Search results

Comparatively, men have poorer physical and mental health outcomes than women, with a significantly higher suicide rate. Contributory factors are thought to be social and biological, leading to reduced access to health-care services. The study aims to develop and implement community-based support to increase awareness of and access to men’s mental health support networks and groups.

The project involved three key work-packages discussed in this paper: raising awareness of men’s mental health needs in health care, educational and community settings; collaboration between National Health Services (NHS) and non-NHS health-care support organisations to build multi-sector partnership working; and developing a supported sports-based community intervention aimed at men living with mental health conditions. The acceptability and feasibility of these work-packages were pragmatically evaluated through mixed-methods surveys and qualitative content analysis.

Overall, both community events and sports groups successfully engaged men living with mental health problems. Organisations interested in men’s mental health are continuing to engage in a partnership initiative. Community events were well-attended and received positive feedback, particularly regarding the educative and real-life experiences approach promoted in the events. The sports intervention is feasible and well-accepted by participants, who described feeling supported with their physical and mental health needs, with increased mental well-being reported.

The main limitations of this project are that the authors only evaluated a football group rather than all work areas. The project collected outcomes relating to participants’ demographics and qualitative reflections of participating in the football group along with a retrospective survey of perceived benefits, but the project did not undertake a pre- and post-comparison of well-being outcomes owing to low completion of these measures. Future work could focus on collecting more pre- and post-measures related to well-being, recovery and inclusion and compare these with men not involved in the football groups or public events.

This paper discusses the development and feasibility of setting up community-based men’s mental health support networks, involving public events, partnership working and targeted-sports interventions. All initiatives were well-received and successfully attended by men living with mental health conditions. Evaluation of the programme revealed the value placed on education about mental health and the role that community sports interventions may play in men’s mental health care.

This project has demonstrated three different ways of supporting men’s mental health needs in the community. Community public events were held to raise awareness of men’s mental health needs and issues were well-attended and highlighted the need for health promotion and education in this area across all the communities. The men’s football group demonstrated the feasibility of moving mental health support out into a non-clinical and more community arena in a way that men engaged effectively. Finally, the creation of MensNet has bought together disparate multi-sector organisations successfully to lead public health mechanisms to support men’s mental health needs.

This paper describes a new multi-disciplined approach to supporting health-seeking challenges among men, in particular, how partnership working across NHS and non-NHS sectors can successfully support an identified public health need pragmatically using existing services and organisations.

A body of literature and case studies has developed as part of the reporting, outreach and evaluation of the local and regional food system projects supported by grants and other funders. Yet, there is concern that food value chains are promoted without adequately evaluating the viability of these businesses, or how these markets affect the performance and welfare of key stakeholders: farm vendors and local communities/economies.

This paper reviews and summarizes a comprehensive set of U.S.-based case studies focused on food value chains. We conduct a meta-analysis to systematically capture what available case study evidence tells us about: 1) trends in the viability of food value chain businesses; 2) the impact of these businesses on participating farm vendors; and, 3) the associated community economic development outcomes (framed in terms of ‘wealth creation’).

In addition to sharing findings from the meta-analysis, we demonstrate how the lack of standardized protocols for case study development is a barrier to learning about metric comparisons, best practices, and what impacts these food value chain businesses may have. We conclude with some recommendations of how the field can move forward to evaluate and share lessons learned using more uniform, project-driven case study development.

This is the first study to conduct a systematic meta-analysis of U.S. food value chain businesses.

Alerts health educators to the message that eating a healthy diet and taking regular exercise in childhood and young adulthood can help to prevent the bone disease osteoporosis in later life. Describes a teaching pack produced by the National Osteoporosis Society for primary school children. Summarizes evidence that school children take insufficient exercise and that many teenagers have a poor calcium intake. Reports on feedback from schools which have used the teaching pack.

Using Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as a guide, the purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of considering the library as place, and specifically as a place that has the “curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (Foucault, 1986a, p. 24).

The paper draws upon a range of literary examples and from biographical accounts of authors such as Alan Bennett, Michel Foucault, and Umberto Eco to show how the library space operates as a heterotopia.

The paper finds that drawing together the constructs of heterotopia and serendipity can enrich the understanding of how libraries are experienced as sites of play, creativity, and adventure.

Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is offered as an original and useful frame that can account for the range of experiences and associations uniquely attached to the library.

The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 directed the US Secretary of Agriculture to report on the profitability and viability of beginning farmers and ranchers. Many beginning operations use local food markets as they provide more control, or a premium over commodity prices, and beginning operations cannot yet take advantage of economies of scale and subsequently have higher costs of production. Little research assesses the relationship between beginning farmer profitability and sales through local food markets. In this paper, the profitability implications of sales through local food markets for beginning farmers and ranchers are explored.

The authors utilize 2013–2016 USDA agricultural resource management survey data to assess the financial performance of US beginning farmers and ranchers who generate sales through local food markets.

The results point to four important takeaways to support beginning operations. (1) Local food channels can be viable marketing opportunities for beginning operations. (2) There are differences when using short- and long-term financial performance indicators, which may indicate that there is benefit to promoting lean management strategies to support beginning operations. (3) Beginning operations with intermediated local food sales, on average, perform better than those operations with direct-to-consumer sales. (4) Diversification across local food market channel types does not appear to be an indicator of improved financial performance.

