De overheid trekt zich terug en legt steeds meer verantwoordelijkheid bij de burger. Dat is reden tot zorg, want door bezuinigingen op bijvoorbeeld de rechtsbijstand kan de toegankelijkheid van het recht in het gedrang komen. Maar er zijn ook kansen. Voortschrijdende digitalisering stelt mensen in staat zelf oplossingen te zoeken bij juridische problemen. Dit kan meer keuzevrijheid en meer zelfstandigheid betekenen, hoewel onzekerheid over dit palet aan mogelijkheden evenzeer op de loer ligt. Een mogelijk bijeffect is dat er nog meer juridische problemen ontstaan, omdat door onzekerheid of onwetendheid kan worden besloten geen rechtszaak te starten, geen aanvraag in te dienen of niet tot actie over te gaan wanneer rechten worden geschonden. Een ding staat vast: het beroep op de eigen kracht van de burger neemt toe. Maar in hoeverre zijn burgers zelfstandig in staat gebruik te maken van het recht en hun rechtspositie te beschermen? De vraag is niet nieuw. Sinds het einde van de negentiende eeuw is hier aandacht voor. Deze aandacht verloopt in golfbewegingen en verandert in de loop der tijd van accent en betekenis. In het huidige tijdsbestek, waarin een transitie gaande is van verzorgingsstaat naar participatiesamenleving is de vraag opnieuw actueel. Als mensen meer op zichzelf zijn aangewezen en zelf oplossingen moeten zoeken voor hun juridische problemen, hoe zet je hen dan in hun kracht? De vraag wat legal empowerment kan betekenen voor de toegankelijkheid van het recht in de Nederlandse participatiesamenleving staat hier centraal. In het eerste hoofdstuk worden de belangrijkste ontwikkelingen in de literatuur over de toegankelijkheid van het recht beschreven. De nadruk ligt hierbij op gebruikers van het recht en het daadwerkelijk kunnen gebruiken van het recht. Dit kader helpt om het concept legal empowerment te kunnen plaatsen. Vervolgens wordt in het tweede hoofdstuk een analyse gemaakt van de achtergrond, de kenmerken en de toepassing van legal empowerment om het begrip beter te kunnen duiden. De lessen die we hieruit kunnen trekken, worden in het laatste hoofdstuk toegepast op de situatie in Nederland, met name op thema’s als de terugtredende overheid, decentralisatie, digitalisering en juridische dienstverlening.
IntroductionOver the past years, health games have shown to be an effective method for providing patient-education. At the same time, physical activity as medicine is increasingly popular when stimulating health in patients. Especially for those who are inactive and have a chronic disease, these two methods can even be more effective when combined. This may also be true for children with asthma, for whom physical activity is important to decrease the impact of their asthma. To meet the needs and wishes of these children, their parents, and healthcare providers, this study aims to obtain insight in factors that stimulate physical activity in children with asthma through the concept mapping method. This to ultimately develop a tailored health-game for children with asthma.MethodQualitative data were collected during concept mapping sessions with four groups of 8-11-year old children with asthma (n=25; 40% boy, age mean: 9.6y), two groups of parents (n=17; 29% male; age-range 29-57y, mean: 43.3y) and one group of 20 healthcare providers who received three online meetings (15% male; age-range 25-63y, mean:40.8y). During these sessions, participants generated ideas or solutions to the seeding statement ‘What is needed to increase the physical activity level of inactive children with asthma?’ After checking the complete list of ideas per group on clarity, participants clustered (based on similarity) and rated (score from 1 to 5, based on importance) the ideas individually. Using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster-analysis one concept map was generated for each group. For this study we received approval of the medical ethics committee of the AMC; all participants signed informed consent.ResultsChildren generated 160 ideas in total and respectively 4, 5, 7 and 10 clusters, parents generated 73 ideas and respectively 5 and 8 clusters, and healthcare providers generated 116 ideas and 13 clusters. The child clusters with the highest importance scores were: positive feelings (mean: 3.9; SD: 1.0), availability of suitable and joyful sports (mean: 3.8; standard deviation [SD]:0.5), and guidance by motivated others (mean: 3.7; SD: 0.6). For parents, the highest-scored clusters were: motivated others (mean: 3.9; SD: 0.3), knowledge about asthma consequences by the child and others (mean: 3.7; SD: 0.6), and child self-confidence (mean: 3.6; SD: 0.7), Health-care providers reported knowledge about asthma by child and others (mean: 4.2; SD: 0.1), the need for motivated parents (mean: 4.2; SD: 0.8), exercise-stimulating environment (mean: 4.1; SD: 0.1), and appropriate asthma-treatment (mean: 4.1; SD: 0.4) as important physical activity stimulating factors in this population. However, some factors cannot be influenced by one person or a health-game. Since knowledge about asthma, self-confidence and positive feelings can be, the focus is on these clusters in the next level process of the study: the designing phase of the health-game.ConclusionPhysical activity stimulation in children with asthma can be influenced by different factors in which knowledge, empowerment and joy seem important factors. To increase physical activity in children with asthma the new health-game will include these factors with high importance.
In this article we study the evolvement of empowering and dis-empowering aspects of a local memory website, initiated by the Amsterdam Museum and currently active for more than a decade. The results partly fill a gap in the available literature about this field, because the relation between collective empowerment and online behaviour in these communities has been underexposed. Departing from a narrative perspective on memories as resources for empowerment, we show how the online dynamics around these memories exhibit collective processes of identity formation, social learning and networking. However, certain patterns in the online dynamics also uncover that, although the online activity is increasing, the diversity in the content and the number of participants are decreasing. Describing the organizational development of the local memory community, we argue that the growth into a self-organizing community is the cause of increasing activity and decreasing participation. This implies that the online community has become a small, empowered group, which at the same time has developed dis-empowering characteristics, i.e. limitations to include ‘other’ locals, neighbourhoods and topics. We illustrate how the current self-organization, unintentionally, fuels the decreasing diversity in content by a natural selection process of a rather homogeneous group of participants. In addition, the conviction of what constitutes a successful online community is discussed for emphasizing individual empowerment and attracting empowered locals instead of vulnerable ones.
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