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This article is the fourth in a series introducing the reader to methods and theories relevant to advancing socio‐legal research. They are written for the curious rather than the expert reader and provide illustrations of how the theories, methods, and frameworks have been employed and might be used in your work. This article explores the use of case biography methods for socio‐legal studies. Drawing on ‘paths to justice’ studies, network analysis, and legal archaeology, we develop a case study of AC v.Berkshire West Primary Care Trust. We show how the judicial determination of the case suppressed a transgender rights narrative construction of the dispute in favour of one about health care law. Our case biography analysis explores how competing narratives can be traced not only through legal argument and literature, but also through the personnel involved, in ways that are obscured by formal records. Paying attention to biographical features leads to a richer understanding of cases, including the importance of pre‐ and post‐judicial decision‐making aspects.

Aims and Objectives Neonatal inpatient care is reliant on experienced nursing care, yet little is known about how Kenyan hospitals foster the development of newborn nursing experience in newborn units. Design A Qualitative ethnographic design. Methods Face to face 29 in depth interviews were conducted with nurses providing neonatal care in one private, one faith based and one public hospital in Nairobi, Kenya between January 2017 and March 2018. All data were transcribed verbatim, coded in the original language and analysed using a framework approach. Results Across the sectors, nurses perceived experience as important to the provision of quality care. They noted that hospitals could foster experience through recruitment, orientation, continuous learning and retention. However, while the private hospital facilitated experience building the public and faith‐based hospitals experienced challenges due to human resource management practices and nursing shortages. Conclusion Health sector context influenced how experience was developed among nurses. Implications Nurturing experience will require that different health sectors adopt better recruitment for people interested in NBU work, better orientation and fewer rotations even without specialist nurse training.

Acute malnutrition in infants under 6 months (u6m) is increasingly recognised as a global public health problem. The World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines for inpatient nutritional rehabilitation of infants u6m is re‐lactation: the re‐establishment of exclusive breastfeeding. Evidence suggests these guidelines are rarely followed in many low‐income settings. Two studies of infant nutritional rehabilitation undertaken in three public hospitals in coastal Kenya employed breastfeeding peer supporters (BFPSs) to facilitate WHO guideline implementation. To explore the acceptability of the strategy to health workers (HWs) and the BFPSs, in‐depth interviews were conducted with 20 HWs and five BFPSs in the three study hospitals. The HWs reported that the presence of the BFPSs changed the way infant nutritional rehabilitation was managed, increasing efforts at relactation and decreasing reliance on supplemental milk. BFPSs were said to help address staff shortages and had dedicated time to support and assist the mothers. Key to the success of the BFPSs was the social relationships they were able to establish with the mothers due to the similarity in their experiences and backgrounds. Despite the success of the BFPSs, human resource management and infrastructure challenges remained. BFPSs can successfully be employed to facilitate the implementation of the WHO guidelines for the nutritional rehabilitation of acutely malnourished infants u6m in hospitals in Kenya, establishing supportive social relationships and trust with the mothers of the acutely malnourished infants and helping to address the issue of human resource shortages.

Re‐establishment and maintenance of exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) is recommended by the World Health Organization for the nutritional rehabilitation of malnourished infants under 6 months; however, there is no explicit guidance on how this should be achieved. The IBAMI study—a pilot study conducted in Kilifi, Kenya—implemented these recommendations using an intervention for hospitalized infants and their mothers that included ward‐based breastfeeding peer supporters. This paper explores how the challenges of maintaining EBF are recontextualized after infant hospitalization for malnutrition. Four weeks after discharge, semistructured interviews on experiences of trying to maintain EBF in a postdischarge home setting were conducted with a total of 20 mothers. Although most stated the aspiration of maintaining EBF for 6 months, a range of challenges were reported and not all had successfully maintained EBF post discharge. Reported challenges include the stress of household chores, food insecurity, technical difficulties and social stigma of expressing breast milk, pressure from neighbours and family members to introduce mixed feeding, and needing more community‐based awareness and support. Most of these challenges were specific to the home setting and were not easily surmountable, despite the breastfeeding practices mothers had learned in the ward. Indeed, in some cases, challenges were exacerbated by the overmedicalized nature of the breastfeeding practices taught in the ward. In order to aid the transition from ward to home, there may be a need to further translate ward‐based education and promotional messaging for EBF into a community setting, targeting other caregivers as well.

Judges articulate their role in controversial cases of medical ethics in terms of deference to Parliament, lest their personal morality be improperly brought to bear. This hides a wide range of law-making activities, as parliamentary sovereignty is diffused by ‘intermediate law-makers’, and judicial activity is more subtle than the deference account implies. The nature of litigation raises questions about the contributions of other legal personnel and also the nature of the parties' interests in test-cases. While judges demonstrate an awareness of some of these issues and anxiety about the constitutional legitimacy of their work, a more nuanced account is needed of their proper role. This may be built on Austin's theory of tacit legislation. It may draw from human rights law. However, considerable work is required before the complexities of hidden law-making can be properly incorporated into the province of medical jurisprudence.

Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present study we describe the nature and extent of vowel variation in nearly 900 vowel tokens in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language of northern Australia, which, like bilingual input, has differences in the relative frequency of adjacent, overlapping vowel categories. In Analysis 1, we provide the first systematic account of vowel variation and phone frequency in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol. In Analysis 2, cluster analysis was applied to the vowel formant and duration data, to see what categories might emerge from acoustic data alone. The results suggest that, were infants to base their initial vowel categories solely on the clusters emerging in acoustic space, they might likely set up relatively few vowel categories. We discuss implications for how infants may learn Gurindji Kriol and for distributional learning.

Flooding due to coastal storm surges presents a significant threat to life and property. The UK has long had a storm surge forecasting system based on a single ‘deterministic’ simulation. This was augmented with an operational storm surge ensemble in December 2009. By producing several simulations sampling the forecast uncertainty, the ensemble estimates the probability of reaching critical water levels and thus supports a more risk-based approach to civil protection. The original storm surge ensemble provided forecasts out to T + 54 h, limited by the forecast range of the driving MOGREPS-R atmospheric ensemble. Longer-range forecasts could provide advance notice of the potential for a significant event, allowing suitable preparatory actions to be taken. This study investigates the possibility of extending the storm surge ensemble to between 5 and 7 days using atmospheric data from the lower-resolution Met Office 15-day ensemble (MOGREPS-15). Both case studies and statistical verification indicate the potential for useful forecasts out to the full 7.25 days tested. The best performance is obtained by extending the existing surge ensemble products with output from separate runs of the storm surge model, which have been driven by MOGREPS-15 meteorology from T + 0 h. An attempt to create a single surge history for each member by switching from MOGREPS-R to MOGREPS-15 input at T + 54 h led to spurious oscillations in some cases, and poorer performance on several statistical measures. These issues might be improved by smoothing the discontinuity in atmospheric forcing. Following this successful trial, the separate-runs extension to the surge ensemble was implemented operationally in summer 2011. The study also demonstrates the benefit of online bias correction and ‘dressing’ the forecast members to account for errors which the system does not otherwise sample. The operational implementation of these features is left for future work. Copyright © 2012 British Crown copyright, the Met Office Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Regulatory T cells (Tregs) migrate into peripheral sites of inflammation such as allografts undergoing rejection, where they serve to suppress the immune response. In this study, we find that ∼30-40% of human CD25(hi) FOXP3(+) CD4(+) Tregs express the peripheral CXC chemokine receptor 3 (CXCR3) and that this subset has potent immunoregulatory properties. Consistently, we observed that proliferative responses as well as IFN-γ production were significantly higher using CXCR3-depleted versus undepleted responders in the mixed lymphocyte reaction, as well as following mitogen-dependent activation of T cells. Using microfluidics, we also found that CXCR3 was functional on CXCR3(pos) Tregs, in as much as chemotaxis and directional persistence towards interferon-γ-inducible protein of 10 kDa (IP-10) was significantly greater for CXCR3(pos) than CXCR3(neg) Tregs. Following activation, CXCR3-expressing CD4(+) Tregs were maintained in vitro in cell culture in the presence of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitor rapamycin, and we detected higher numbers of circulating CXCR3(+) FOXP3(+) T cells in adult and pediatric recipients of renal transplants who were treated with mTOR-inhibitor immunosuppressive therapy. Collectively, these results demonstrate that the peripheral homing receptor CXCR3 is expressed on subset(s) of circulating human Tregs and suggest a role for CXCR3 in their recruitment into peripheral sites of inflammation.

To reconstruct an indigenous language known solely from historical wordlists, the linguist needs to decide which source wordlists are most relevant, i.e. which sources are most likely to be attestations of the language to be reconstructed. There is little published research on methods appropriate to this task, and yet there is increasing attention to indigenous language reconstruction in support of language revival and revitalisation in education and community contexts. This paper1 describes a replicable and relatively objective method for comparing lexical similarity within a set of historical sources. The method described draws on the use of measures of lexical similarity in linguistics and the use of measures of endemism in biogeography. The method is illustrated via an analysis of historical sources for Aboriginal languages from the greater Sydney region, New South Wales, Australia. The sample is used to describe the overall similarity and difference between wordlists from this region, and to identify which wordlists are most similar to the wordlist recorded by the surveyor R. H. Mathews (e.g. 1903) as Darkinyung language.

Over the past 50 years, there have been considerable changes both in how medical anthropologists view their relationship to tropical public health and in how tropical public health professionals view the role of anthropologists. In particular, in recent decades critical currents have emerged from an anthropology of medicine, calling for an examination of biomedicine and its conceptualisation of public health. There are parallel debates in public health about a narrow disease-focused or broader socio-cultural approach to improving population health. Based on a review of the literature and a qualitative study of the views of public health professionals and anthropologists working in tropical public health, the data presented in this paper suggest that public health professionals remain unaware of many of the contributions anthropology could make to tropical public health theory and practice. However, the objectives of a critical social science are not dissimilar to those of the broader concept of public health. We suggest that there are grounds for optimism. For those of us concerned not just with disease but also with inequities in health, the challenge is to work towards a critical tropical public health which draws as much from social science as from biomedicine, in theory and practice.