BACKGROUND There is a growing recognition of the value of synthesising qualitative research in the evidence base in order to facilitate effective and appropriate health care. In response to this, methods for undertaking these syntheses are currently being developed. Thematic analysis is a method that is often used to analyse data in primary qualitative research. This paper reports on the use of...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To examine patient preferences for content and methods of delivering treatment plans, educational information, and survivorship care plans. RESEARCH APPROACH Thematic analysis of four tape-recorded focus groups of cancer survivors. SETTING An outpatient clinical cancer center in an academic medical center in the midwestern United States. PARTICIPANTS 40 cancer survivors...

The syntactic structure of a sentence is usually a strong predictor of its meaning: Each argument noun phrase (i.e., Subject and Object) should map onto exactly one thematic role (i.e., Agent and Patient, respectively). Some constructions, however, are exceptions to this pattern. This paper investigates how the syntactic structure of an utterance contributes to its construal, using ditransitive...

The time-course with which readers use event-specific world knowledge (thematic fit) to resolve structural ambiguity was explored through experiments and implementation of constraintbased and two-stage models. In a norming study, subjects completed fragments that ended in the ambiguous region of a reduced relative clause (The crook arrested/by/the/detective). Completion proportions up to and in...

The syntactic realization of a verb’s arguments is constrained by the role that the argument plays in the meaning of the verb. In most linguistic frameworks, these constraints are captured by mappings between syntactic functions and thematic roles. Such mappings clearly shape our interpretation of novel verbs. But there is controversy about when these mappings develop and whether they are emplo...

Though associative recognition memory is thought to rely primarily on recollection, recent research indicates that familiarity might also make a substantial contribution when to-be-learned items are integrated into a coherent structure by means of an existing semantic relation. It remains unclear how different types of semantic relations, such as categorical (e.g., dancer-singer) and thematic (...