First book to show how qualitative and quantitative methods in health and social care are used in practice. Ideal for helping students make an informed decision on what research methods to use for their research projects. Relates social research methodology to social research studies done in the real world and demonstrates the link between research and changing and improving practice. Ideal for students at level 4 to 6.

1. PROGRESS IN UTILITY AND RISK THEORY At the First International Congress of Utility and Risk Theory in Oslo 1982 (FUR-82) it appeared to be a widespread feeling among the participants that the conference signalled something like a paradigm shift in the field. This does not necessarily mean that old truths were discarded and replaced by new ones, but rather that new theories and new empirical evidence were brought forth, compelling old theories to be critically analyzed from new angels. Some of the papers presented at FUR-82 have been published by Reidel in 1983 in a volume edited by Stigum and Wenst0p. The present volume contains com mentaries on a number of the papers presented at the conference together with broader outlines of current views on the theory. The observation that utility and risk theory now appears to be in a state of rapid change has prompted us to choose the title PROGRESS IN UTILITY AND RISK THEORY for the book, in the belief that science always moves from poorer to more advanced paradigms or from weaker to more forceful theories. In other words, change is usually progress, even though intermediate stages in a para digm shift may be bewildering, to say the least."

This book presents a systematic overview of cutting-edge research in the field of parametric modeling of personal income and wealth distribution, which allows one to represent how income/wealth is distributed within a given population. The estimated parameters may be used to gain insights into the causes of the evolution of income/wealth distribution over time, or to interpret the differences between distributions across countries. Moreover, once a given parametric model has been fitted to a data set, one can straightforwardly compute inequality and poverty measures. Finally, estimated parameters may be used in empirical modeling of the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the evolution of personal income/wealth distribution. In reviewing the state of the art in the field, the authors provide a thorough discussion of parametric models belonging to the " -generalized" family, a new and fruitful set of statistical models for the size distribution of income and wealth that they have developed over several years of collaborative and multidisciplinary research. This book will be of interest to all who share the belief that problems of income and wealth distribution merit detailed conceptual and methodological attention.

This book analyzes the changes and shifts in religious education in Europe over the past 50 years. In a post-secular age, it has become increasingly difficult to make sharp distinctions between what is religious and non-religious, confessional and non-confessional. Reforms in religious education in Sweden in the 1960s appeared as part of a process of wider secular liberalization, giving more credence to the idea of absolute neutrality in religious education. However drastic shifts in society, culture and the European religious landscape raise the need for a reevaluation of the foundations of religious education. Drawing on a range of case studies from across Europe, this book will appeal to students and scholars of religious education as well as post-secular education more generally.

This book employs a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology to analyse the language used by university careers services in the UK. Drawing on a corpus which includes the public-facing websites of careers services from 24 Russell Group and 34 Post-92 universities, the author highlights some of the potentially problematic 'common-sense' views and ideas that are currently promoted to students using these services. She argues that the language used by university websites promotes neoliberal ideology and encourages the denaturalisation of such language. This book will be of interest to linguists, sociologists, education scholars, and scholars who are otherwise interested in the notion of employability.

Combining the latest thinking in the field with practical, step-by-step guidance, the Third Edition of John W. Creswell and Vicki L. Plano Clark's Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research now covers seven mixed methods designs with accompanying journal articles illustrating each design. The authors walk readers through the entire research process, and present updated examples from published mixed methods studies drawn from multiple disciplines. In addition, this new edition includes information about the dynamic and evolving nature of the field of mixed methods research, four additional methodological approaches, and coverage of new directions in mixed methods.

Expository Discourse describes the social science research genre in an entirely original light. The authors present a comprehensive model which characterizes the generic, registerial and discoursal options as they interweave within a text, formulating explicit realization statements that relate the abstract categories of move and act (as described by Swales) to the way these units actually are created by lexical and grammatical choices. The realization networks draw on the work of systemic functional linguists, primarily Halliday, Hasan, Martin, and Ventola.

This monograph contains many ideas on the analysis of survival data to present a comprehensive account of the field. The value of survival analysis is not confined to medical statistics, where the benefit of the analysis of data on such factors as life expectancy and duration of periods of freedom from symptoms of a disease as related to a treatment applied individual histories and so on, is obvious. The techniques also find important applications in industrial life testing and a range of subjects from physics to econometrics. In the eleven chapters of the book the methods and applications of are discussed and illustrated by examples.

