| 1. |
- Andreassen, Sissel
(författare)
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Life Situation, Information Needs, and Information Seeking in Patients with Oesophageal Cancer and their Family Members
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores the experiences of living with oesophageal cancer from the perspective of patients and family members. Also, their needs for information and how they seek information in relation to the illness were investigated. The thesis comprises one qualitative meta-analysis and three empirical studies including data from patients, family members, and health-care professionals. Paper I was a qualitative meta-analysis the aim of which was to extend knowledge about patients' and family members' experiences of living with oesophageal cancer and clinically similar cancer forms, mainly head and neck cancer. As a result of the thematic analysis we have shown that both patients and family members 'run into an unpredictable enemy'. Patients had to 'endure a fading body' Running into an unpredictable enemy and enduring a fading body led to -entering social silence' for patients and family members.The aim of paper II was to describe patients' experiences of living with oesophageal cancer and how they seek information in relation to the illness. Data was collected by qualitative interviews with thirteen patients and analysed by qualitative content analysis. The findings describe patients' experiences of receiving the diagnosis, their experiences of vague symptoms, and of existential concerns evoked by the illness. Undergoing investigations and treatment caused extreme tiredness. Patients experienced that the illness intruded upon their daily life. In order to manage the life-threatening illness- they sought information about the illness.The aim of paper III was to describe family members' experiences of living with a patient suffering from oesophageal cancer, their information needs and information seeking Data was collected by means of qualitative interviews with nine family members and analysed by qualitative content analysis. The findings describe that family members lacked awareness of the disease. When faced with the diagnosis, shock, stress, and disbelief were evoked . The cancer illness became intrusive into their everyday lives, routines, and life plans. Uncertainty about the course and prognosis of the disease was the main source of distress among them. In order to learn, obtain understanding for the illness, and manage this uncertainty, family members entrusted themselves to the experts and sought information from them.Paper IV was a pilot study the aim of which was to describe patients' and family members' information needs following a diagnosis of oesophageal cancer, their satisfaction with information obtained, and health-care professionals' perceptions concerning patients' and family members' information needs. Data was collected by means of a study-specific questionnaire and analysed with descriptive statistics. The results indicate that patients' and family members need for information following a diagnosis of oesophageal cancer was substantial and had not been adequately met by health-care professionals.In conclusion, the receipt of the diagnosis of oesophageal cancer was an abrupt change from feeling healthy with vague symptoms to having a life-threatening illness. The illness disrupts patients' and family members' social world and relationships, and the whole family is affected. For understanding and managing the illness, they sought information from health-care professionals, social networks, and various media
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| 2. |
- Axelsson, Karin, 1968-, et al.
(författare)
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An inter-organisational perspective on challenges in one-stop government
- 2008
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Ingår i: International Journal of Electronic Governance. - 1742-7509 .- 1742-7517. ; 1:3, s. 296-314
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Fragmentation and isolated development are main problems that hinder successful e-government. This paper has an inter-organisational perspective on challenges in one-stop government. We present a conceptual framework that characterises an inter-organisational relationship and its dimensions. The conceptual framework is used for analysing data from an inter-organisational one-stop government project. When applying the framework we focus on some interesting issues and explain some of the challenges that our interviewees identified. By addressing these inter-organisational aspects we reached further understanding of the problems associated with this case, which can provide added value to discussions of e-government challenges, barriers and problems in general.
