There are many unanswered questions about the concept of spirituality and its relationship to occupational performance. The role of occupational therapists in addressing clients' spiritual needs is unclear, and the inclusion of spirituality as a topic in the educational curricula of occupational therapy students requires further attention. Focus groups and surveys were used in this phenomenological study to explore the lived experiences of 11 occupational therapy students participating in a 3-month graduate seminar entitled "Spirituality in Occupational Therapy Practice." The study was designed to help occupational therapy faculty better understand how students experience the relationship between occupational therapy and spirituality, and how educational programs can better prepare students to translate theoretical frameworks into practice. Findings explored the students' evolving belief systems, and began to reveal a diversity of beliefs and practices in the occupational therapy community related to spirituality. Implications for theory and practice are offered.
It is the era of evidence-based practices. Now more than ever, social programs are challenged to clearly describe their ideal frameworks and empirically demonstrate fidelity to their standards. In this study, the authors implemented a narrative approach to developing standards in a peer support program for people accessing mental health services. In an attempt to broaden the scope of evidence-based practices, emphasis was placed on developing standards that characterize the helping processes in peer support. Seven helping standards and their related indicators were identified. When is narrative inquiry an effective approach for developing standards? Should similar kinds of social programs have to adopt the same standards? What role do contextual factors play in the development of standards? Whose criteria should standards represent? These are but a few of the broader issues the study attempted to address.
I suggest that evaluators have much to offer in being stewards of citizen deliberation during the conduct of evaluative inquiry, especially in regards to the professional community’s guiding principle of “Responsibility to the general and public welfare.” The deliberative forum is reviewed as one evaluation methodology for bringing the theory of deliberative democratic evaluation into practice. The paper offers a number of reflections from the field based on my experiences of adopting a stewardship role during my evaluation practice. These include: (1) working with the tacit program culture, (2) consciousness of risk, (3) creating dissonance, (4) the role of coaching, and (5) sustaining deliberation in program communities. Examples are offered in thinking about constructing deliberative forums throughout evaluation processes in practical contexts. The paper positions evaluation practice as an important mechanism for contributing toward a civil society and asks evaluators to consider their role in being stewards of citizen deliberation.
The evaluation of modern day social programming presents challenges to the evaluation community. Among these are the need for others to understand the complexity of unique social circumstances and the inclusion of a diverse range of evaluation participants. Such challenges may call for alternative methods of representation in evaluation reporting. In this article I make a case for and demonstrate the use of poetic transcription as one form of presenting evaluation findings. Taking language from focus group interviews, I constructed a poem intended to provoke report readers to engage in a process of reflective meaning making about the program being evaluated. I discuss my rationale for using poetic transcription as a form of evaluation reporting, the method by which I constructed the representation, and the reactions of the different stakeholders involved in the evaluation.
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