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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social research & statistics > General
This open access book presents a ground-breaking approach to developing micro-foundations for demography and migration studies. It offers a unique and novel methodology for creating empirically grounded agent-based models of international migration - one of the most uncertain population processes and a top-priority policy area. The book discusses in detail the process of building a simulation model of migration, based on a population of intelligent, cognitive agents, their networks and institutions, all interacting with one another. The proposed model-based approach integrates behavioural and social theory with formal modelling, by embedding the interdisciplinary modelling process within a wider inductive framework based on the Bayesian statistical reasoning. Principles of uncertainty quantification are used to devise innovative computer-based simulations, and to learn about modelling the simulated individuals and the way they make decisions. The identified knowledge gaps are subsequently filled with information from dedicated laboratory experiments on cognitive aspects of human decision-making under uncertainty. In this way, the models are built iteratively, from the bottom up, filling an important epistemological gap in migration studies, and social sciences more broadly.
Karl R. Popper is widely regarded as one of the most influential 20th century philosophers. In this new biography, Weinert provides a comprehensive and accessible account of his life and work, also addressing Popper's role as a public intellectual. Drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews with former colleagues and collaborators, he recounts not only the wide interest from the scientific community, but also the inspiration that politicians took from Popper's work. The book surveys the vast and varied intellectual landscape of Popper's philosophical journey during his long career: from the natural and social sciences (physics, evolution, sociology) to political philosophy and the philosophy of mind. It pays significant attention to Popper's critical method - i.e., the notion that ideas and institutions should be exposed to rigorous tests - the approach that led him to a fervent defence of objectivity, rationality and realism, against all forms of irrationalism, as well as a passionate advocacy of freedom, social justice and liberal democracy, against all forms of authoritarianism. The book brings Popper into focus as a modern Enlightenment philosopher.
A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences includes essays on the ways in which the histories of psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history and political science have been written since the Second World War. Bringing together chapters written by the leading historians of each discipline, the book establishes significant parallels and contrasts and makes the case for a comparative interdisciplinary historiography. This comparative approach helps explain historiographical developments on the basis of factors specific to individual disciplines and the social, political, and intellectual developments that go beyond individual disciplines. All historians, including historians of the different social sciences, encounter literatures with which they are not familiar. This book will provide a broader understanding of the different ways in which the history of the social sciences, and by extension intellectual history, is written.
This book focuses on ethical and methodological issues faced by researchers working with young language learners in formal school contexts. It uncovers and explicitly discusses a range of ethical dilemmas, challenges and experiences that researchers have encountered and grappled with, in studies of all kinds from large scale, experimental studies to ethnographic studies focused on just a handful of children. The chapters are written by researchers working with children in different classroom contexts around the world and highlight how ethical dilemmas and tensions take on a complex form in child-focused research, requiring researchers to pay particular attention to the social and cultural norms of the different communities within which children are educated as well as their school-based experiences. The book comprises three sections, with the first part focused on involving children as active participants in research; part two on ethical challenges in multilingual contexts and part three on links between teacher education and researching children. The book includes a critical discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with applying the UNCRC (1989) document in second language research with children which will be of use to any researcher working in this area.
This book highlights the rise of the Strauss-Corbin-Gioia (SCG) methodology as an important paradigm in qualitative research in the social sciences, and demonstrates how the SCG methodology can be operationalized and enhanced using RQDA. It also provides a technical and methodological review of RQDA as a new CAQDAS tool. Covering various techniques, it offers methodological guidance on how to connect CAQDAS tool with accepted paradigms, particularly the SCG methodology, to produce high- quality qualitative research and includes step-by-step instructions on using RQDA under the SCG qualitative research paradigm. Lastly, it comprehensively discusses methodological issues in qualitative research. This book is useful for qualitative scholars, PhD/postdoctoral students and students taking qualitative methodology courses in the broader social sciences, and those who are familiar with programming languages and wish to cross over to qualitative data analysis. "At long last! We now have a qualitative data-analysis approach that enhances the use of a systematic methodology for conducting qualitative research. Chandra and Shang should be applauded for making our research lives a lot easier. And to top it all off, it's free." Dennis Gioia, Robert & Judith Auritt Klein Professor of Management, Smeal College of Business at Penn State University, USA "While we have a growing library of books on qualitative data analysis, this new volume provides a much needed new perspective. By combining a sophisticated understanding of qualitative research with an impressive command of R, the authors provide an important new toolkit for qualitative researchers that will improve the depth and rigor of their data analysis. And given that R is open source and freely available, their approach solves the all too common problem of access that arises from the prohibitive cost of more traditional qualitative data analysis software. Students and seasoned researchers alike should take note!" Nelson Phillips, Abu Dhabi Chamber Chair in Strategy and Innovation, Imperial College Business School, United Kingdom "This helpful book does what it sets out to do: offers a guide for systematizing and building a trail of evidence by integrating RQDA with the Gioia approach to analyzing inductive data. The authors provide easy-to-follow yet detailed instructions underpinned by sound logic, explanations and examples. The book makes me want to go back to my old data and start over!" Nicole Coviello, Lazaridis Research Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada "Qualitative Research Using R: A Systematic Approach guides aspiring researchers through the process of conducting a qualitative study with the assistance of the R programming language. It is the only textbook that offers "click-by-click" instruction in how to use RQDA software to carry out analysis. This book will undoubtedly serve as a useful resource for those interested in learning more about R as applied to qualitative or mixed methods data analysis. Helpful as well is the six-step procedure for carrying out a grounded-theory type study (the "Gioia approach") with the support of RQDA software, making it a comprehensive resource for those interested in innovative qualitative methods and uses of CAQDAS tools." Trena M. Paulus, Professor of Education, University of Georgia, USA
