The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the state of the science on uxoricide, including qualitative findings on 47 survivors. Two qualitative interviews were conducted between January 2004 and January 2005 with 47 convenience sample adult survivors of uxoricide. Data were analyzed using hermeneutic analysis. A number of themes…

In this issue's "Ethical Challenges" column, commentators share their views of how evaluators might respond to specific problematic situations, linking their analyses to the principles and standards they believe are most relevant to the case. Not surprisingly, the perspectives that commentators offer are not always in agreement. When…

The purpose of this qualitative research study is to explore and describe the experiences of transformative learning in seminary students and clergy who have participated in a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) residency program while providing pastoral care to patients in an acute care hospital setting. This research focuses on the affective…

Based on the life histories of residents from La Victoria, a poor settlement in Santiago, Chile, this study reconstructed the central biographic elements in individual empowerment processes, linking them with the sociocultural context in which they occurred. Results show the following main characteristics related to individual empowerment:…

Playfulness steering is an emerging approach in educational game design and play. The integration of arithmetical computation, game strategy, and teamwork into one game allows players to interactively "steer" the playfulness and enhance learning. In this paper an evolutionary contest game was designed and implemented to examine the…

The aim of this article is the explication of the identity of Comparative Education and a critical reflection thereon, by means of a journal analysis of articles published in the "Comparative Education Review" during the first 50 years of its existence. The 1157 articles were analyzed under the following rubrics: levels of analysis of articles;…

The European Qualifications Framework (EQF) table, with descriptors for the reference levels, is by far the most comprehensively annotated table in Europe. Criticism of the table tends to misinterpret it, by looking at the EQF from only one perspective or, at most, two. In this article, we set out to show that the EQF can be understood only if it…

In this article we describe the application of a phenomenological hermeneutical method for interpreting interview texts. The subject of the interviews was to ask "what is the experience of being an educated woman" and get to the core of the experience as much as possible. Using an exploratory phenomenological method to document women's…

This article explores the interaction between the work and lives of five religious qualitative researchers whose research studies investigate both culture and religion. The ways their personal backgrounds, experiences, and values affect their choice of research topics and their relationships with research participants and with data, are revealed…

This life history study focuses on a group of European-American, female preservice teachers and how they have learned literacy across contexts within their lives. Specifically, I examined these teachers' "literacy stories" or stories they told about their own learning to read, write, and interpret texts, looking closely at how they used narrative…

Borrowing the title of Raymond Williams' famous study, the following reflections--sometimes collective and sometimes individual--are based on a series of "Keywords", specifically: "fear", "community" and "creativity". By reflecting on the meanings these words have for us today, we attempt to capture their dialogical character, posing them as sites…

This classroom note describes the lessons I learned from the use of formal debates during the two semesters I taught "Paul and Early Christianity" to undergraduates at a liberal arts college in Ohio. The purpose of the course was primarily to give students the exegetical skills to understand Paul in his own context. The secondary purpose…

Examines personal meanings ascribed to the experience of touch in the context of forgiveness. Data from in-depth interviews with six self-reported Christians were analyzed to determine themes in the meanings participants assigned to a forgiving touch. (Contains 54 references.) (Author)

The conventional image is that we (and other students) reach an understanding of something after a period of puzzled wrestling with the material. Understanding is the end-point of learning. However, there is an important sense in which understanding (of a rudimentary kind) precedes effective learning. Trying to develop this conceptually, I draw on…

This article looks at the practice of educational questioning using the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. It first looks at questions and statements from a hermeneutic perspective, demonstrating some of the differences and similarities between the two. It then details Gadamer's notion of the "true question", asking whether it is…