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| 3. |
- Axelsson, Karin, 1959
(författare)
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Analysing unexpected forms of potential question tags in the spoken component of the British National Corpus
- 2009
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Ingår i: Pre-conference workshop on errors and disfluencies in spoken corpora held in conjunction with ICAME 30, Lancaster U.K., 27 May 2009.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In my thesis project, I compare the use of ‘canonical’ question tags in fiction dialogue and spoken conversation, using data from a BNC fiction subcorpus and the demographic part of the spoken component of the BNC. I first searched for and analysed question tags in fiction, finding it quite unproblematic to apply a conventional definition of question tags (N.B. anchor + question tag = tag question): the tag subject should be co-referent with the anchor subject, the operator should be the same as in the anchor or a form of do if there is a lexical verb in the anchor, and the tag operator should have the same tense and number/person properties as the anchor verb: (1)Well, these things happen, don’t they? Using the same definition in the demographic part turned out to be more problematic, as some phrases which seem to be intended as question tags do not meet the criteria in the definition. These examples can be divided into three categories. The first category is invariant question tags. The tag has a canonical form, usually isn’t it or innit, but it is connected to an anchor with a subject with other number/person properties and/or a finite other than is: (2)you pay much more though isn’t it? The second category may be called modified question tags. These tags have an unexpected form but are logical as there is a plausible alternative wording of the anchor with the same meaning which would make the form of the question tag acceptable. This conforms to the hypothesis that we tend to remember the content of speech rather than the exact wordings. Some examples: (3)But that can be the same anywhere couldn’t it? [alternative: could] (4)Oh it [i.e. the price] was sixteen nineteen nine were they? [alternative: they were] (5)Oh that’s why I came up wasn’t it? [alternative: was] (6)[about a photo] this is at the zoo was it? [alternative: was] The third category is erroneous question tags, i.e. tags where the speaker makes an error in the wording, but where it is still clear that a question tag is intended, as in example (7), which was uttered by a four-year-old girl: (7)you count, one, two, three, four, don’t it? Instances in these three categories are included as question tags in my study. Excluded are question-tag-like wordings involving a new proposition, as in (8) where the change of operator adds a new meaning when the speaker asks for advice: (8)I won’t open another one, should I? and disfluencies, where there seems to be no logical connection to the preceding discourse: (9)Big fancy does are you? Unexpected forms of potential question tags thus require manual analysis; the context is very important here, especially the reaction from the addressee. However, a small number of instances are still problematic. This is sometimes due to the lack of prosodic marking, which can make it difficult to decide whether a tag-like wording is really a question tag or the beginning of a new question.
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| 4. |
- Axelsson, Karin, 1968-, et al.
(författare)
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Citizen Participation and Involvement in eGovernment Projects : An Emergent Framework
- 2008
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Ingår i: Electronic Government. - Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. - 9783540852032 ; , s. 207-218
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper reports from an action research project where focus groups have been used as an approach for taking citizens’ requirements into account during public e-service development projects. In the paper we use theories from the area of user participation in the information systems (IS) discipline in order to discuss and enhance the specific aspects of citizen participation and involvement in the eGovernment context. The main purpose of this paper is to enrich the eGovernment field in general, and to facilitate the citizen perspective in eGovernment development projects in particular, by using notions from the user participation tradition in the IS discipline. Our empirical findings from performing focus groups are discussed and compared to well-known user participation theories from the IS discipline. This results in an emergent framework for better understanding of citizen participation and involvement in the eGovernment context. The emergent framework consists of a set of questions that can be used in order to put an increased focus on the citizen perspective in future eGovernment development projects.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Axelsson, Karin, 1968-, et al.
(författare)
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Communication Analysis of Public Forms : Discovering Multi-functional Purposes in Citizen and Government Communication
- 2007
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Ingår i: International Journal of Public Information Systems. - Sundsvall : MidSweden University. - 1653-4360. ; :3, s. 161-181
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper adopts a communication perspective on forms in public e-services. This perspective emphasizes that the main purpose of such forms is to facilitate communication between citizens and government agencies. The form is perceived as a tool for performing communicative actions. A communication analysis (CA) method, originally developed for systems requirements engineering, is applied on a public form; i.e. the medical certificate used in connection with a citizen’s application for a provisional driving license in Sweden. The CA method consists of a set of questions related tothree communicative categories; conditions, actions, and consequences. The CA method is used in order to explore the communicative roles of forms in public e-services. As a result of the communication analysis four multi-functional purposes of citizen and government agency communication are discovered. These purposes contribute to the understanding and evaluation of forms in public e-services. The communicative roles, and their multi-functional purposes, are important design features to focus in the development of e-services and electronic forms. Besides these findings, another outcomeis that the CA method has been tested in an e-government context. The communication perspective, as well as the CA method, contribute with useful insights in this context.
