This book's purpose is to enable educational researchers to make better use of the huge longitudinal and cross-sectional data files that are now readily available. Of value to experienced researchers and undergraduates alike, the book focuses primarily on the planning and design of research rather than implementation of data base information. Its chapters address a variety of vital questions including:
* What variables are present in each of the major national data bases?
* What are the problems and dangers in making comparisons across data bases?
* What factors invalidate comparisons of test scores across data bases?
* In what ways can data from certain data bases be physically merged with data from other data bases?
This text clearly demonstrates what can be done with large national data bases and, perhaps equally important, what cannot be done -- or done only if certain precautions are taken.

With cross-cultural perspectives from contributors in nine countries, this book showcases much-needed research on current issues around migration and social work in Europe. Focusing on the reception, experiences and integration of refugees and asylum seekers, the chapters also consider the impact of recent EU policies on borders and integration. With racism on the rise in some European societies, the book foregrounds international social work values as a common framework to face discriminatory practice at macro and micro levels. Featuring recommendations for inclusive practice that 'opens doors', this book features the voices of migrants and the practitioners aiding their inclusion in new societies.

The publication of this unique three-volume set represents the culmination of years of work by a large number of scholars, researchers, and professionals in the field of moral development. The literature on moral behavior and development has grown to the point where it is no longer possible to capture the "state of the art" in a single volume. This comprehensive multi-volume Handbook marks an important transition because it provides evidence that the field has emerged as an area of scholarly activity in its own right. Spanning many professional domains, there is a striking variety of issues and topics surveyed: anthropology, biology, economics, education, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, social work, and more. By bringing together work on diverse topics, the editors have fostered a mutually-beneficial exchange not only between alternative approaches and perspectives, but also between "applied" and "pure" research interests. The Theory volume presents current and ongoing theoretical advances focusing on new developments or substantive refinements and revisions to existing theoretical frameworks. The Research volume summarizes and interprets the findings of specific, theory-driven, research programs; reviews research in areas that have generated substantial empirical findings; describes recent developments in research methodology/techniques; and reports research on new and emerging issues. The Application volume describes a diverse array of intervention projects - educational, clinical, organizational, and the like. Each chapter includes a summary report of results and findings, conceptual developments, and emerging issues or topics. Since the contributors to this publication are active theorists, researchers, and practitioners, it may serve to define directions that will shape the emerging literature in the field.

Tradition recognises five social sciences: anthropology, economies, social psychology, sociology, and political science. But who knows what is going on in all five disciplines? Social scientists from one discipline often know little or nothing about the progress made by social scientists from another discipline working on essentially the same social problem. Sometimes, even of a neighbouring discipline is terra incognita. the methodology The problem becomes worse when we widen the remit to natural scientists and engineers. I have found little evidence myself that they see themselves as standing on the other side of an unbridgeable golf between two cultures. They observe the intellectual excesses of those few 'newage' social scientists who see themselves fighting a 'science war', but the ignorance of these innumerate critics is so apparent in their grossly naive attacks on natural science, that they are not taken seriously. However, although natural scientists appreciate that most social science is genuine science, they seldom know much about how and why it is done as it iso This can lead to serious inefficiencies in areas in which the traditional frontiers between social and natural science are melting away. An example is the frontier between the economies of imperfeet competition and evolutionary biology. Reversing the usual bias, the evolutionary biologists commonly know little mathematics, and hence find the game theory literature hard to read, with the result that they often spend their time re-inventing the wheel.

"Sociology Projects: A Students' Guide" is a practical guide to project work for sociology students. It includes advice on how to choose a manageable topic, checklists, where to look for useful documents, how not to get overwhelmed by data, when to prepare and how to evaluate a questionnaire, ways of presenting your material to best effect and how to anticipate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of a sociological project.

The anti-causal prophecies of last century have been disproved. Causality is neither a relic of a bygone nor another fetish of modern science; it still occupies a large part of the current debate in philosophy and the sciences.

This investigation into causal modelling presents the rationale of causality, i.e. the notion that guides causal reasoning in causal modelling. It is argued that causal models are regimented by a rationale of variation, nor of regularity neither invariance, thus breaking down the dominant Human paradigm. The notion of variation is shown to be embedded in the scheme of reasoning behind various causal models: e.g. Rubin s model, contingency tables, and multilevel analysis. It is also shown to be latent yet fundamental in many philosophical accounts. Moreover, it has significant consequences for methodological issues: the warranty of the causal interpretation of causal models, the levels of causation, the characterisation of mechanisms, and the interpretation of probability.

