Troubling meanings of family and competing moral imperatives in the family lives of young people with a parent who is at the end of life

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a narrative study of young people with a parent who is at the end of life to examine how family lives are troubled by life-limiting parental illness. Young people struggled to reconcile the physical and emotional absence of family members with meanings of ‘family’; the extent to which young people could rely on family to ‘be there’ in these troubling circumstances was of practical, emotional and moral significance. Our discussion is situated in the context of an English end of life care policy predicated on the ideal of a good death as one that takes place at home accompanied by family members. We explore how the shift away from family as a site for nurturing children towards family as a space to care for the dying is experienced by young people, and consider how these competing moral imperatives are negotiated through relational practices of care.     

Linking Scottish vital event records using family groups

Abstract

The reconstitution of populations through linkage of historical records is a powerful approach to generate longitudinal historical microdata resources of interest to researchers in various fields. Here we consider automated linking of the vital events recorded in the civil registers of birth, death and marriage compiled in Scotland, to bring together the various records associated with the demographic events in the life course of each individual in the population. From the histories, the genealogical structure of the population can then be built up. Rather than apply standard linkage techniques to link the individuals on the available certificates, we explore an alternative approach, inspired by the family reconstitution techniques adopted by historical demographers, in which the births of siblings are first linked to form family groups, after which intergenerational links between families can be established. We report a small-scale evaluation of this approach, using two district-level data sets from Scotland in the late nineteenth century, for which sibling links have already been created by demographers. We show that quality measures of up to 83% can be achieved on these data sets (using F-Measure, a combination of precision and recall). In the future, we intend to compare the results with a standard linkage approach and to investigate how these various methods may be used in a project which aims to link the entire Scottish population from 1856 to 1973.     

A POLYMORPHIC APPROACH TO POLICY ANALYSIS: A CASE STUDY OF ONTARIO'S ETHANOL IN GASOLINE REGULATION

This article develops a “polymorphic” approach to policy analysis, that is, an approach that draws on multiple forms of spatial reasoning. Specifically, the proposed framework deploys scale and network not merely as epistemological devices that make sense of “horizontal” and “vertical” politico‐institutional structures, but as co‐constitutive ontological processes that involve an ever‐shifting interplay among legacies, rhythms, and events. This polymorphic approach, we argue, facilitates the identification and the examination of the mobilization of social networks and of the attendant cross‐scalar interactions that must be articulated whenever a given policy is framed as a sensible and politically viable place‐based solution. The novel conceptual framework is then applied to the empirical investigation of the formulation of the complex moral, political, and economic environment that enabled the emergence of Ontario's controversial Ethanol in Gasoline Regulation. Our polymorphic approach reveals how this regulation is a (failed) attempt to reconcile Canada's legacy as a resource‐based economy and Ontario's legacy as a manufacturing‐based economy where value is added, with the need for more rational and less harmful resource extraction and for greener fuels that can sustain the current order. We build on the lessons drawn from this case study to suggest that our approach has wider applicability in that it can help create a process‐oriented, dynamic, and multi‐dimensional geography of policy‐making.