This textbook provides a self-contained presentation of the main concepts and methods of nonparametric statistical testing, with a particular focus on the theoretical foundations of goodness-of-fit tests, rank tests, resampling tests, and projection tests. The substitution principle is employed as a unified approach to the nonparametric test problems discussed. In addition to mathematical theory, it also includes numerous examples and computer implementations. The book is intended for advanced undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc students as well as young researchers. Readers should be familiar with the basic concepts of mathematical statistics typically covered in introductory statistics courses.

Una de las inquietudes mas acentuadas en el siglo XXI gira en torno a los modelos de formacion por competencias que permean en los planes de estudio de los diversos niveles educativos de algunos paises de Latinoamerica. Esta por demas decir que la necesidad de profesionalizar al profesorado en este tema versa como punto nodal en la mayoria de las agendas de gobierno. Se pretende conseguir que, frente a las preceptivas y las recomendaciones oficiales para implementar los planes de estudio sea el profesorado el que se introduzca al campo de la investigacion y analice y discuta los hallazgos y sugerencias de los trabajos presentados aqui; que sirvan de motor al despertar su interes y motivacion para reflexionar sobre su practica docente. En esta publicacion se exponen los estudios de quince investigadores en educacion que junto con sus colaboradores han recuperado informacion metodologica y cientifica que permite abonarle al campo del conocimiento un acercamiento a la docencia favorecedora de competencias. Este libro pretende ser un estado de las perspectivas que han configurado el campo de estudio en competencias; es un analisis integrado por aportes plurales para su comprension y una fotografia de las distintas versiones de como se abordan las competencias en los paises invitados a compartir hallazgos de sus especialistas, que ya construyen varias comunidades de investigadores educativos.

Food Security, Poverty and Nutrition Policy Analysis: Statistical Methods and Applications, Third Edition combines statistical data analysis and computer literacy, applying the results to develop policy alternatives through a series of statistical methods for real world food insecurity, malnutrition and poverty problems. The book presents the latest uses of statistical methods for policy analysis using the open source statistical environment R, in addition to having the original Stata files and applications. A new chapter on obesity brings in new datasets for analysis to effectively demonstrate the use of such data for addressing policy issues. Finally, program evaluation methods which can be directly applied to the data on food security, nutrition, poverty indicators and causal factors are included. This unique, real-world data takes the reader through a "hands-on" approach toward econometric practice whereby they can also test the effects of policy and program interventions. Further, this is the first book to explore actual data with STATA and R statistical packages that also provides a line-by-line guide to the programming and interpretation of results.

This book traces changes in the social and political orientations of the publics of Britain, France, Italy, Spain, West Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, Greece and Luxembourg from 1970 to 1988. It charts the persistence of distinctive national outlooks in many domains, alongside the emergence of a European consensus within the framework of an increasingly integrated European Community. Written by leading social scientists from Western Europe and the United States, this book helps chart the future for Europe after 1992.

This book is concerned with the associated issues between the differing paradigms of academic and organizational computing infrastructures. Driven by the increasing impact Information Communication Technology (ICT) has on our working and social lives, researchers within the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) field try and find ways to situate new hardware and software in rapidly changing socio-digital ecologies. Adopting a design-orientated research perspective, researchers from the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET) elaborate on the challenges and opportunities we face through the increasing permeation of society by ICT from commercial, academic, design and organizational perspectives. Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World is directed at researchers, industry practitioners and will be of great interest to any other societal actors who are involved with the design of IT systems.

This book brings together an international group of researchers reporting on their work about play and early childhood education across 13 countries - Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Germany, Hong Kong, United States of America, India, The Maldives, Sri Lanka, Singapore, China and Australia. It contributes to growing international conversations about play and the role of play in early childhood education. Each of the chapters in this anthology reflects different directions in research as well as a range of approaches to reconceptualising play. Each researcher questions assumptions underpinning young children's play and early childhood education and explores the implications of these questions for further research, practice and policy. Chapters report a wide range of innovative and transformative research, focusing on areas such as the play of infants and toddlers, the role of values in play, the complexity of connections between play and learning, motivation, the role and understandings of early childhood educators in promoting children's play, risky play and the impact of Westernised approaches to play in different contexts. This book argues for the importance of children's play at a time when there is a great deal of pressure to increase the academic focus of early education and to eliminate play that could be deemed risky. Several authors note moves towards pedagogies of play and explore the potential links between play and learning in early education settings. The research reported in this book is a timely reminder of the value of play, for and of itself, as well as the learning potential of play. It provides a pathway into the debates about the role and value of play in early years' education for students, researchers and policy-makers.

