Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis: interdisciplinary creative art practice and nature connections.

Scoliosis is an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine with the large majority of cases classed as idiopathic, meaning there is no known cause. Typically, most cases occur in children and young people affecting approximately three per cent of the adult populace with five out of six cases being female. The BackBone: Interdisciplinary Creative Practices and Body Positive Resilience pilot research study used arts and humanities methods to measure the impact of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) on well-being and body perception. The research aimed to contribute to a better understanding of alternative treatments towards improving quality of life in young women diagnosed with AIS. In particular, concentrating on two highlighted priorities from the Scoliosis Priority Setting Partnership: (1) How is quality of life affected by scoliosis and its treatment? How can we measure this in ways that are meaningful to patients? (2) How are the psychological impacts (including on body image) of diagnosis and treatment best managed.Using established medical techniques, art-based workshops, and focus groups with postoperative participants with AIS and their families we gathered both quantitative and qualitative data. The workshops explored the aesthetics of imperfection through material investigations that focus on the body as both an object and how it is experienced using the metaphor of tree images. Drawing parallels between the growth patterns of trees that, for complex and often unknown reasons, have grown unexpectedly we explored questions around ideological notions of perfect growth through art-making in a non-clinical setting. Uniquely, the pilot project sought to draw on insights from four key disciplines (art, medicine, psychology and human geography), thinking across boundaries to evoke different ways of knowing and understanding the complexities of body perception through image-making.

Providing ethical guidance for collaborative research in developing countries.

Experience has shown that the application of ethical guidelines developed for research in developed countries to research in developing countries can be, and often is, impractical and raises a number of contentious issues. Various attempts have been made to provide guidelines more appropriate to the developing world context; however, to date these efforts have been dominated by the fields of bioscience, medical research and nutrition. There is very little advice available for those seeking to undertake collaborative social science or natural science research in developing countries and what is there tends to be held within disparate sources. Charting the development of a set of ethics documentation for future use by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme research community, this paper outlines past and present attitudes towards ethics procedures amongst this community and suggests ways in which ethics procedures might be made more relevant and user-friendly to researchers working in this area.