Article
Protocol for a mixed methods study investigating the impact of investment in housing, regeneration and neighbourhood renewal on the health and wellbeing of residents: the GoWell programme
Background: There is little robust evidence to test the policy assumption that housing-led area regeneration strategies will contribute to health improvement and reduce social inequalities in health. The GoWell Programme has been designed to measure effects on health and wellbeing of multi-faceted regeneration interventions on residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. Methods/Design: This mixed methods study focused (initially) on 14 disadvantaged neighbourhoods experiencing regeneration. These were grouped by intervention into 5 categories for comparison. GoWell includes a preintervention householder survey (n = 6008) and three follow-up repeat-cross sectional surveys held at two or three year intervals (the main focus of this protocol) conducted alongside a nested longitudinal study of residents from 6 of those areas. Self-reported responses from face-to-face questionnaires are analysed along with various routinely produced ecological data and documentary sources to build a picture of the changes taking place, their cost and impacts on residents and communities. Qualitative methods include interviews and focus groups of residents, housing managers and other stakeholders exploring issues such as the neighbourhood context, potential pathways from regeneration to health, community engagement and empowerment. Discussion: Urban regeneration programmes are 'natural experiments.' They are complex interventions that may impact upon social determinants of population health and wellbeing. Measuring the effects of such interventions is notoriously challenging. GoWell compares the health and wellbeing effects of different approaches to regeneration, generates theory on pathways from regeneration to health and explores the attitudes and responses of residents and other stakeholders to neighbourhood change.
This article sets out to describe the current situation in the social housing sector in Russia. The author presents the historical background of social housing in Russia, it’s development and current conditions in the context of the transition from planned housing sector to one governed by market relations. The article also contains the analysis of the key structural elements of the social housing sector and expert evaluation of how well the social housing works as a mechanism for improving the housing conditions of the poor and vulnerable groups of population. The important role in the article is given to the legal status of social housing tenants, rent-setting policies and the problems of social housing finance. The main development opportunities and the main challenges for housing policy are revealed in the final sections of the article.
Some categories used in Russian geography to analyze spatial aspects of social processes in cities are considered. The possibility to interpret the same terms differently is shown depending on scientific approaches and the investigation scopes applied. This paper is part of a topical collection of five articles published in this issue of the journal under the rubric “Urban Geography” and dedicated to key terms and notions used in urban studies in Russia, France, and other European countries (in addition, see also the following articles: “Cities, Rural Areas and Urbanization: Russia and the World”, “City and Countryside under WorldWide Urbanization”, “Integrated Forms of Urban Settlement Pattern in Russia, Europe, and Worldwide”, “Types of Cities in Russia and Across the Globe”).
Importance and gap. Local strategies and brands must be created on the basis of the hopes and aspirations for the future of the place felt by stakeholders and their active participation (Allan, 2015). However, as a rule, ‘’practitioners and local authorities are not able to define their own needs‘’ (Kavaratzis, 2015). Strategies and brands require a rigour of thought and process (Allan, 2015) that is more typical for experts than for ordinary people. Therefore, “practitioners need from experts to provide them with clear concepts and a strategic view“(Kavaratzis, 2015). The question that remains to be answered, then, is: How should experts accomplish this without replacing the local representatives’ strategic vision with their own?
Purpose. This paper aims to develop a methodological approach to stating a vision of a place that allows experts to help local stakeholders transform their hopes and aspirations for the future into a rigorous form suitable for building place strategies and brands.
Methodology. The methodology combined learning and decision-making, was based on focus groups formed by local representatives who passed corporate training sessions and included three stages.
First, focus group participants formulated strategic visions of their place intuitively (without any tools or assistance).
Second, they built strategic matrices under the guidance of experts, but using their own categories, terms, language constructions, etc.
Finally, they formulated new strategic visions for the place, applying the matrices that they constructed.
Findings. Strategic visions formulated in the third stage, in comparison with those obtained in the first one, were more rigorous and detailed, on one hand, and reflected the intrinsic nature of the place, on the other.
Originality/value. First, theory and analytical tools for stating place vision were co-created by expert and practitioners. This entailed systematizing the everyday consciousness and experience of the participants and transforming them into scientific consciousness and experience, rather than replacing them with the professional experience of the expert.
Second, the use of the co-created tools in building the vision of a place enabled the practitioners to think strategically and creatively and thus gave them the main role in the strategic process, while the expert assumed the role of facilitator.
Managerial implications. The methodological approach that has been developed is a much-needed supplement to existing techniques used in place management. It allows local stakeholders to implement place identities into organic strategy and brand.
Mixed tenure is the predominant development and regeneration strategy and is a key component of UK housing and urban policy. It is purported to provide wide-ranging social, environmental and economic benefits to residents. While there is a large literature on mixed tenure, policy makers are likely to rely on reviews and summaries of the evidence rather than primary studies. But can they rely on such reviews? Using systematic review methods this paper critically appraises recent reviews for the evidence that mixed tenure policies and strategies have achieved any of these expected benefits. Of the six UK reviews of primary studies, most drew on less than half the available primary studies, none provided a critical appraisal of individual studies and made no comment on conflicting evidence between and within studies. While the reviews gave indications of the deficiencies of the evidence base, rather than focus on the implications of these deficiencies, four of the six reviews emphasised the positive effects of tenure mix.
Background. Runaway behavior among children in residential care is a serious social problem in all countries of the world. Existing scientific data on risk factors and motives of runaway from out-of-home care may not be absolutely relevant to the Russian cultural context.
