all (UN-OHRLLS 2006: 130). An impressive body of literature heralds the gacaca courts as a viable alternative to punitive, procedural, Western-style justice (for example, Clark 2010; Longman 2006; Meyerstein 2007; Venter 2007). These glowing assessments are based on the idea that gacaca is a local, traditional and restorative judicial mechanism– rather than on the way that the gacaca process, as a key part of a broader regime of state power defined by the post-genocide government’s policy of national unity and reconciliation, actually plays out in the lives of ordinary people. While it is currently fashionable among many scholars of transitional justice to praise locally forged and culturally relative justice as more effective and legitimate, such claims are made without knowing nearly enough about the broader power dynamics that influence local justice mechanisms like gacaca. Without a local-level perspective, grounded in the individual lived experiences of participants in the gacaca processes, the darker side of how the courts work in practice at the level of the everyday person is hidden from view. This is because international academics and journalists laud the outcomes of gacaca–ending impunity and promoting reconciliation –as national policy accomplishments rather than recognizing gacaca as central to a state-run legal system that produces

The government in post-genocide Rwanda stakes its moral claim to legitimacy on a policy of national unity and reconciliation, claiming to create a ‘Rwanda for all Rwandans’. This article investigates peasant resistance to this policy. Focusing on everyday acts of resistance among the rural poor, it demonstrates that despite the appearance of widespread popular support, many peasant Rwandans consider the various mechanisms of national unity and reconciliation to be unjust and illegitimate. Obedience to the dictates of the policy of national unity is frequently tactical, rather than sincere, as peasants employ various strategies to avoid participation. Through a focus on everyday acts of resistance, the article reveals how the post-genocide state through the policy of national unity and reconciliation seeks to depoliticize peasant people by orchestrating public performances and by closing off the possibility for individuals to join together to organize politically.

1 In this article, we untangle the relationships among law, power and justice as they impact on the lives of ordinary Rwandans brought into contact with the state and local officials through the gacaca process. Drawing on 37 life-history interviews conducted in 2006, we find that gacaca reinforces a particular version of postgenocide justice that renders the average Rwandan citizen largely powerless over individual processes of reconciliation while serving to maintain a climate of fear and insecurity in their everyday lives. Locating the Rwandan case more broadly, we caution that a preoccupation with harmonizing traditional justice with international standards must look beyond forms of legality. While gacaca may be legally acceptable in a harmonized way, it is both a product and a producer of relations of state power that operate to impact negatively on conflict-affected individuals who bear the brunt of government-led initiatives to promote justice and reconciliation.

Academic literature rarely gives an account of the ‘story behind the findings’, meaning the ethical challenges and emotional pitfalls that you, the researcher, are confronted with before, during and after the field experience. These quagmires have a potentially profound impact upon both the research process and its findings. They deserve proper attention, not only to fathom the inevitable bias in researchers’ position in the field and to assess the quality of the research findings, but also to illustrate that the facade of ‘scientific validity and neutrality’ often hides a pragmatic approach that has shaped the empirical research process. As Wilkinson writes, ‘both as social scientists and as human beings, we have a responsibility to “tell it as it happened,” rather than how we would have liked it to be’ (2008, p. 60). Acknowledging this does not degrade the quality and value of empirical data; instead, it places the results of field research into broader socio-political context regardless of the academic discipline that produced the findings.

In September 2006, just six months into my planned year-long period of fieldwork in southern Rwanda (April 2006–2007), the government of Rwanda stopped my research. At the end of August 2006, following a long day of interviews at the prison in Butare town, the Director summoned me to his office, demanding that I share the names of the prisoners I spoke to in the course of my nearly three weeks visiting his prison on a daily basis. My initial agreement with the Director was that I would speak to the two prison Heads and as many prisoners as they could identify who might be willing to speak to me about their lives during and after the 1994 genocide. I spoke to 24 prisoners in total, with nine agreeing to multiple life interviews. I specifically asked for the Heads of Prisoners for both men and women to identify prisoners who might be willing to talk to, rather than submitting a generic request for prisoners to the Director to identify potential respondents. This put a layer of distance between the prisoners and the Director, particularly since I did not record the demographic information of any of the prisoners I spoke to as a safeguard to ensure confidentiality. When the Director of Butare prison asked me to give the names of those I spoke to, I only had a list of their initials, their alleged crimes and age during the genocide.

