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Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Policy researchers face a range of pressures to incorporate the perspectives of ‘hard-to-reach’ groups in their research. In the specific case of public involvement policy in health (one example of the growing field of citizen participation initiatives in administrative contexts), researchers have struggled to accomplish this without compelling research participants to enter into a policy discourse that is unfamiliar and may be at odds with their self-understood roles as patients and citizens. This paper presents findings from an interpretive project which sought to understand the perspectives of young adults on local practices of public involvement in a socio-economically deprived area of Scotland. It recounts the researcher’s shifting standpoint in response to silences and absences within young adults’ reaction to the project, and argues that the everyday ‘tactics’ young adults described using in their interactions with health services be reimagined as relevant, albeit challenging forms of citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the philosophical hermeneutics of principles of patent claim construction or interpretation. It discusses interpretive theories underlying the "ordinary meaning first" approach prevailing in the U.S. which is classified as text-oriented interpretation and the purposive approach which prevails in Great Britain classified as author-oriented interpretation. The author further suggests a dynamic claim interpretation of the claim terms defined by interpretive legal theories.

Abstract: This introduction presents the case, and sets the scene, for five reviews of research on rural schools and their communities, arguing that educational research in this field is relatively rare, and decreasingly visible despite the significant population of the world''s children who live in rural communities and attend rural schools. After considering various interpretations of ‘rural’, of the purpose and function of rural schooling, and of the relationship between school and community, we present three basic research questions with relevance for researchers of schools and communities, rural and urban, the world over, and raise more specific questions which are addressed in the reviews themselves and pursued in the closing chapter. Finally we introduce the research reviews and justify our selection of British and Nordic countries, where, despite geographical proximity, there are wide thematic and methodological disparities in rural schools’ research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The author reflects on a study showing the practice of marketing in Great Britain. He notes that marketing textbooks were highly similar as they do on implicit systems based paradigm and shows that marketing is locally defined as a contextualized activity that is not similar in many ways to the generalized prescriptions of the mainstream textbooks. He also mentions that dissenting interpretations of marketing should not be viewed as heretical.

Chartism existed to exert pressure on the parliamentary classes, yet the interaction between Chartism and its audience has rarely been closely examined. Studies of the political engagement with Chartism have usually focused on questions of policing and control, but such an emphasis was only possible if Chartism was first delegitimized as an authentic popular voice. This article explores the upper-class engagement with Chartism, arguing that it was interpreted not as a political movement but as a social pathology. Neither the charter nor its spokesmen were accepted as representative of the people, with observers instead projecting their own interpretations onto the movement. As a result, the Chartists were unable to force serious constitutional debate or to confront M.P.s with a compelling popular authority distinct from their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on his evaluation of the use of ethnography in housing studies in Great Britain from 1990 to 2008. The author considers the ethnographic approaches that make difference to address housing issues, and assesses the quality, application and interpretation of ethnography in the studies. He comments on the understandings and purpose of ethnography as a tool, the financing of ethnographic research, and the matching of ethnography with focused policy studies. The author also discusses the benefits and potential of ethnography as discovered in the area of housing studies.

The article presents the author's view about the purpose and value of commentaries in Great Britain. He states that commenting involves bringing together the text and the perspective that belong to the interpreter. He added that it also opens the question to all appropriate levels for interpretation. He believes that commentary provides a thoughtful and well-informed conversation from a certain place or event with sensitivity to the tension and creativity from the flow of the text.

The article focuses on the author's interpretation of the War in Heaven in Milton's "Paradise Lost." The author suggestions that the War in Heaven represented battles of Great Britain's Civil War of the seventeenth century. A comparison between Satan's creation of gunpowder and William Camden's attainment of a recipe for the powder in "Remaines, Concerning Britaine," is provided. Comparisons between other events in the War on Heaven and other Civil War period literature are included.

With development of `scientific literacy' in mind, this study explored early secondary school pupils' written evaluations of media reports of contemporary science research in a classroom setting. Their abilities of evidence evaluation were contrasted with those of people with greater experience of science education-college science students and science graduates. The vast majority of each of these three groups distinguished between established facts and areas of uncertainty in media reports. A similar proportion of pupils and students (40%) showed logical but limited reasoning in recognizing the problems of extrapolating from insufficient evidence, with pupils perhaps aided by the pedagogical context. In contrast, 80% of science graduates reasoned logically invoking methodological limitations of the research evidence presented. There was little distinction between the nature and extent of pupils' and students' responses, except that only amongst pupils was personal experience invoked in reasoning. Results suggest that, at present, only through extensive experience of formal science education do skills of evidence evaluation develop fully. However, pupils and students exhibit the potential for abilities to be developed further through explicit teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author offers the most convincing interpretation of the effect of contemporary experiences and attitudes to a report on social security released by W. H. Beveridge in 1942. The author notes that the report was couched in a mixture of styles. There is a close and scholarly analysis of the details of social insurance in Great Britain. There are also clarion calls to action. Beveridge happened to be the right man in the right place at the right time, expressing in a mixture of careful analysis and popular advocacy a programme which caught the imagination of the large majority at the time and has acted as a reference point ever since. The debate about the underlying motivation for its use and its longer-lasting effects will continue unabated on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary.

The article provides information concerning the life and works of Élie Halévy in Great Britain. The author says that nowhere in his work does he show that he felt any particular preference for those whom many hold to be his predecessors or masters. The author adds that Halévy refers at length to Montesquieu at the beginning of his third volume on England in 1815, but indirectly, through his English interpreters, especially Cathy Blackstone. Blackstone has interpreted the British constitution in the light of the interpretation.

The article discusses the National Student Survey (NSS) that is completed by college students in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. Topics discussed include the ways terms on the survey are interpreted by students, the league tables that are created based on the surveys and that compare universities in Great Britain, and the impact negative incidents have on the ways students respond to questions on the survey.