This book offers a novel philosophical and methodological approach to causal reasoning in causal modelling and provides the reader with the tools to be up to date about various issues causality rises in social science.

"Dr. Federica Russo's book is a very valuable addition to a small number of relevant publications on causality and causal modelling in the social sciences viewed from a philosophical approach." (Prof. Guillaume Wunsch, Institute of Demography, University of Louvain, Belgium)"

This book offers examples of programs designed for analysis of variance and related statistical tests of significance that can be run with SPSS. The reader may copy these programs directly, changing only the names or numbers of levels of factors according to individual needs. Ways of altering command specifications to fit situations with larger numbers of factors are discussed and illustrated, as are ways of combining program statements to request a variety of analyses in the same program. The first two chapters provide an introduction to the use of SPSS, Versions 3 and 4. General rules concerning the use of commands, subcommands, and keywords are discussed, providing a specific introduction to the use of SPSS for analysis of variance. They provide detailed programs for obtaining omnibus F tests in completely randomized designs and for designs that include repeated measures factors. The remaining chapters may be read independently and in any order.

This volume celebrates Lee J. Cronbach's considerable contributions to the methodology of social and behavioral science. Comprised of chapters written by colleagues and contemporaries of the highly influential scholar, it offers a range of ideas, perspectives, and new approaches to improving social science inquiry.

The Igbo community in Chicago is a newer immigrant community, compared to the German, Polish, Italian, or Irish communities. Just as for these older immigrant communities, education is essential for Igbo immigrants who have come to start a new life in the United States. Adapting well and thriving in the new environment requires immigrants to tread the path of education. The number of Igbo children and other such immigrants is increasing. The way they are educated is important-not only to the individual child, but also to society. Igbo children are enrolled in both public and private schools in the Chicago metropolitan area. "Ka umu anyi wee karia anyi" ("So that our children will be more successful than us") is one of the many reasons Igbo families in Chicago are involved in the education of their children. Education of children occurs in the home, the school, and the community. This study seeks to understand the nature of parental engagement of Igbo families in Chicago in the education of their children. Not all immigrants are the same. Knowing about Igbo experiences will enable scholars and educators to recognize both similarities with and differences from other immigrant communities. It is immaterial whether their kind of involvement fits the prescribed or standardized form of parental involvement in the literature or in practice elsewhere. The crucial question is, given their circumstances, are Igbo parents' perceptions and practices of parental involvement promoting the education of their children in Chicago?

This book examines the experiences of global healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It shines a light on the experiences of healthcare workers during the pandemic, exploring their lived experiences of delivering care without losing sight of the emotional and symbolic nature of their work. Incorporating cutting-edge research from global experts in medical anthropology, medical sociology, medicine, psychology and nursing, it uniquely demonstrates the value of rapid qualitative research during infectious epidemics. Drawing on data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book explores global healthcare policies and healthcare workers' experiences across 20 countries.

This second edition of Design of Observational Studies is both an introduction to statistical inference in observational studies and a detailed discussion of the principles that guide the design of observational studies. An observational study is an empiric investigation of effects caused by treatments when randomized experimentation is unethical or infeasible. Observational studies are common in most fields that study the effects of treatments on people, including medicine, economics, epidemiology, education, psychology, political science and sociology. The quality and strength of evidence provided by an observational study is determined largely by its design. Design of Observational Studies is organized into five parts. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 of Part I cover concisely many of the ideas discussed in Rosenbaum's Observational Studies (also published by Springer) but in a less technical fashion. Part II discusses the practical aspects of using propensity scores and other tools to create a matched comparison that balances many covariates, and includes an updated chapter on matching in R. In Part III, the concept of design sensitivity is used to appraise the relative ability of competing designs to distinguish treatment effects from biases due to unmeasured covariates. Part IV is new to this edition; it discusses evidence factors and the computerized construction of more than one comparison group. Part V discusses planning the analysis of an observational study, with particular reference to Sir Ronald Fisher's striking advice for observational studies: "make your theories elaborate." This new edition features updated exploration of causal influence, with four new chapters, a new R package DOS2 designed as a companion for the book, and discussion of several of the latest matching packages for R. In particular, DOS2 allows readers to reproduce many analyses from Design of Observational Studies.