Objective. To describe risk factors and the motives that cause children to runaway from residential care.
Design. A qualitative study that included 2 focus groups with staff and graduates of residential care supplemented by the analysis of 23 cases of child runaways from residential care in St. Petersburg.
Results. The study revealed the following runaway risk factors and motives: 1) running to parents or relatives, 2) romantic and/or sexual relations, 3) interaction with peers, 4) psychiatric problems, 5) addictive behavior, 6) avoidance of conflicts, 7) physical or emotional violence, 8) unmotivated runaways for entertainment, 9) problems adapting to the care institution, 10) dissatisfaction with the conditions at the care institution. Moreover, in this study, two different types of runaways have been identified, including relatively “true” runaways and those who are not psychologically experienced as such, but are only disobeying the formal rules of the care institution.
Conclusions. Runaways of children from residential care are extremely heterogeneous in nature. In further empirical studies, it should be taken into account that runaways may be true and formal. There can be multiple reasons for running away: the care institution itself, a child’s personality, or his or her social network outside of the care institution.
This volume intends to fill the gap in the range of publications about the post-transition social housing policy developments in Central and Eastern Europe by delivering critical evaluations about the past two decades of developments in selected countries’ social housing sectors, and showing what conditions have decisively impacted these processes.
Contributors depict the different paths the countries have taken by reviewing the policy changes, the conditions institutions work within, and the solutions that were selected to answer the housing needs of vulnerable households. They discuss whether the differences among the countries have emerged due to the time lag caused by belated reforms in selected countries, or whether any of the disparities can be attributed to differences inherited from Soviet times. Since some of the countries have recently become member states of the European Union, the volume also explores whether there were any convergence trends in the policy approaches to social housing that can be attributed to the general changes brought about by the EU accession.
Importance and gap. Local strategies and brands must be created on the basis of the hopes and aspirations for the future of the place felt by stakeholders and their active participation (Allan, 2015). However, as a rule, ‘’practitioners and local authorities are not able to define their own needs‘’ (Kavaratzis, 2015). Strategies and brands require a rigour of thought and process (Allan, 2015) that is more typical for experts than for ordinary people. Therefore, “practitioners need from experts to provide them with clear concepts and a strategic view“(Kavaratzis, 2015). The question that remains to be answered, then, is: How should experts accomplish this without replacing the local representatives’ strategic vision with their own?
Purpose. This paper aims to develop a methodological approach to stating a vision of a place that allows experts to help local stakeholders transform their hopes and aspirations for the future into a rigorous form suitable for building place strategies and brands.
Methodology. The methodology combined learning and decision-making, was based on focus groups formed by local representatives who passed corporate training sessions and included three stages.
First, focus group participants formulated strategic visions of their place intuitively (without any tools or assistance).
Second, they built strategic matrices under the guidance of experts, but using their own categories, terms, language constructions, etc.
Finally, they formulated new strategic visions for the place, applying the matrices that they constructed.
Findings. Strategic visions formulated in the third stage, in comparison with those obtained in the first one, were more rigorous and detailed, on one hand, and reflected the intrinsic nature of the place, on the other.
Originality/value. First, theory and analytical tools for stating place vision were co-created by expert and practitioners. This entailed systematizing the everyday consciousness and experience of the participants and transforming them into scientific consciousness and experience, rather than replacing them with the professional experience of the expert.
Second, the use of the co-created tools in building the vision of a place enabled the practitioners to think strategically and creatively and thus gave them the main role in the strategic process, while the expert assumed the role of facilitator.
Managerial implications. The methodological approach that has been developed is a much-needed supplement to existing techniques used in place management. It allows local stakeholders to implement place identities into organic strategy and brand.
This prototype development explains the challenges encountered during the ISO/IEEE 11073 standard implementation process. The complexity of the standard and the consequent heavy requirements, which have not encouraged software engineers to adopt the standard. The developing complexity evaluation drives us to propose two possible implementation strategies that cover almost all possible use cases and eases handling the standard by non-expert users. The first one is focused on medical devices (MD) and proposes a low-memory and low-processor usage technique. It is based on message patterns that allow simple functions to generate ISO/IEEE 11073 messages and to process them easily. MD act as X73 agent. Second one is focused on more powerful device X73 manager, which do not have the MDs' memory and processor usage constraints. The protocol between Agent and Manager is point-to-point and we can distribute the functionality between devices.
Developed both implementation X73 Agent and Manager will cut developing time for applications based on ISO/EEE 11073.
In the internal medicine wide spectrum the gastroenterology is one of the chapters, less enlightened by the scientific evidence. It does not mean that the practice of the grasntroenterology may ot be improved by the systematic use of the approaches of the evidence based medicine
Smoking is a problem, bringing signifi cant social and economic costs to Russiansociety. However, ratifi cation of the World health organization Framework conventionon tobacco control makes it possible to improve Russian legislation accordingto the international standards. So, I describe some measures that should be taken bythe Russian authorities in the nearest future, and I examine their effi ciency. By studyingthe international evidence I analyze the impact of the smoke-free areas, advertisementand sponsorship bans, tax increases, etc. on the prevalence of smoking, cigaretteconsumption and some other indicators. I also investigate the obstacles confrontingthe Russian authorities when they introduce new policy measures and the public attitudetowards these measures. I conclude that there is a number of easy-to-implementanti-smoking activities that need no fi nancial resources but only a political will.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.