title: Challenges Faced – Implications for Policy: The Everyday Lives of Eastern European Women in New Zealand

authors: Ember, Adrienna

subjects: everyday life

abstract: This study explored the everyday lives, aspirations, and coping strategies of seven Eastern European immigrant women in New Zealand who came from Bulgaria, the former Eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia. The answers to the research questions aimed to contribute to the deconstruction of the invisibility and marginalisation of these women in New Zealand.
Guided by the philosophies of Kaupapa Māori Research; the theory of Human Wellbeing; and the theory of Positive Psychology, and using the methods of narrative inquiry, three interviews were conducted with each participant. The focus of the first interviews was to learn about the everyday lives of research participants in their countries of origin. The second interview explored the reasons of relocation to New Zealand, the settlement process, and how women re-established their lives in their new locations. In the final interviews women talked about their current everyday lives and their plans for the future.
Interviews were recorded and summarised in interview summary reports which research participants modified in collaboration with the researcher until a final version was achieved. In addition, women participated in two focus group sessions. The first session was devoted to establish connections among the participants and allow themes to emerge from their conversations. The second group session aimed to explore areas women struggled with in their lives the most: relationships and employment opportunities.
The study yielded contributions to the research topic, to the acculturation literature, and to the design of research with migrants. Firstly, it revealed both negative and positive aspects of the participants’ everyday lives and highlighted some under-researched cultural differences from the mainstream population.
Women highlighted as an important cultural difference their strong preference for straightforward communication which was often experienced as offensive and blatant by local New Zealanders. Research participants critiqued the necessity of networking to obtain jobs in New Zealand which is a clear obstacle for a newly arrived migrant.
This study also highlighted how the acculturation process is more individual and complex than conventional models have sought to explain. While traditional acculturation literature suggests that migrants go through some common patterns during their settlement that ideally leads to their assimilation to the host culture, in this research not all migrant women intended to assimilate. Indeed, those with a stronger wish to become part of the host culture reported more disappointments than those who embraced their cultural otherness as a positive aspect and did not mind reminding different from the dominant Pakeha culture.
Finally, for migrant studies a less common research design was applied by using the Kaupapa Māori framework. This philosophy proposes a research process that empowers immigrants to voice their needs and strengthen them as agents of their lives beyond the research process. While two strength based theories were used for data interpretation (the 3-D model of the Human Wellbeing Theory and the PERMA model of Positive Psychology), the data analysis revealed that both models showed some limitations by failing to incorporate the dimension of spiritual and physical wellbeing within their domains.

text: Challenges Faced – Implications for Policy: The Everyday Lives of Eastern European Women in New Zealand This study explored the everyday lives, aspirations, and coping strategies of seven Eastern European immigrant women in New Zealand who came from Bulgaria, the former Eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia. The answers to the research questions aimed to contribute to the deconstruction of the invisibility and marginalisation of these women in New Zealand.
Guided by the philosophies of Kaupapa Māori Research; the theory of Human Wellbeing; and the theory of Positive Psychology, and using the methods of narrative inquiry, three interviews were conducted with each participant. The focus of the first interviews was to learn about the everyday lives of research participants in their countries of origin. The second interview explored the reasons of relocation to New Zealand, the settlement process, and how women re-established their lives in their new locations. In the final interviews women talked about their current everyday lives and their plans for the future.
Interviews were recorded and summarised in interview summary reports which research participants modified in collaboration with the researcher until a final version was achieved. In addition, women participated in two focus group sessions. The first session was devoted to establish connections among the participants and allow themes to emerge from their conversations. The second group session aimed to explore areas women struggled with in their lives the most: relationships and employment opportunities.
The study yielded contributions to the research topic, to the acculturation literature, and to the design of research with migrants. Firstly, it revealed both negative and positive aspects of the participants’ everyday lives and highlighted some under-researched cultural differences from the mainstream population.
Women highlighted as an important cultural difference their strong preference for straightforward communication which was often experienced as offensive and blatant by local New Zealanders. Research participants critiqued the necessity of networking to obtain jobs in New Zealand which is a clear obstacle for a newly arrived migrant.
This study also highlighted how the acculturation process is more individual and complex than conventional models have sought to explain. While traditional acculturation literature suggests that migrants go through some common patterns during their settlement that ideally leads to their assimilation to the host culture, in this research not all migrant women intended to assimilate. Indeed, those with a stronger wish to become part of the host culture reported more disappointments than those who embraced their cultural otherness as a positive aspect and did not mind reminding different from the dominant Pakeha culture.
Finally, for migrant studies a less common research design was applied by using the Kaupapa Māori framework. This philosophy proposes a research process that empowers immigrants to voice their needs and strengthen them as agents of their lives beyond the research process. While two strength based theories were used for data interpretation (the 3-D model of the Human Wellbeing Theory and the PERMA model of Positive Psychology), the data analysis revealed that both models showed some limitations by failing to incorporate the dimension of spiritual and physical wellbeing within their domains.

