Author Archives: Helen Wilding

My role as a researcher

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I’m now officially four days into the induction programme for my Professional Doctorate in Public Health at the University of Lancaster.  We’ve got some on-line induction activities to do – then in a couple of weeks is the summer residential academy.  I’m looking forward to meeting my fellow students for ‘real’ beyond the on-line networking we’ve started.

But today yet again, I found myself inquiring into the relationship between ‘doing my job’, ‘doing research’, ‘producing knowledge’ and what these things mean with respect to the relationship with my colleagues and others who will become ‘participants’ in my research.

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Do you subscribe to Just Practicing?

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Hi there

If you are a regular reader to Just Practicing and receive notifications of new posts by email or other feeds… please read on…otherwise just ignore this administrative post.

I have been doing a little housekeeping and updating on my account and am now using a different email notification system – I’ve moved from feedblitz to the one operated by wordpress.com.  I am not geeky enough to know whether the old one will continue working – so please pop to Just Practicing and sign up again on the new facility.  I’d hate to lose you.

The RSS feeds should continue as usual – but I’ve heard that google are ceasing their google reader service soon.  There are others around – such as Feedly.

Thank you.

Do we need to ‘change our behaviour’ or ‘develop our practice’?

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In public health, the notion of behaviour change has been around for a while.  The focus stems from the desire to reduce or eliminate ‘health risk behaviours’ like smoking or alcohol or to introduce ‘health enhancing behaviours’ like physical activity or nutritious diets.  There has been plenty of research by health psychologists to explain how behaviour change happens (descriptive theories) that are now being used to design interventions (turning them into prescriptive theories but that’s another matter).

But that’s not what I want to focus on – there has been this odd creep of phrases like ‘behaviour change’ into the language of leadership and management. It seems not only do leaders and managers need to ‘change their behaviour’, they also need to know how to change that of their ‘subordinates’.  I’m all for seeing how helpful ideas can be when you transfer them across disciplines but I feel very uneasy about this transfer. Continue reading →

Knowledge to action (or theories in practice)

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I’ve always been uncomfortable about phrases such as ‘knowledge transfer’.  I thought that this was predominantly a question of epistemological stance – that knowledge is socially constructed, but I’ve read a couple of things in the last week that has expanded my thinking on this…

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Regeneration management, development management and public health – are they learning enough from each other?

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I have no idea how this line of thought started really – and in some ways I don’t know if I want to explore it in depth – but today I found myself getting quite frustrated that there doesn’t appear (on the surface) to be as much inter-disciplinary learning and synergies as there could be between regeneration management, development management and public health.  They seem quite siloed in perspective.

Not really where it is going to take me, but I’ll start off by exploring what those terms mean…..

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If ‘research’ is the answer, what is the question?

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A while back, I wrote a blog with a similar title to this – but with ‘systems thinking’ rather than ‘research’ the focus of the answer.  That blog was inspired by Ison (2010, 187)’s discussion about – if ‘managing’ is the answer what is the question.

This frame of inquiry came to mind today as I started thinking about the purpose of ‘research’ – what is the system to which doing research is the answer?

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Health is controversial

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I can’t count how many times I’ve at least hinted at the phrase in the title of this post.  Following Ison (2010, page 231/232), my stock phrase is something like  “wellbeing and health concerns, are characterized by interdependencies, complexity, uncertainty and controversy and involve multiple stakeholders with different perspectives”.  It’s these type of characteristics that lead us to call health a ‘wicked issue’ or a ‘mess’.

But I suppose I’ve never really taken stock of just how ‘controversial’ health is.  I started thinking about this the other day and realised that a lot of the time the ‘multiple stakeholders with different perspectives’ can’t even agree how to word the questions, let alone any of the ‘answers’.  What’s more when people want to illustrate the ‘wickedness’, they often don’t even take on ‘health’ in its entirety they break it down into example issues or more focused concerns like obesity or sexual health – it seems that ‘health’ is so wicked you have to chunk it up.

So I thought I’d try and summarise my thinking on this controversial concept – in doing so I hope that I will bring into focus the nature of what makes the territory so difficult to negotiate through.  By the way, I’m making no attempt to ‘hide’ where my own perspective lies!

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What makes a systems approach?

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In the last week, I have been part of a great conversation in the LinkedIn STiP alumni group about systems approaches.  It started with a question from Arwen asking what other systems approaches there are out there, other than the ones that made up the core part of our TU811 Systems approaches for managing change curriculum.

Before that thread disappears too far into the archive, I wanted to capture here some of my key reflections.

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A new step in my learning trajectory

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Every so often in this blog I have marked a ‘key event’ in the flux of events unfolding through time that collectively make up my learning/development journey.  These transition points have often marked a change in the type of posts I write and why I am writing them.  This is one of those posts…as I am about to embark on a new phase of ‘temporary purposeful activity’ in my learning.

Just after Christmas I made the decision to apply to do a Professional Doctorate in Public Health with University of Lancaster.  And in the last couple of weeks I have been offered a place and accepted it.  It starts with a residential week in June (with some pre and post work) then in September it gets going again.  As a professional doctorate it is ‘distance learning’ and designed to be done alongside having a job.  In essence the first two years are ‘taught’ with a curriculum covering public health theory/policy/practice and research skills/methods then from year three you start a work-based research project leading to a 35,000 word Thesis.  Gulp.

So why?  what motivated me to do this?  what is my purpose?

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