Academics across the globe are being urged by universities and research councils to do research that impacts the world beyond academia. Yet to date there has been very little reflection amongst scholars and practitioners in these fields concerning the relationship between the theoretical and engaged practices that emerge through such forms of scholarship. Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice investigates the ways in which theoretical research has been incorporated into recent applied practices across the social sciences and humanities. This collection advances our understanding of the ethics, values, opportunities and challenges that emerge in the making of engaged and interdisciplinary scholarship.

For courses in Research Methods in Education."Understanding and Evaluating Research," third edition, is a supplemental textbook appropriate for all courses in educational research. A reader, this text contains quantitative "and" qualitative educational research articles from a variety of professional journals. With each article is a sample article analysis and exercises that help students become better consumers of research. The third edition is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of a new chapter on "Mixed Method Designs" and two mixed-method studies, revised and expanded discussion of qualitative methods, more emphasis given to randomized designs, revision of research typology, and features eight new articles.

No less than a revolutionary transformation of the research enterprise is underway. This transformation extends beyond the natural sciences, where 'e-research' has become the modus operandi, and is penetrating the social sciences and humanities, sometimes with differences in accent and label. Many suggest that the very essence of scholarship in these areas is changing. The everyday procedures and practices of traditional forms of scholarship are affected by these and other features of e-research. This volume, which features renowned scholars from across the globe who are active in the social sciences and humanities, provides critical reflection on the overall emergence of e-research, particularly on its adoption and adaptation by the social sciences and humanities.

The primary goal of this book is to present the research findings and conclusions of physicists, economists, mathematicians and financial engineers working in the field of "Econophysics" who have undertaken agent-based modelling, comparison with empirical studies and related investigations.
Most standard economic models assume the existence of the representative agent, who is "perfectly rational" and applies the utility maximization principle when taking action. One reason for this is the desire to keep models mathematically tractable: no tools are available to economists for solving non-linear models of heterogeneous adaptive agents without explicit optimization. In contrast, multi-agent models, which originated from statistical physics considerations, allow us to go beyond the prototype theories of traditional economics involving the representative agent. This book is based on the Econophys-Kolkata VII Workshop, at which many such modelling efforts were presented. In the book, leading researchers in their fields report on their latest work, consider recent developments and review the contemporary literature.

Through the analysis of examples taken from America, the Caribbean and western and East Central Europe, this book addresses one of the greatest challenges for the immediate future: the impact of migration, displacement and minority cultures and peoples within the space of larger multicultural states. It focuses upon the concepts of inclusion and exclusion and the processes of ethnic self identification cultural traditions in host countries ethnic stereotyping and inter ethnic communications and tensions.

Previously published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research, this collection includes papers published in the first 10 years of the journal, together with a series of specially commissioned critical vignettes that address the kinds of research that the journal attracts and wider aspects of the journal's work over that time. Contributors and editors also look ahead to the next ten years, discussing six major themes within contemporary research that require close scrutiny: EE and ESD: tension or transition? locating the environmental in environmental education research doing environmental education research environmental learning as process and outcome environmental education for ... developing environmental education research. For each theme, two papers published by the journal in the first ten years are re-printed and two researchers review the issues they raise, giving readers a broad and future-facing overview of the development of the field today.

This volume comprehensively examines the long-term effects of higher education on attitudes and activities of a large, nationally representative sample of high school students who graduated in 1972. The authors hold that what people want from higher education depends on core American values. The authors question whether colleges foster new attitudes that lead to new types of behavior, or if colleges confer new identities upon students by bestowing certificates and degrees. The chapters give particular attention to the impact of college on career success, expressive individualism, civic commitment, and changes in self-concept. The study is strengthened by its use of data on those high school graduates who did not attend college, and by following high school graduates until they are about 32 years old. The book concludes by examining the significance of the authors' findings for higher education curriculum policy.

Responding to the rapid growth of personal narrative as a method of inquiry among qualitative scholars, Bud Goodall offers a concise volume of practical advice for scholars and students seeking to work in this tradition. He provides writing tips and strategies from a well-published, successful author of creative nonfiction and concrete guidance on finding appropriate outlets for your work. For readers, he offers a set of criteria to assess the quality of creative nonfiction writing. Goodall suggests paths to success within the academy--still rife with political sinkholes for the narrative ethnographer--and ways of building a career as a public scholar. Goodall's work serves as both a writing manual and career guide for those in qualitative inquiry.

What makes a research project feminist? Connie Miller has complied an annotated bibliography of English-language works that help to answer that question. Each of the titles brought together in this volume addresses some aspect of feminist research. The bibliography includes both general works and those devoted to specific disciplines, and the entries include journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, and reports. The book begins with a general section followed by chapters on specific disciplines. Each chapter begins with an introduction discussing general trends. Anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, political science, and history each merit a separate chapter. A chapter on geography includes architecture and urban planning as well, and a chapter on science covers the hard sciences. A Communications chapter includes mass media and communications, linguistics and speech, film studies, and art criticism. Omitted is the vast body of literature on feminist literary criticism, philosophy, education, nursing, and medicine. The book concludes with both subject and author indexes. The volume will be of interest to feminist scholars from all disciplines as well as to those involved in Women's Studies programs.