This article is the first to focus on the relationship beginning local food sales and beginning farmer financial performance. It incorporates short-term and long-term measures of financial performance and differentiates sales by four local food market type classifications: direct-to-consumer sales at farmers markets, other direct-to-consumer sales, direct-to-retail sales and direct-to-regional distributor or institution sales.

This paper aims to analyse the development of the pilgrimage phenomenon over the past few decades. Pilgrimage was the first tourism mobility to come into existence thousands of years ago. In recent decades, its significance has decreased, as other tourism segments have gained prominence. Although modern tourism is regarded as a relatively new phenomenon, its origins are clearly rooted in the age-old practice of pilgrimage. Indeed, the development of tourism is difficult to understand without a thorough comprehension of the practice of pilgrimage in ancient times.

This paper analyses the development of the pilgrimage phenomenon over the past few decades. The phenomenon of Pilgrimage Tourism and the nexus between the two mobilities has been experiencing tremendous changes over the past few decades and is still in the midst of an on-going process of transformation.

This paper concludes with the prediction that pilgrimage will re-emerge when the many similar segments – particularly, spiritual tourism, heritage tourism, religious tourism, dark tourism and secular pilgrimage – are re-identified as pilgrimage: a mobility for the search for meaning that contains an element of transformation that is often deep and enduring (as they were viewed at the dawn of humanity and for thousands of years).

This review has examined the development of pilgrimage tourism as a research topic, highlighting the importance of re-examining our contemporary usage of terms in order to allow for broader interpretations of different phenomena in the field of tourism. These conclusions are consistent with the current calls for a fundamental rethinking of the paradigms and the norms shaping scholarship on pilgrimage, dark tourism and tourism as a whole from a post-disciplinary perspective based on synthesis and synergy.

Beginning farmers have unique challenges securing credit because they are less likely to have established sales and collateral for secured loans. This article explores US beginning farmers’ financing strategies relative to those of established operations, with a focus on the source of financing and debt structure (short- vs long-term usage). Agricultural operations commonly use nontraditional financing tools and strategies to start, build and/or sustain their businesses. This article provides a comparative overview of financing strategies comparing established operators to operations with only beginning operators, as well as those multigenerational operations with at least one beginning operator.

The study uses 2013–2016 USDA Agricultural Resource Management Survey data to explore how various financing patterns vary across US beginning farmers and ranchers with a particular focus on understanding differences where (1) all operators are beginning, (2) there is a mix of beginning and established operators and (3) all operators are established.

This article explores how the nature of beginning farmer status, human capital resources and alternative marketing strategies may influence financial management strategies and lead to differential use of nontraditional financing sources for beginning farmers and ranchers.

Though exploratory, the authors hope that attention to patterns among US beginning farmers and ranchers of reliance on human capital resources including off-farm income and type of beginning farm operation, nontraditional government support programs and alternative marketing strategies can provide important information as to the role of nontraditional credit in the US farm economy.

This chapter reflects on the process of conducting qualitative research as an indigenous researcher, drawing from two studies based in south Wales (the United Kingdom). The chapter not only explores the advantages of similarity in relation to trust, access, gender and understandings of locality, but it also complicates this position by examining the problem of familiarity.

The studies, one doctoral research and one an undergraduate dissertation project, both took a qualitative approach and introduced visual methods of data production including collages, maps, photographs and timelines. These activities were followed by individual elicitation interviews.

The chapter argues that the insider outsider binary is unable capture the complexity of research relationships; however, these distinctions remain central in challenging the researcher’s preconceptions and the propensity for their research to be clouded by their subjective assumptions of class, gender, locality and community.

The chapter presents strategies to fight familiarity in fieldwork and considers the ethical issues that arise when research is conducted from the competing perspectives of both insider and academic. The authors focus on uncertainties and reservations in the fieldwork process and move beyond notions of fighting familiarity to consider the unforeseen circumstances of acquaintance and novel positionings within established social networks.

Social class has long existed in tension with other forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality, both in academic and popular debate. While Marxist-influenced class primacy perspectives gained prominence in US sociology in the 1970s, they faded from view by the 1990s, replaced by perspectives focusing on culture and institutions or on intersectional analyses of how multiple forms of social difference shape durable patterns of disempowerment and marginalization. More recently, class and capitalism have reasserted their place on the academic agenda, but continue to coexist uneasily with analyses of oppression and social difference. Here we discuss possibilities for bridging the gap between studies of class and other forms of social difference. We contend that these categories are best understood in relation to each other when situated in a larger system with its own endogenous dynamics and tendencies, namely capitalism. After providing an historical account of the fraught relationship between studies of class and other forms of social difference, we propose a theoretical model for integrating understandings of class and social difference using Wright et al.‘s concept of dynamic asymmetry. This shifts us away from discussions of which factors are most important in general toward concrete discussions of how these factors interact in particular cases and processes. We contend that class and other forms of social difference should not be studied primarily as traits embodied in individuals, but rather with respect to how these differences are organized in relation to each other within a framework shaped by the dynamics of capitalist development.