Browsing by Person "Campbell, Craig"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Mapping practice onto theory: the speech and language practitioner's construction of receptive language impairment
(Taylor & Francis, 2008-05) Law, James; Campbell, Craig; Roulstone, S.; Adams, C.; Boyle, James
Background: Receptive language impairment (RLI) is one of the most significant indicators of negative sequelae for children with speech and language disorders. Despite this, relatively little is known about the most effective treatments for these children in the primary school period. Aims: To explore the relationship between the reported practice of speech and language practitioners and the underlying rationales for the therapy that they provide. Methods & Procedures: A phenomenological approach was adopted, drawing on the experiences of speech and language practitioners. Practitioners completed a questionnaire relating to their practice for a single child with receptive language impairment within the 5-11 age range, providing details and rationales for three recent therapy activities. The responses of 56 participants were coded. All the children described experienced marked receptive language impairments, in the main associated with expressive language difficulties and/or social communication problems. Outcome & Results: The relative homogeneity of the presenting symptoms in terms of test performance was not reflected in the highly differentiated descriptions of intervention. One of the key determinants of how therapists described their practice was the child's age. As the child develops the therapists appeared to shift from a 'skills acquisition' orientation to a 'meta-cognitive' orientation, that is they move away from teaching specific linguistic behaviours towards teaching children strategies for thinking and using their language. A third of rationales refer to explicit theories but only half of these refer to the work of specific authors. Many of these were theories of practice rather than theories of deficit, and of those that do cite specific theories, no less than 29 different authors were cited many of whom might best be described as translators of existing theories rather than generators of novel theories. Conclusions: While theories of the deficit dominate the literature they appear to play a relatively small part in the eclectic practice of speech and language therapists. Theories of therapy may develop relatively independent of theories of deficit. While this may not present a problem for the practitioner, whose principal focus is remediation, it may present a problem for the researcher developing intervention efficacy studies, where the theory of the deficit will need to be well-defined in order to describe both the subgroup of children under investigation and the parameters of the deficit to be targeted in intervention. © 2008 Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists.
Medicine, rhetoric and undermining: managing credibility in homeopathic practice
(2008-04) Campbell, Craig
This article examines homeopathic practitioners 'real life' accounts, and illustrates the ways in which they negotiate their homeopathic practices as contingently formulated ongoing social events in research interview settings. Interview transcripts were analysed in a qualitative framework using discourse analysis. The findings show that practitioners construct homeopathy and defend their own individual practices either by 'alignment-with-medicine' or by 'boosting-the-credibility-of-homeopathy'. Homeopathy is also negotiated and sustained as an 'alternative' to notions of conventional medicine, which is the accepted yardstick for practice or as a practice that is portrayed as problematic. Overall, managing personal credibility is accomplished through specific ways of accounting that tend to marginalise homeopathy. Developing and establishing homeopathic practice further as a discipline in its own right is offered as a 'nucleus' to reduce continuing marginalisation. 2008 The Faculty of Homeopathy.
Talk about homeopathy: discursive strategies as ways to continually marginalise homeopathy from mainstream acceptance
(Queen Margaret University, 2009) Campbell, Craig
Traditionally, quantifiable research into homeopathy has largely focused on its effectiveness compared to forms of mainstream medicine. The effect of such comparisons is that homeopathy is commonly constructed as not being demonstrably effective. It becomes discredited, demarcated and downgraded as an alternative 'type' of practice, subsequently marginalised in terms of mainstream acceptance. Qualitative studies concerned with homeopathy and focusing on notions of personal credibility, demarcation and the marginal are primarily concerned with practitioners' perspectives, where views are taken for granted and regarded as representative of accurate events. Thus, no study has focused on and investigated social constructions of homeopathic practice derived from practitioners, and their patients, in the semi-structured interview and in the context of the homeopathic consultation. Here, I identify and fill a gap in the literature which is currently under-represented. The corpus of twenty practitioners, seventeen patients and five homeopathic consultations drawn from interview and consultation contexts were recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim. The innovative analytical framework is informed by discursive psychology perspectives that focus on accounts as action. Discourse analysis (DA) led to new, original and significant findings about how interpersonal experiences in relation to homeopathic practice are contingently formulated and constituted in interaction and configured over broader discourses. The analytical chapters show how talk about homeopathy is presented via four discursive strategies: by using the communicative competencies and descriptions they do, the participants' factual accounts function to enhance their own individual credibility and that of their practices, defend their practices and attend to the notion of personal accountability as a discursive practice. For those advocates for homeopathy, managing their personal credibility is accomplished only through sensitive ways of accounting. This reflects the way in which homeopathic practice is located in a culture of scepticism, as an alternative, contested and controversial 'type' of practice positioned on the fringe of the modern medical market. Demonstrating an understanding of homeopathy and their expectations of it as a form of treatment, participants draw upon dichotomised categories attributed to notions of mainstream medicine and homeopathy, combined with various discursive devices to add persuasiveness to their descriptions. Overall, the originality of the research lies in the application of the innovative interactional DA framework, its broad range of participants and unique findings from within the field of homeopathy. With several implications, it forms a unique interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological contribution to the DA literature. It has practical implications for future policy makers, in the education and training of practitioners, and offers ways to approach future research in homeopathic encounters and in parallel health-related encounters such as other CAM therapies, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Notably, the transferability of the findings has wider implications for the understanding of other contested, controversial and new medical practices in the ways that mainstream medicine is the taken-for-granted, accepted yardstick for practice. In making this distinction, the paradoxical boundaries of what is and what is not acceptable is seen as a central issue to members' mutually intelligible sense-making practices in everyday medical encounters.