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BackgroundLeadership is critical to making changes at multiple levels of the social ecological model, including the environmental and policy levels, and will therefore likely contribute to solutions to the obesity epidemic and other public health issues. The literature describing the relative leadership styles and strengths of women versus men is mixed and virtually all research comes from sectors outside of public health. The purpose of this qualitative study is to identify specific leadership skills and characteristics in women who have successfully created change predominantly within the food and physical activity environments in their communities and beyond. The second purpose of this study is to understand best practices for training and nurturing women leaders, to maximize their effectiveness in creating social change.MethodsKey informant interviews were conducted with 16 women leaders in the public health sector from November 2008 through February 2010. The sample represented a broad spectrum of leaders from across the United States, identified through web searches and through networks of academic and professional colleagues. Most were working on improving the food and physical activity environments within their communities. Questions were designed to determine leaders’ career path, motivation, characteristics, definition of success, and challenges. The initial coding framework was based on the questioning structure. Using a grounded theory approach, additional themes were added to the framework as they emerged. The NVivo program was used to help code the data.ResultsRespondents possessed a vision, a strong drive to carry it out, and an ability to mobilize others around the vision. Their definitions of success most often included changing the lives of others in a sustainable way. Persistence and communications skills were important to their success. The mentoring they received was critical. Challenges included fundraising and drifting from their original mission.ConclusionsThese findings may be used to help develop or inform a model of women’s leadership in public health and to improve the training and nurturance of leaders who promote health in their communities and beyond.

This article studies teams of service providers in education and psychiatric services, in which a substantial number of both deaf and hearing people work together as colleagues. It focuses specifically on the challenges involved in cooperatively creating a signing work environment. Using a methodology that draws on the principles of ethnography, it identifies and explores the meaning constructions associated with signing at work, from deaf and hearing perspectives. Data were collected through interviews in three organizations all in the United Kingdom: two specialist psychiatric units for deaf adults and a school for deaf children. Forty-one informants participated (20 deaf, 21 hearing). Results show that from a deaf perspective, hearing people's use of sign language in their presence at work is closely associated with demonstrating personal respect, value, and confidence, and hearing colleagues' willingness to sign is more significant than their fluency. From a hearing perspective, results demonstrate that sign language use at work is closely associated with change, pressure, and the questioning of professional competence. The challenges involved in improving deaf/hearing relations are perceived from a deaf perspective as largely person-centered, and from a hearing perspective as primarily language-centered. The significance of organizational factors such as imbalances in power and status between deaf and hearing colleagues is explored in relation to the findings.

In this article, a research study that examined the working relationships between Deaf and hearing professionals in health and educational services in the United Kingdom is addressed. These service providers worked in bilingual organizations where both British Sign Language and English were used and in which Deaf people's identity as a cultural-linguistic minority was accepted. The focus of this article is on issues of validity and epistemology that arose for the Deaf and hearing research team in the course of this study. In particular, it examines the influence of identity attributions on the research process for researchers operating within a context of historical oppression, minority language use and legitimization of research knowledge, and challenges to the interpretative analysis used in the study that arose from the dynamics of majority-minority power relations in the wider social world.

College This paper describes the early lexical development of four children. Two main issues are considered. The first concerns changes in the children's use of individual words. The second concerns the relationship between the children's use of words and their mother's use of the same words when talking to the children.Analysis of the initial uses of words revealed that there was a very close correspondence between the way in which the children used a particular word and the mother's most frequent use of the word. However, when the children's subsequent uses of the same words were analysed, it was found that their relationship to maternal use was much weaker.These findings are considered in the light of accounts of early lexical development (particularly Barrett 1986) and developmental changes in the representation of linguistic knowledge (Karmiloff-Smith 1988).REFERENCES Barrett, M. D. (1986). Early semantic representations and early word-usage. In S. A. Kuczaj Despite the increasing use of signing in deaf education, linguistic research in British Sign Language (BSL) has begun only recently, as have studies of the development of sign language in children. Research into the means of assessing these skills is also in its infancy. The research project presented here looks at the issues involved in appropriately assessing deaf children's linguistic skills in BSL. Deaf children of deaf parents learn BSL as a native language rather than English. In contrast, deaf children of hearing parents often have not developed any 'native' language until they have entered school. Therefore, there is a probability of great variation in linguistic skill development in BSL among deaf school children. The need exists for teachers to differentiate between the extent of any native language difficulties in BSL in this population and linguistic skills tapped by signed English-based tests. Attempts at using such tests to assess linguistic skill in BSL have many inherent difficulties. These include matching words with signs and vice-versa, to get the at University of Otago Library on March 15, 2015 fla.sagepub.com Downloaded from