A volume in Research in Global Child Advocacy Series Series Editors Ilene R. Berson and Michael J. Berson (Sponsored by the Research in Global Child Advocacy SIG of the American Educational Research Association) Young children are coming of age surrounded by information and communication technology (ICT). ICT is a prominent force in their lives, and working with ICT can stimulate students intellectually, incite their creativity, and challenge them to apply developmentally appropriate inquiry approaches that enhance their learning experiences. Digital technologies also allow children to expand their physical space and access many online social environments that transcend time and space. However, any focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of technology applications in the early childhood years cannot overlook the potential consequences of technological development on children with regard to their social functioning, interpersonal interactions, and global understanding. In addition to evaluating technology as a tool of instruction, we must focus on educational implications and ethical issues associated with their use. This book is the fifth in the Research in Global Child Advocacy Series. The volume examines theoretical assumptions as well as the application of innovative strategies that optimize the interface between young children and ICT from a global perspective. Despite divergent perspectives, the chapter authors share a commitment to explore the immersion of ICT into the lives of young children and consider the educational value of these tools as well as the developmental appropriateness of technological affordances. This volume brings together scholars and policymakers whose rich discourse delves into questions such as: How do communication technologies benefit young children's social and cognitive development? What standards and technical specifications are needed to effectively safeguard young children engaged with ICT? How are young children introduced to ICT? What are the challenges and risks for young children online? What programs are effective in mediating risk? What are the educational applications for ICT in early childhood? Is social networking the new "online playground" for young children? How can young children become competent users of digital technology and media? How can early childhood educators and families encourage positive usage and discourage negative social consequences associated with today's technology? How can ICT enhance teaching and learning for young children? What ICT activities are developmentally appropriate for young children? In the book there are three primary areas of emphasis: (a) ICT as a teaching and learning tool across cultures and countries to promote the social and cognitive development of young children; (b) research on developmentally appropriate education on cybersafety and cybercitizenship; and (c) studies on the influence of digital technologies on young children, including exposure to inappropriate content and participation in online social networks. This resource offers readers a glimpse into the experience of children and the expertise of researchers and professionals who diligently work toward crafting a framework for action that reflects intercultural and cross-national initiatives. Given the role that electronic media plays in the lives of children as both an educational and entertainment tool, understanding the physical and social contexts, as well as the developmental issues, is critical to programs aiming to optimize the full potential of digital tools that support and enhance the experiences of young children.

This book presents the fundamental theory for non-standard diffusion problems in movement ecology. Levy processes and anomalous diffusion have shown to be both powerful and useful tools for qualitatively and quantitatively describing a wide variety of spatial population ecological phenomena and dynamics, such as invasion fronts and search strategies. Adopting a self-contained, textbook-style approach, the authors provide the elements of statistical physics and stochastic processes on which the modeling of movement ecology is based and systematically introduce the physical characterization of ecological processes at the microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic levels. The explicit definition of these levels and their interrelations is particularly suitable to coping with the broad spectrum of space and time scales involved in bio-ecological problems. Including numerous exercises (with solutions), this text is aimed at graduate students and newcomers in this field at the interface of theoretical ecology, mathematical biology and physics.

This completely updated edition of TheAlmanac of American Education helps users understand and compare the quality of education at the national, state, and county levels. Compiled from official U.S. government sources, this book contains historical and current data, insightful analysis, and useful graphs that provide compelling insights into the state of education in America. The Almanac provides national coverage of school enrollment and educational attainment, looking at American education from a variety of different angles. It is organized into three sections: Part A-National Education Statistics; Part B-Region and State Education Statistics; and Part C-County Education Statistics. The Almanac's contents and coverage allow users to answer-and ask-important questions about education, including: * What are the nationwide trends in earnings by educational attainment level? * Is the earnings gap between high school graduates and college graduates growing or shrinking? * What is the average cost to attend college? * Which states have the highest and lowest high school dropout rates? * How do unemployment rates differ by educational attainment? * What is the correlation between family income and kindergarten and preschool enrollment?

Straightforward and accessible, this pragmatic guide takes you step-by-step through doing grounded theory research. With hands-on advice focussed around designing real projects, it demonstrates best practice for integrating theory building and methods. Its extensive examples and case studies are drawn from across the social sciences, presenting students with a range of options for both applying and using grounded theory. Clear and easy to follow, this second edition: Traces the evolution of grounded theory method and provides a clear introduction to the nuanced history of grounded theory Showcases important concepts like theory building, helping you to reflect on the wider context of your research and the contribution it makes to existing literature Offers practical advice for how to do grounded theory research, alleviating common student concerns every step of the way This new edition features two new chapters: one covering theory, and one on Theoretical Sampling. Several chapters have also undergone updates: Chapter 5 includes a wider range of perspectives including feminist and post-colonial perspectives, Chapter 9 features new, contemporary examples on how to write up your study, and Chapters 2 and 10 include new developments in the field of Grounded Theory. Supported by videos from the author sharing expert advice, this book helps you build the confidence to explore and successfully complete your own grounded theory research.

