PUBH 8007 Week 11 Scholar-Practitioner Statement Example

Four Commitments Someone Could Hold Me To: A Scholar-Practitioner Statement by a Farm Safety Planner on Arguing With Defeaters Stated, Judging Sources by Design, Writing for Readers Who Disagree and Treating Behavior as Part of Every Intervention

Student Name

Walden University

PUBH 8007: Public Health Essentials

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Four Commitments Someone Could Hold Me To: A Scholar-Practitioner Statement by a Farm Safety Planner on Arguing With Defeaters Stated, Judging Sources by Design, Writing for Readers Who Disagree and Treating Behavior as Part of Every Intervention

Why Commitments Rather Than Values

A scholar-practitioner statement could list values, such as rigor, humility and service, and remain true forever because nothing tests it. I want this statement to be checkable. It names four commitments drawn from this term's work on tractor overturn deaths, each with an example of where I kept or broke it and a sign a colleague could look for in my future writing. I write as a farm safety planner who helped draft a state plan whose central sentence, "Training young tractor operators prevents overturn deaths," did not survive scholarly reading.

Commitment 1: Argue Positions With Their Defeaters Stated

When I take a position, I will state in the same document the findings that would make me abandon it.

Where it was tested: the retrofit-first stance I took rested on an unstated warrant, that farmers would keep protection installed and wear seatbelts. Writing that warrant out, and listing four findings that would defeat it, changed how I designed the position. Toulmin (2003) treats rebuttals as a normal part of a practical argument; I had been treating them as weaknesses to hide.

What a colleague could check: whether my future position papers contain a section naming defeaters.

Commitment 2: Judge Sources by What They Did

I will appraise sources by design, comparison and measures, not by journal prestige or citation counts.

Where it was tested: an evaluation of a rebate program in Victoria, Australia, turned out to be more useful for my argument than a more widely cited review, because it documented an actual rebate scheme reshaping a state's tractors, while also being limited by projected rather than counted lives saved (Day et al., 2004). Judging it by design let me cite it for what it showed and state what it did not.

What a colleague could check: whether my literature reviews include an appraisal of each key source's design rather than a summary of its conclusions. Boote and Beile (2005) argue that this kind of critical synthesis is what distinguishes doctoral scholarship from accumulation of sources.

Commitment 3: Write for Readers Who Disagree

I will revise important arguments by imagining a reader who rejects them and answering that reader sentence by sentence.

Where it was tested: imagining an experienced extension educator who believed I overstated engineering forced me to concede that hardware does not act independently of behavior. The revised position was more accurate and, I think, more persuasive to the people whose cooperation it needs.

What a colleague could check: whether my revisions record what was conceded, answered and held.

Commitment 4: Treat Behavior as Part of Every Intervention

I will not describe any intervention, engineering or educational, as if it works without the people who use it.

Where it was tested: my early line that hardware works "regardless of what a farmer remembers" overlooked unbelted deaths on protected machines and the stripping of frames from many tractors (Reynolds & Groves, 2000). The opposing claim in my old plan, that training prevents deaths, ignored that training had rarely been evaluated with injury outcomes (DeRoo & Rautiainen, 2000). Both erred by treating one side of the problem as the whole.

What a colleague could check: whether my intervention descriptions name the behaviors they depend on.

Practice and Scholarship Together

These commitments are meant for both my roles. As a planner, I write documents that direct money and attention. As a scholar, I write arguments that others will test. The state plan sentence that began this course failed both tests: it directed attention to a group that is not where most overturn deaths occur, older operators carrying more of the burden (Myers & Hendricks, 2010), and it claimed more than evidence supported. The commitments above are my attempt to make sure the next plan I help write would survive the reading this course taught me to give it.

How the Commitments Relate

The four commitments are not independent. Stating defeaters requires judging sources by design, since only well-designed studies can serve as defeaters. Writing for readers who disagree tests whether the defeaters I named are the ones an opponent would raise. And treating behavior as part of every intervention is, in my field, the most common defeater I failed to see. Taken together, they describe one habit seen from four sides: refusing to let a confident sentence stand without asking what would prove it wrong.

Where I Expect to Struggle

The second commitment will be hardest in practice. Planning work runs on deadlines, and appraising every source by design takes time a busy office rarely grants. I expect to fall back, at times, on citing the best-known source rather than the best-designed one. To guard against this, I will keep a short appraisal note for each source I cite in plans, recording what it measured and what it did not, so the work is done once and reused.

A Commitment I Considered and Rejected

I considered committing to cite only peer-reviewed sources. I rejected it. Some of the most useful evidence in farm safety comes from program evaluations and government reports. The better commitment is the second one: judge every source by what it did.

What Would Show I Have Failed

The clearest sign of failure would be a future plan or paper of mine containing a confident causal sentence with no stated defeater, a source cited for its reputation rather than its design, or an intervention described without the behavior it needs. If a colleague finds such a sentence, I would rather be told than not, and I will thank whoever tells me, because a correction from a colleague now costs far less than one from a reviewer or a funder later.

Review

I will ask my dissertation committee chair to review these commitments with me after my first year of coursework, using the checks listed, and to tell me which I have kept.

References

Boote, D. N., & Beile, P. (2005). Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation. Educational Researcher, 34(6), 3-15. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X034006003

Day, L., Rechnitzer, G., & Lough, J. (2004). An Australian experience with tractor rollover protective structure rebate programs: Process, impact and outcome evaluation. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 36(5), 861-867. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2003.09.001

DeRoo, L. A., & Rautiainen, R. H. (2000). A systematic review of farm safety interventions. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 18(4 Suppl.), 51-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(00)00141-0

Myers, J. R., & Hendricks, K. J. (2010). Agricultural tractor overturn deaths: Assessment of trends and risk factors. American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 53(7), 662-672. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.20775

Reynolds, S. J., & Groves, W. (2000). Effectiveness of roll-over protective structures in reducing farm tractor fatalities. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 18(4 Suppl.), 63-69. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(00)00142-2

Toulmin, S. E. (2003). The uses of argument (Updated ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840005