Hi Marcello
I guess one of the initial issues is whether you are trying to uncover differing 'conceptualizations' or 'theories' of community within and across different academic disciplines. For me, the term 'storyline' is rather vague and is particularly difficult to operationalise. I guess you could potentially examine 'storyline' as 'narrative', and in this way examine the genealogy of 'community' in different disciplines, but this wouldn't necessarily help with MRT
I agree that there has already been a lot of work on uncovering the different meanings of community, but I'm not aware of such a structured and systematic analysis as the one you are engaged in. In the 'discipline' of public health, the term seems to have lost meaning, in that it is variably used as a proxy for neighborhood, place, locality, groups of people, social networks etc etc - so I really look forward to seeing the outcomes of your work
Kind regards
Paul
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Professor Paul Ward
Discipline of Public Health
Flinders University
On 01/07/2011, at 2:27 AM, "Marcello Bertotti" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> at the Institute for Health and Human Development (IHHD) based at UeL we are conducting a meta-narrative systematic review on the meanings of community from different research traditions (sociology, psychology, anthropology etc) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The idea is to build 'storylines' from each research tradition and compare research across these.
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> At the moment, we are in the process of coding about 250 initial references based upon a database search on the concept/meanings of community, alongside other sources such as our own searches and outcomes from an academic and policy advisory groups. We hope to identify key authors in each research tradition and build from that a range of draft meta-narratives (based on Trisha Greenhalgh's work).
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> What i would like to ask the group is whether they have been engaged in similar work and whether they can provide any useful tip or lessons they learnt, even from the 'realist' type of work they have been engaged in. A specific problem that is tormenting me is the theoretical level of the 'storylines'. We don't want to repeat longstanding work on community but provide some sort of middle range theories (I don't really know if I am using the right terminology here). I would like to interact with anybody who has faced such problems in the past.
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> i am obviously happy to provide further details if needed.
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> Marcello
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