Design Research uses scientific methods to evaluate designs and build design theories. This book starts with recognizable questions in Design Research, such as A/B testing, how users learn to operate a device and why computer-generated faces are eerie. Using a broad range of examples, efficient research designs are presented together with statistical models and many visualizations. With the tidy R approach, producing publication-ready statistical reports is straight-forward and even non-programmers can learn this in just one day. Hundreds of illustrations, tables, simulations and models are presented with full R code and data included. Using Bayesian linear models, multi-level models and generalized linear models, an extensive statistical framework is introduced, covering a huge variety of research situations and yet, building on only a handful of basic concepts. Unique solutions to recurring problems are presented, such as psychometric multi-level models, beta regression for rating scales and ExGaussian regression for response times. A "think-first" approach is promoted for model building, as much as the quantitative interpretation of results, stimulating readers to think about data generating processes, as well as rational decision making. New Statistics for Design Researchers: A Bayesian Workflow in Tidy R targets scientists, industrial researchers and students in a range of disciplines, such as Human Factors, Applied Psychology, Communication Science, Industrial Design, Computer Science and Social Robotics. Statistical concepts are introduced in a problem-oriented way and with minimal formalism. Included primers on R and Bayesian statistics provide entry point for all backgrounds. A dedicated chapter on model criticism and comparison is a valuable addition for the seasoned scientist.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is the first textbook that allows readers who may be unfamiliar with matrices to understand a variety of multivariate analysis procedures in matrix forms. By explaining which models underlie particular procedures and what objective function is optimized to fit the model to the data, it enables readers to rapidly comprehend multivariate data analysis. Arranged so that readers can intuitively grasp the purposes for which multivariate analysis procedures are used, the book also offers clear explanations of those purposes, with numerical examples preceding the mathematical descriptions. Supporting the modern matrix formulations by highlighting singular value decomposition among theorems in matrix algebra, this book is useful for undergraduate students who have already learned introductory statistics, as well as for graduate students and researchers who are not familiar with matrix-intensive formulations of multivariate data analysis. The book begins by explaining fundamental matrix operations and the matrix expressions of elementary statistics. Then, it offers an introduction to popular multivariate procedures, with each chapter featuring increasing advanced levels of matrix algebra. Further the book includes in six chapters on advanced procedures, covering advanced matrix operations and recently proposed multivariate procedures, such as sparse estimation, together with a clear explication of the differences between principal components and factor analyses solutions. In a nutshell, this book allows readers to gain an understanding of the latest developments in multivariate data science.

Due to changes in funding and legislation, educating as a career has become unstable. It is imperative to establish a culture that values education in order to encourage pursuing and preserving the profession of teaching. Advocacy in Academia and the Role of Teacher Preparation Programs is an essential reference source for the latest scholarly research on the need of support for students and faculty by examining policy, student engagement, professorial activism, and integrated allied services. Featuring extensive coverage on a broad range of topics such as student success, specialty programs, and service learning, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and practitioners seeking current research on issues of advocacy in education.

This volume brings together leading gender and politics scholars to assess how women's political empowerment can best be conceptualized and measured on a global scale. It argues that women's political empowerment is a fundamental process of transformation for benchmarking and understanding all political empowerment gains across the globe. Chapters improve our global understanding of women's political empowerment through cross-national comparisons, a synthesis of methodological approaches across varied levels of politics, and attention to the ways gender intersects with myriad factors in shaping women's political empowerment. This book is an indispensable resource for scholars of politics and gender, as well as being relevant to a global scholarly and policy community.

This book includes a wide selection of the papers presented at the 48th Scientific Meeting of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS2016), held in Salerno on 8-10 June 2016. Covering a wide variety of topics ranging from modern data sources and survey design issues to measuring sustainable development, it provides a comprehensive overview of the current Italian scientific research in the fields of open data and big data in public administration and official statistics, survey sampling, ordinal and symbolic data, statistical models and methods for network data, time series forecasting, spatial analysis, environmental statistics, economic and financial data analysis, statistics in the education system, and sustainable development. Intended for researchers interested in theoretical and empirical issues, this volume provides interesting starting points for further research.