This book develops a debate around responsible social inquiry into new racism. A variety of ways of researching new forms of racism (for example, aversive, modern, cultural, purportedly color-blind, and new racism) are addressed. Experiments that have been undertaken to inquire into group identity and people's implicit bias in relation to those perceived as "other" are critically explored and their potential consequences reconsidered. The book also critically explores survey research, which, it is argued, can serve to reinforce the notion of the existence of ethnoracial groups with defined boundaries that inhere in social life. The book considers interviewing (including focus group interviewing) and case study research (including participant observation/ethnography) in terms of possibilities for moving beyond new forms of racism. Action research (defined by the understanding of an inextricable link between knowing and acting) is examined in-depth in terms of the hopes to "make a difference" at the moment of inquiry. Types of retroductive logic that are used to examine underlying structures that arguably unduly constrain people's life chances and render human relationships inhumane are also explored. The book draws together the different arguments; and it proposes ways in which the design of research into new racism can better approached as well as ways in which dialogue around processes of inquiry and the products thereof can be better fostered. Suggestions for nurturing humane social relationships that provide for transcultural meaning-making are threaded through the text.

This volume provides new insights into the functioning of organizational, managerial and market societies. Multilevel analysis and social network analysis are described and the authors show how they can be combined in developing the theory, methods and empirical applications of the social sciences. This book maps out the development of multilevel reasoning and shows how it can explain behavior, through two different ways of contextualizing it. First, by identifying levels of influence on behavior and different aggregations of actors and behavior, and complex interactions between context and behavior. Second, by identifying different levels as truly different systems of agency: such levels of agency can be examined separately and jointly since the link between them is affiliation of members of one level to collective actors at the superior level. It is by combining these approaches that this work offers new insights. New case studies and datasets that explore new avenues of theorizing and new applications of methodology are presented. This book will be useful as a reference work for all social scientists, economists and historians who use network analyses and multilevel statistical analyses. Philosophers interested in the philosophy of science or epistemology will also find this book valuable.

This volume explores issues connected with quality, planning of services and access concerns especially as linked with providers of care, health care institutions, and patients. Changes have continued to occur within the field but have been led by overall marketplace trends. Papers in this volume are presented in four parts covering changing models of health care. In Part I topics come from a broad perspective to include: development of newer models of care, more traditional areas such as the medical profession and the patient or the hospital and the patient, the changes that alternative medicine brings to issues of quality of care and access and planning, and of citizen participation in health planning. Part II deals with federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and access and quality issues within those programs. Part III covers the challenges of planning for long-term care needs and services. And Part IV explores other aspects of the changing health care delivery system: changes in nursing, midwifery, and rural health care and provides linkages to quality, access, and planning issues. This excellent work helps the reader to think more carefully and more creatively about issues of quality of care, access to care, and planning for services.

This annual is designed to publish research that increases understanding and knowledge of political sociology. The articles are directed towards explaining the numerous interrelations that exist within and between social and political phenomena.

This book is a practical guide on how to design, create and validate a spatial microsimulation model. These models are becoming more popular as academics and policy makers recognise the value of place in research and policy making. Recent spatial microsimulation models have been used to analyse health and social disadvantage for small areas; and to look at the effect of policy change for small areas. This provides a powerful analysis tool for researchers and policy makers. This book covers preparing the data for spatial microsimulation; a number of methods for both static and dynamic spatial microsimulation models; validation of the models to ensure the outputs are reasonable; and the future of spatial microsimulation. The book will be an essential handbook for any researcher or policy maker looking to design and create a spatial microsimulation model. This book will also be useful to those policy makers who are commissioning a spatial microsimulation model, or looking to commission work using a spatial microsimulation model, as it provides information on the different methods in a non-technical way.

Urban space has emerged as the central organizing construct in studies of the post-modern metropolis. Contributors to this volume write on how urban space is used and contested by different social groups, how urban space is transformed by the changing economic relationships manifested in the new world order, and how urban space is defined by those who use and study it.

This book presents a collection of results from the interdisciplinary research project "ELLI" published by researchers at RWTH Aachen University, the TU Dortmund and Ruhr-Universitat Bochum between 2011 and 2016. All contributions showcase essential research results, concepts and innovative teaching methods to improve engineering education. Further, they focus on a variety of areas, including virtual and remote teaching and learning environments, student mobility, support throughout the student lifecycle, and the cultivation of interdisciplinary skills.

The collection proposes inventive research strategies for the study of the affective and fluctuating dimensions of cultural life. It presents studies of nightclubs, YouTube memes, political provocations, heritage sites, blogging, education development, and haunting memories.