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| 7. |
- Axelsson, Karin, 1959
(författare)
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Corpus research on fiction dialogue: Problems and possible solutions
- 2008
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Ingår i: ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English) 29, 14–18 May 2008, Ascona, Switzerland.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A great deal of contemporary corpus-based research is focused on spoken language, the primary mode of language use. There is, however, a genre in the written mode which is particularly interesting due to its relation to spoken language: fiction dialogue, as it aims to give ”the illusion of real conversation” (Leech & Short 2007:132). As linguists, we are well aware that certain special characteristics of spoken language are missing in fiction dialogue: overlaps, hesitations etc., but there might also be other less obvious differences. Studies on fiction dialogue might be interesting for e.g. applied linguistics (fiction dialogue being an important input for learners) and corpus stylistics (see Mahlberg 2007). So far, there seems to be very little corpus research on the language of fiction dialogue. The major reason is probably a lack of specially designed corpora. Fiction texts are included in many corpora, but they are a mix of two subgenres, narrative and dialogue, which differ not only in style but also to some extent in vocabulary and the use of grammatical structures. It is usually impossible to restrict corpus searches to fiction dialogue. Manual discarding of irrelevant matches is possible, but frequency calculations are problematic. In this presen¬tation I will describe how we have calculated the proportion of dialogue in a fiction subcorpus of the BNC. There will also be a discussion on the ideal corpus for research on fiction dialogue. The tagging should allow only matches from fiction dialogue to appear in the result display, but the narrative context is of course necessary to keep. The corpus would have to be balanced for a range of features. The most controversial issue is whether certain literary genres like historical novels should be excluded or separately tagged as their language does not pretend to reflect contemporary real-life conversation. Leech, Geoffrey and Mick Short. 2007. Style in fiction: a linguistic introduction to English fictional prose. 2nd edition. Harlow: Longman. Mahlberg, Michaela. 2007. Corpus stylistics: bridging the gap between linguistic and literary studies. In Text, discourse and corpora: theory and analysis, ed. by Michael Hoey, Michaela Mahlberg, Michael Stubbs and Wolfgang Teubert, 219–246. London: Continuum
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Axelsson, Karin, 1968-, et al.
(författare)
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Developing public e-services for several stakeholders : a multifaceted view of the needs for an e-service
- 2009
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Ingår i: Proceeding of the 17th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2009). - 9788861293915 ; , s. 653-664
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper discusses how several stakeholders in a public e-service development project consider a future e-service and expected changes in administrative processes and working routines. Our findings indicate a much more multi facetted view than the common win-win situation, with increased quality for citizens and increased efficiency for agencies, which is rhetorically put forth as an effect of public e-service implementation. We have studied a development project resulting in an e-service for handling student anonymity when marking written exams in higher education. In this case we have identified five stakeholder groups related to this e-service; students, teachers, course administrators, exam guards, and the university at an agency level. All of them having certain expectations and fears about the new situation. By presenting this diversity in opinions we add further complexity to the discussion of building trust or mistrust for administration and technology when developing public e-services.
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| 10. |
- Axelsson, Karin, 1968-, et al.
(författare)
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E-government in Sweden: New Directions : Editorial
- 2009
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Ingår i: International Journal of Public Information Systems. - Sundsvall : MidSweden University. - 1653-4360. ; 5:2, s. 31-35
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In January 2008, the Swedish Government launched a new eGovernment action plan which was formulated to serve as “a new basis for IT-based organisational development in public administration”. The main objective in the plan was formulated as “as simple as possible for as many as possible”. The definition of eGovernment used in the action plan is the one agreed upon by many other European countries: “eGovernment is organisational development in public administrations that takes advantage of information and communication technologies (ICT) combined with organisational changes and new skills”. Behind the suggested course of actions there is a rhetoric that Sweden was now entering a new path regarding eGovernment development. Taken together the declarations in the plan made it and the expressed expectations of profound changes in public administration an interesting target for critical review. Having identified the importance in critically discussing and analysing the action plan, the Swedish Researchers Network in eGovernment (www.egov.nu) arranged a network meeting at the national conference for public sector in Sweden June 2008. The theme for the meeting was “Reflections on the Swedish action plan for eGovernment”. Several researchers and practitioners shared and debated their reflections during this meeting. In order to continue this very interesting discussion after the conference, we then invited authors to submit an article on the same theme, i.e. analysing different aspects of the Swedish action plan for eGovernment. This call for papers was directed both to participants at the network meeting and others, who wanted to contribute to this on-going debate. The call was to encourage authors to communicate and share their insights and opinions regarding the action plan in order to provide knowledge to decision-makers and other practitioners.
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