In 2004, the government declared Rwanda ‘a nation rehabilitated from the scourge of genocide’, meaning that it had returned peace and security to the country after only 10 years (ORTPN, 2004: 4). The key government mechanism in rebuilding society is the policy of national unity and reconciliation (henceforward ‘the policy’): an ambitious social engineering project that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)-led government believes will forge a unified Rwandan identity while fostering reconciliation between survivors of the genocide and its perpetrators. The official narrative of national unity and reconciliation argues that the combination of a docile and obedient population, a legacy of authoritarian government, and colonial policies of ethnic divisionism caused the 1994 genocide. Thus ‘Rwanda cannot recover from the effects of the genocide until national unity is restored’ (author’s interview with senior RPF official, Kigali, April 2006). According to the peasant Rwandans I consulted, however, the policy is an oppressive force in their daily lives: the post-genocide state ‘organises everything’ and ‘makes decisions’ that regular folk are then left to interpret and implement according to the official narrative (author’s interviews with peasant Rwandans in South province, 2006).

AIDS and rural livelihoods: dynamics and diversity in sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Anke Niehof, Gabriel Rugalema and Stuart Gillespie, London, Earthscan, 2010, xii + 234 pp., ISBN 978-1-84971-126-...

LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS Luc Huyse and Mark Salter, eds. Traditional Justice and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict: Learning from African Experiences. Stockholm: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2008. xiv + 203 pp. List of Acronyms and Abbreviations. Notes. References. Tables. $19.95. Paper. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) has put together a useful book on the role of local justice mechanisms on reconciliation processes in Africa. Traditional Justice and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict is an important addition to the literature on transitional justice. Each of the substantive chapters analyzes the role of traditional justice mechanisms in dealing with the legacy of mass political violence in five African countries. Four of the chapters (on Burundi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Uganda) were written by African authors who provide a nuanced examination of local traditional justice mechanisms. This insider information has been sorely lacking in the academic and policy literatures. The chapter on Rwanda were written by a Belgian scholar (apparently because the Rwandan contributors pulled out). The editors, Luc Huyse and Mark Salter, wrote the introduction and conclusion, respectively. This book deserves to be read by academics, practitioners, policymakers, graduate students, and journalists, although academics will be disappointed by the lack of theoretical insight in the introduction and conclusion. Indeed, Huyse 's superficial treatment of the state of the field (as of 2008) is exceedingly weak. Anyone familiar with the rapidly growing and conceptually contested texts at the core of the literature on transitional justice will recognize that the discussion of the main debates (justice versus impunity) was written for the uninitiated. Neither Huyse nor Salter addresses the conceptual boundaries of what they mean by reconciliation, and the volume would have benefited from a working definition; nor do they consider what acts or words constitute an instance of reconciliation between survivors and perpetrators. Salter does not draw on the analytical framework set out in Huyse 's introduction; instead, he summarizes the substantive chapters to provide a shopping list of recommendations clearly intended for practitioners. But readers are cautioned not to avoid picking up the volume on the basis of this criticism. Indeed, the volume is in line with IDEA's mission statement: to provide general knowledge to practitioners and donors seeking to grant funding to governments that are trying to promote the rule of law and democracy after violent conflict. In addition, the individual chapters are among the few published pieces of research that bring in a local perspective on how traditional justice mechanisms are understood within the sociopolitical, religious, and cultural contexts in which they operate. …