'Human Communication' is a field of interest of enormous breadth, being one which has concerned students of many different disciplines. It spans the imagined 'gap' between the 'arts' and the 'sciences', but it forms no unified academic subject. There is no commonly accepted terminology to cover aU aspects. The eight articles comprising this book have been chosen to illustrate something of the diversity yet, at the same time, to be comprehensible to readers from different academic disciplines. They cannot pretend to cover the whole field Some attempt has been made to present them in an order which represents a continuity of theme, though this is merely an opinion. Most publications of this type form the proceedings of some sympo sium, or conference. In this case, however, there has been no such unifying influence, no collaboration, no discussions. The authors have been drawn from a number of different countries. The first article, by John Marshall and Roger Wales (Great Britain) concerns the pragmatic values of communication, starting by considering bird-song and passing to the infinitely more complex 'meaningful' values of human language and pictures. The 'pragmatic aspect' means the usefulness - what does language or bird song do for humans and birds? What adaptation or survival values does it have? These questions are then considered in relation to brain specialisation for representation of experience and cognition."

Ordinal Data Modeling is a comprehensive treatment of ordinal data models from both likelihood and Bayesian perspectives. Written for graduate students and researchers in the statistical and social sciences, this book describes a coherent framework for understanding binary and ordinal regression models, item response models, graded response models, and ROC analyses, and for exposing the close connection between these models. A unique feature of this text is its emphasis on applications. All models developed in the book are motivated by real datasets, and considerable attention is devoted to the description of diagnostic plots and residual analyses. Software and datasets used for all analyses described in the text are available on websites listed in the preface.

The volume is particularly addressed to the human sciences. It aims to show that these sciences could greatly profit from reframing their problems in the moved spirit of systems theory. The individual sections concern: 1, general systems; 2, semiotics; 3, knowledge and cognition; 4, culture; 5, music; 6, language; 7, literature - 29 authors - among whom one finds e.g. M. Bunge, H. Haken, G. Klit, E. Laszlo, B. Nicolescmu, F. Wuketitis etc - deal with systems in general, they show the application of systems concepts and ideas in individual human sciences, they advance a number of models and hypotheses and offer concrete examples. The volume yields an extensive survey of the history of systems thinking in different sciences and is an excellent state of the art for all pertinent disciplines. It covers relevant concepts as self-organization, evolution, chaos, synergetics, complexity, information, law, theory, cognition, and model building. This collection of essays bears testimony to the mutual penetration and cross-fertilization of all sciences. It is an pioneering enterprise dispensing with the idea of priority of the natural sciences over the human sciences. It closes our century and comes up with a research programme for the next one.

1. Offers ready-to-play games of varying lengths and topics, giving teachers everything they need to implement active learning in the political science classroom. 2. Offers pedagogical data supporting classroom games and simulations, providing encouragement to professors and justification to administrators for active learning, 3. Serves as a primer for modifying and designing classroom games, supporting active professorial engagement and agency especially important in a time of online learning.

This book presents innovations in the mathematical foundations of financial analysis and numerical methods for finance and applications to the modeling of risk. The topics selected include measures of risk, credit contagion, insider trading, information in finance, stochastic control and its applications to portfolio choices and liquidation, models of liquidity, pricing, and hedging. The models presented are based on the use of Brownian motion, Levy processes and jump diffusions. Moreover, fractional Brownian motion and ambit processes are also introduced at various levels. The chosen blend of topics gives an overview of the frontiers of mathematics for finance. New results, new methods and new models are all introduced in different forms according to the subject. Additionally, the existing literature on the topic is reviewed. The diversity of the topics makes the book suitable for graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the areas of financial modeling and quantitative finance. The chapters will also be of interest to experts in the financial market interested in new methods and products. This volume presents the results of the European ESF research networking program Advanced Mathematical Methods for Finance.

This book highlights major quantitative and qualitative methods and approaches used in the field of urban analysis. The respective chapters cover the background and relevance of various approaches to urban studies and offer guidance on implementing specific methodologies. Each chapter also provides links to real-world examples. The book is unique in its focus on Australian examples and subject matter, presented by recognized experts in the field.

In many international settings, developing economies are in danger of declining as the digital divide becomes the knowledge divide. This decline attacks the very fabric of cohesion and purpose for these regional societies delivering increased social, health, economic and sustainability problems. The examples in this book will provide leaders, policy developers, researchers, students and community with successful strategies and principles of ICT use in education to address these needs. This book will discuss how educational technology can be used to transform education and assist developing communities to close the knowledge divide. It will provide comprehensive coverage of educational technology in development in different professions and parts of world. The book will provide examples of best practice, case studies and principles for educators, community leaders, researchers and policy advisers on the use of educational technology for development. In particular, it will provide examples of how education can be provided more flexibly in order to provide access to hitherto disadvantaged communities and individuals.