This substantially revised text provides a comprehensive, highly accessible, and student friendly introduction to the principles, concepts, and methods currently used in educational research. This text provides a balanced combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and enables students to master skills in reading, understanding, critiquing, and conducting research. Many examples and article excerpts are used throughout the text to demonstrate and highlight best practices in educational research. Evidence-based inquiry is emphasized in two ways: (1) Introductory chapters focus on the added importance of data driven decision-making, (2) Methodological chapters provide explicit guidelines for conducting empirical studies.

Doing Social Research is an easy-to-understand guidebook for readers who have little or no knowledge of the social research process. Written in a clear, straightforward style, this book presents the various topics of social research in the outline form of all sociological research articles: starting with an introduction to the problem being researched, why the problem was chosen, and the theoretical premises of the chosen topic, then progressing to the methods utilized to collect the data, the analysis of the data, and the presentation of the material. By following the research outline, the book provides a concise overview of the most important elements of social research, and as an added bonus, synopses of classical studies introduce readers to the early pioneers of social research.

Approaching qualitative research for the first time and unsure how to get started? This book captures what you need to know to jump into effective qualitative or mixed methods research. The book gets you up to speed on the specifics of qualitative research, while showing how it complements quantitative research and how to draw on and hone your existing skills to conduct impactful research. It covers the whole research process, from explaining what theories are for and planning your research design, through gathering and working with your data, to developing good practice in research reporting and dissemination. The book also: * Showcases the value of qualitative research, helping you understand its relevance, credibility and validity. * Grapples with how to decolonise your approach, do research in an ethical and inclusive way, and debias your thinking. * Challenges you to rethink how you conduct research and choose the most appropriate methods for your project. Giving you a fuller understanding of methods and methodologies to benefit your work regardless of the approach you choose, this book encourages you to discover the joy of qualitative research.

In this first book of the series Survey Methods in Educational Research, we have brought together leading authors and scholars in the field to discuss key introductory concepts in the creation, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of survey instruments and their resultant findings. While there are other textbooks that might introduce these concepts adequately well, the authors here have focused on the pragmatic issues that inevitably arise in the development and administration process of survey instruments. Drawing from their rich experiences, the authors present these potential speed bumps or road blocks a survey researcher in education or the social sciences might encounter. Referencing their own work and practice, the authors provide valuable suggestions for dealing with these issues "your advisor never told you about." And all of the recommendations are aligned with standard protocols and current research on best practices in the field of research methodology. This book is broken into four broad units on creating survey items and instruments, administering surveys, analyzing the data from surveys, and stories of successful administrations modeling the entire research cycle. Each chapter focuses on a different concept in the survey research process, and the authors share their approaches to addressing the issues. These topics include survey item construction, scale development, cognitive interviewing, measuring change with self-report data, translation issues with surveys administered in multiple languages, working with school and program administrators when implementing surveys, a review of current software used in survey research, the use of weights, response styles, assessing validity of results, and effectively communicating your results and findings ... and much more. The intended audience of the volume will be practitioners, administrators, teachers as researchers, graduate students, social science and education researchers not experienced in survey research, and students learning program evaluation. In brief, if you are considering doing survey research, this book is meant for you

Modern Advances in Tourism Research provides a thorough assessment of state-of-the-art academic research in this recent field of economic science. The authors start by scoping the scene of tourism research, evolving then to a comprehensive analysis of themes of particular interest for researchers and academics interested on the workings of the tourism markets, such as new analysis frameworks in tourism economics and new operational tools in tourism research. With a view to go beyond fundamental research, the book closes with a chapter dedicated to applied country and regional studies, where a variety of subjects a " from input-output analysis to e-tourism competitiveness a " are analysed from an alternative micro-perspective.

This book aims to clarify exactly how simulation studies can be carried out in the system theory paradigm, while providing a realistically complete coverage of (discrete event) simulation in its more traditional aspects. It focuses on the subclass of predictive, generative and dynamic system models.

