Introduction: Children with disabilities often experience unsupportive environments that restrict their play opportunities and inclusion on the school playground. This exclusion can perpetuate inequities for children with disabilities, with lifelong implications. The Sydney Playground Project uses a simple, innovative intervention consisting of placing recycled materials on the playground and engaging parents and educators in risk reframing sessions to create increased playground choice, control, independence and inclusion for all children. Methods: The purpose of this study was to learn from participants about the utility of the intervention for promoting choice and control among children with disability on the school playground. Data included evaluative interviews with 27 school staff (teaching assistants, teachers, therapists, school leadership) across five participating schools after completing of the intervention. Analysis was thematic and explored prominent ideas first within schools, and then between schools. Results: Prior to the intervention, participating school staff focused on active supervision to support play and student needs. During the intervention, school staff experienced role shift and confusion as they allowed the children increased independence while using the recycled materials and learned to navigate how much independence to give the children. Children engaged in increased imaginative and social play, and school staff adopted higher expectations of children's capabilities. Conclusion: Interventions such as the Sydney Playground Project that collaboratively shift adult perceptions to focus on the capabilities of children with disabilities and increase the supportiveness of the physical environment have great promise in increasing play choice and inclusion on the school playground. | 63 STERMAN ET Al.
Objective: Increasing numbers of young people live with a chronic health condition. Much research to date has explored young people’s self-management of their illness and related symptomatology. Relatively less is known about how young people manage their long-term condition in everyday social contexts. This paper reports on findings from a qualitative study examining the perspectives of university students with a chronic health condition, including how they negotiate their health (and experiences of ill health) while at university. Design: A qualitative interview study was conducted with 16 students with a medically diagnosed chronic health condition. Setting: The study was conducted at a major university in Australia. Methods: Data were collected via in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysed thematically and inductively. Results: Findings illustrate how young people sought to position themselves as being ‘healthy’ while simultaneously distancing themselves from labels of ill health and disability. The relative invisibility of their health conditions enabled participants to align with and enact a preferred health identity. Yet, this invisibility presented particular challenges for students when navigating university systems and processes. Indeed, the fluctuating nature of their (ill) health status prompted a felt need continuously to prove their ill health to the university in order to receive academic support. Inevitably, this illness identity was at odds with participants’ own health narratives – triggering additional anxieties and (academic and social) exclusions for these young people. Conclusion: These contradictory (ill) health positions carry a number of implications for how best to support young people living with chronic health conditions while at university.
Debates over how to determine age of consent for youth to participate in research feature prominently in the practice of researchers, research ethics boards (REBs), and community decision makers working with youth. In particular, tensions can arise over how the ethical principles of beneficence, autonomy, and justice are interpreted and applied in research involving young people. We discuss our experiences obtaining ethical approval to conduct a participatory action research project involving youth and the differences of opinion we encountered regarding underage youth's capability to make informed consent. We suggest that researchers, REBs, and community decision makers all share a responsibility to conduct proactive outreach to youth participants, so that they are adequately informed of their rights related to research.
In recent times, empowerment has become the focus of much work with young people amidst increasing concerns about their health. Empowerment is often offered as a 'solution' to such concerns, with the uncritical assumption being made that empowerment unproblematically results in positive health outcomes. While much of the health promotion literature advocates 'empowerment', it often does so without offering a clear conceptualisation of the word itself or indeed addressing the thorny theoretical tensions surrounding the concept's root word of power. In light of this omission, this article offers a more theoretically informed conceptualisation of empowerment and considers the relationship to young people's health. This article outlines a more dynamic and generative conceptualisation of empowerment than hitherto articulated in the literature, informed by Lukes' multidimensional perspective of power. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study on empowerment and young people's health, this article develops six conceptually distinct forms of empowerment (impositional, dispositional, concessional, oppositional, normative and transformative). Data were collected from 55 young men and women aged 15-16 years through group discussions, individual interviews and observational work in a school and surrounding community settings in England. Crucially, these six new forms of empowerment capture and synthesise individual, structural and ideological elements of power that differentially, and sometimes inconsistently, shape the possibilities for young people's empowerment. Of significance is the way in which these different forms of empowerment intersect to (re)produce relations of power and may offer different possibilities for health promotion.
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