With the advent of Web 2.0 tools such as Weblogs (blogs), lay people can more easily share knowledge with the public and have far greater reach and impact. At the same time a literature review reveals that experts have been criticised on many fronts. This paper explores key criticisms of experts using 1) a literature review and 2) an interpretive study of lay blogger perceptions of experts. The...

Beliefs about whether people can change ("lay theories" of malleability) are known to have wide-ranging effects on social motivation, cognition, and judgment. Yet rather than holding an overarching belief that people can or cannot change, perceivers may hold independent beliefs about whether different people are malleable-that is, lay theories may be target-specific. Seven studies demonstrate t...

Although involvement of the consumer is increasingly being advocated in health related research, it is not welcome universally. Furthermore, the underlying rationale is rarely made explicit. Policy makers, health care professionals, and researchers need to be clear about the benefits and ways of including lay perspectives and the criteria for evaluating these. Examples of lay involvement in set...

Working within frameworks drawn from the writings of Immanuel Kant, Alfred Schutz, and Kenneth Burke, this article examines the role that diagnostic categories play in autobiographical accounts of illness, with a special focus on chronic disease. Four lay diagnostic categories, each with different connections to formal medical diagnostic categories, serve as typifications to make sense of the w...

Purpose Lay consultations can facilitate or impede healthcare. However, little is known about how lay consultations for symptom evaluation affect treatment decision-making. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of lay consultations in symptom evaluation prior to hospitalization among patients with heart failure. Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 patients ho...

The use of lay health advisers has become an established approach within public health, in particular for impact on health inequalities and engaging socially excluded groups. Evidence on how differences in terms of the multiple role dimensions impact the outcomes of programs is limited. This creates ambiguity for decision makers on which roles should be implemented in different contexts for dif...

In North West London, health and social care leaders decided to design a system of integrated care with the aim of improving the quality of care and supporting people to maintain independence and participation in their community. Patients and carers, known as 'lay partners,' were to be equal partners in co-production of the system. Lay partners were recruited by sending a role profile to health...

The question—what explains cost overruns and benefit shortfalls—remains an important conversation in project management. Two theoretical principles, the Planning Fallacy Hiding Hand, shed light on behavior, that is how projects take different complex out-turns. denotes tendency for forecasts of schedules, costs, benefits to be unrealistically close best-case scenarios. however, suggests it not ...

This paper analyses an amazingly close analogy between models of generalised trinitarin logics on the one hand side and class hierarchies in field object-oriented programming other, thus linking philosophy religion computer science. In order to bring out this as clear precise possible, we utilise a metaobject protocol for actual implementation theological models. These formal implementations le...