year: 2016

title: Character-less programming II: the spreadsheet

authors: Barbour, Robert H.

subjects: computer science

abstract: The spreadsheet is a commonly used, yet under-researched, application tool. Hendry and Green (1994) report fewer than ten entries about spreadsheets in the HCI community literature between 1984 and 1991. The 1993 Human Computer Interaction Proceedings of a Conference on Applications and Case Studies does not list the word 'spreadsheet' in the index whereas databases and wordprocessor are both referenced. The current situation in 1996 is not significantly different. For Polytechnic and University communities, many of whom are involved in teaching about application software, this situation means that the widespread teaching of the tool is simply not being reported in the research literature. The unanswered but researchable question raised in the Hendry and Green (1994) indicate the breadth of the field. Following a summary of these questions, the even more neglected issue of providing culturally appropriate spreadsheet software is raised. A set of constructs for thinking about multicultural software is presented. A model of a procedure for generating an elementary spreadsheet is provided, exemplified and demonstrated for the Maori Language in New Zealand.

text: Character-less programming II: the spreadsheet The spreadsheet is a commonly used, yet under-researched, application tool. Hendry and Green (1994) report fewer than ten entries about spreadsheets in the HCI community literature between 1984 and 1991. The 1993 Human Computer Interaction Proceedings of a Conference on Applications and Case Studies does not list the word 'spreadsheet' in the index whereas databases and wordprocessor are both referenced. The current situation in 1996 is not significantly different. For Polytechnic and University communities, many of whom are involved in teaching about application software, this situation means that the widespread teaching of the tool is simply not being reported in the research literature. The unanswered but researchable question raised in the Hendry and Green (1994) indicate the breadth of the field. Following a summary of these questions, the even more neglected issue of providing culturally appropriate spreadsheet software is raised. A set of constructs for thinking about multicultural software is presented. A model of a procedure for generating an elementary spreadsheet is provided, exemplified and demonstrated for the Maori Language in New Zealand.

year: 1995-11

title: Bundle-driven move analysis: Sentence initial lexical bundles in PhD abstracts

authors: Li, Liang

abstract: Rhetorical moves are discoursal units that perform communicative functions in a given genre. They have been manually identified in many previous studies taking a corpus-based approach, and these studies have provided important contributions to discourse structure theories. However, manual analysis has restricted the scale and quantity of texts under investigation and the identification of moves is likely to be influenced by researchers' prior knowledge. In contrast, a corpus-driven approach, by applying automatic computational technology to process a large number of texts, possibly results in a better representation of the moves in a genre and minimises researcher bias in move identification. This study applies one typical corpus-driven approach, a bundle-driven approach, to analyse rhetorical moves of PhD abstracts, a move-intensive genre. The study focused on 5-word sentence initial bundles. Almost all the generated bundles could be identified as move indicators. The majority of the indicated moves aligned with the moves proposed for research article abstracts in previous studies, and one new move, Structure, was identified. This study indicates the potential of a bundle-driven approach in exploring rhetorical moves and in examining the linguistic features of moves by means of lexical bundles. Pedagogical implications for EAP writing are also suggested.

text: Bundle-driven move analysis: Sentence initial lexical bundles in PhD abstracts Rhetorical moves are discoursal units that perform communicative functions in a given genre. They have been manually identified in many previous studies taking a corpus-based approach, and these studies have provided important contributions to discourse structure theories. However, manual analysis has restricted the scale and quantity of texts under investigation and the identification of moves is likely to be influenced by researchers' prior knowledge. In contrast, a corpus-driven approach, by applying automatic computational technology to process a large number of texts, possibly results in a better representation of the moves in a genre and minimises researcher bias in move identification. This study applies one typical corpus-driven approach, a bundle-driven approach, to analyse rhetorical moves of PhD abstracts, a move-intensive genre. The study focused on 5-word sentence initial bundles. Almost all the generated bundles could be identified as move indicators. The majority of the indicated moves aligned with the moves proposed for research article abstracts in previous studies, and one new move, Structure, was identified. This study indicates the potential of a bundle-driven approach in exploring rhetorical moves and in examining the linguistic features of moves by means of lexical bundles. Pedagogical implications for EAP writing are also suggested.

year: 2020