This book presents the culmination of our collaborative research, going back over 15 years (Rogers & Little, 1994), and for one of us, even longer (Rogers, 1967, 1973). It addresses a dif?cult, yet necessary, area of demographic research: what to do in data situations characterized by irregular, inadequate, or missing data. A common solution within the demographic community has been what is generally referred to as "indirect estimation." In our work the focus has been on the indirect estimation of migration, and our use of the term "indirect" follows the description given in the 1983 United Nations manual, which de?ned it as "techniques suited for analysis of incomplete or defective demographic data" (United Nations, 1983, p. 1). We wrote this book with a goal to make it accessible to a reader familiar with introductory statistical modeling, at the level of regression and categorical data an- ysis using log - linear models. It is primarily intended to serve as a reference work for demographers, sociologists, geographers, economists, and regional planners.

The four volumes of Game Equilibrium Models present applications of non-cooperative game theory. Problems of strategic interaction arising in biology, economics, political science and the social sciences in general are treated in 42 papers on a wide variety of subjects. Internationally known authors with backgrounds in various disciplines have contributed original research. The reader finds innovative modelling combined with advanced methods of analysis. The four volumes are the outcome of a research year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Bielefeld. The close interaction of an international interdisciplinary group of researchers has produced an unusual collection of remarkable results of great interest for everybody who wants to be informed on the scope, potential, and future direction of work in applied game theory. Volume IV Social and Political Interaction contains game equilibrium models focussing on social and political interaction within communities or states or between states, i.e. national and international social and political interaction. Specific aspects of those interactions are modelled as non-cooperative games and their equilibria are analysed.

Serving as both a student textbook and a professional reference/handbook, this volume explores the statistical methods of examining time intervals between successive state transitions or events. Examples include: survival rates of patients in medical studies, unemployment periods in economic studies, or the period of time it takes a criminal to break the law after his release in a criminological study. The authors illustrate the entire research path required in the application of event-history analysis, from the initial problems of recording event-oriented data to the specific questions of data organization, to the concrete application of available program packages and the interpretation of the obtained results. Event History Analysis: * makes didactically accessible the inclusion of covariates in semi-parametric and parametric regression models based upon concrete examples * presents the unabbreviated close relationship underlying statistical theory * details parameter-free methods of analysis of event-history data and the possibilities of their graphical presentation * discusses specific problems of multi-state and multi-episode models * introduces time-varying covariates and the question of unobserved population heterogeneity * demonstrates, through examples, how to implement hypotheses tests and how to choose the right model.

Regression Analysis in R: A Comprehensive View for the Social Sciences covers the basic applications of multiple linear regression all the way through to more complex regression applications and extensions. Written for graduate level students of social science disciplines this book walks readers through bivariate correlation giving them a solid framework from which to expand into more complicated regression models. Concepts are demonstrated using R software and real data examples. Key Features: Full output examples complete with interpretation Full syntax examples to help teach R code Appendix explaining basic R functions Methods for multilevel data that are often included in basic regression texts End of Chapter Comprehension Exercises

This volume intends to summarize the most important changes in the Central European countries and their settlement network emphasizing the last 20 years since the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

This book aims to stimulate debate in the growing and highly controversial area of measuring scholarly work. The authors examine key aspects of this topic through the lens of the latest theoretical developments in service science and associated fields. It includes chapters explaining the theoretical developments and methodological aspects of measuring the quality of academic teaching and research, while other chapters provide a review and analysis of various types of scholarly work metrics and processes with examples from several countries, cultures, and educational systems. The current growing concern about higher education (HE) quality has prompted institutions to divide university teachers' work into different areas and to design methods aimed at measuring the productivity of these areas. It is widely accepted that the need to evaluate HE service quality is a relevant issue for any society. However, the authors argue that most of the current practices used in the pursuit of this objective are jeopardizing the future of the university as a place of knowledge generation, science evolution and professional education.

Launched in 1950, Penguin's Russian Classics quickly progressed to include translations of many great works of Russian literature and the series came to be regarded by readers, both academic and general, as the de facto provider of classic Russian literature in English translation, the legacy of which reputation resonates right up to the present day. Through an analysis of the individuals involved, their agendas, and their socio-cultural context, this book, based on extensive original research, examines how Penguin's decisions and practices when translating and publishing the series played a significant role in deciding how Russian literature would be produced and marketed in English translation. As such the book represents a major contribution to Translation Studies, to the study of Russian literature, to book history and to the history of publishing.