Social problems are endemic to all societies. The UK is no exception and is grappling with a plethora of issues including poverty, family breakdown, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, child abuse and neglect, youth offending, alcohol and drug misuse, mental health issues, homelessness, and ethnic and religious discrimination. These problems have huge implications for the individual, the family unit and society at large and take their toll on health, wellbeing, and community resources. They place an enormous amount of strain on government finances and the welfare state, and add to the burden on social institutions, such as the National Health Service and the social work and criminal justice systems. Contemporary Social Problems in the UK explores a wide range of social problems in the UK. Each social problem has been explored using a range of psychosocial theories to generate an understanding of various causal factors and to examine the linkages between different social problems. Government policy and legislation, remedial measures, preventive approaches, and strategies of intervention are also considered for each social problem that has been dealt with. Each chapter deals with a particular social problem and has been penned by an expert in that topic. The endeavour has been to provide a multi-dimensional overview of the social problem in a manner that is engaging and easy to read. The end-of-chapter content includes supplementary reading, useful topic related websites besides a quiz and individual / group activities to generate discussion and stimulate learning. This informative yet accessible textbook will be an invaluable resource for instructors and students in the social sciences as well as professionals who work with people who experience some of these problems.
This book discusses the Belt and Road Initiative at the provincial level in China. It analyses the evolution of the role of local governments in Chinese foreign policy since the opening of China's economy in 1978, showing how the provinces initially competed with each other, and how the central government was forced to react, developing more centralised policies. Unlike other books on the Belt and Road Initiative, which focus on the international aspects of the initiative, this book demonstrates the importance of the Belt and Road in reinforcing China's unitary status and for managing and coordinating development at the local level as well as centre-province relations and province to province relations inside China.
In this book, senior scholars and a new generation of analysts present different applications of recent advances linking beliefs and decision-making, in the area of foreign policy analysis with strategic interactions in world politics. Divided into five parts, Part 1 identifies how the beliefs in the cognitive operational codes of individual leaders explain the political decisions of states. In Part 2, five chapters illustrate progress in comparing the operational codes of individual leaders, including Vladimir Putin of Russia, three US presidents, Bolivian president Evo Morales, Sri Lanka's President Chandrika Kumaratunga, and various leaders of terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East and North Africa. Part 3 introduces a new Psychological Characteristics of Leaders (PsyCL) data set containing the operational codes of US presidents from the early 1800s to the present. In Part 4, the focus is on strategic interactions among dyads and evolutionary patterns among states in different regional and world systems. Part 5 revisits whether the contents of the preceding chapters support the claims about the links between beliefs and foreign policy roles in world politics. Richly illustrated and with comprehensive analysis Operational Code Analysis and Foreign Policy Roles will be of interest to specialists in foreign policy analysis, international relations theorists, graduate students, and national security analysts in the policy-making and intelligence communities.
Selected papers from the International Conference on New Computational Social Science, focusing on the following five aspects: Big data acquisition and analysis, Integration of qualitative research and quantitative research, Sociological Internet experiment research, Application of ABM simulation method in Sociology Research, Research and development of new social computing tools. With the rapid development of information technology, especially sweeping progress in the Internet of things, cloud computing, social networks, social media and big data, social computing, as a data-intensive science, is an emerging field that leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth, depth and scale. It represents a new computing paradigm and an interdisciplinary field of research and application. A broad comprehension of major topics involved in social computing is important for both scholars and practitioners. This proceedings presents and discusses key concepts and analyzes the state-of-the-art of the field. The conference not only gave insights on social computing, but also affords conduit for future research in the field. Social computing has two distinct trends: One is on the social science issues, such as computational social science, computational sociology, social network analysis, etc; The other is on the use of computational techniques. Finally some new challenges ahead are summarized, including interdisciplinary cooperation and training, big data sharing for scientific data mashups, and privacy protect.
In Researching Yugoslavia and its Aftermath, a common thread is the authors' path through the time and space context in which fieldwork has taken place. Accordingly, this collection tackles problems that have always existed but have not been dealt with in a single volume. In particular, it examines a range of methodological questions arising from the contributors' shared concerns, and thus the obstacles and solutions characterising the relationship between researchers and their objects of study. Being an interdisciplinary project, this book brings together highly regarded historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, cultural and social theorists, as well as experts in architecture and communication studies. They share a belief that the awareness of the researcher's own position in fieldwork is a precondition of utmost significance to comprehend the evolution of objects of study, and hence to ensure transparency and ultimate credibility of the findings. Moreover, the contributors come from diverse backgrounds, including authors from the former Yugoslavia and others who have made their way to the region after starting their research careers; some from universities in the area, others from institutions in the Global North. Here, they explore cross-cutting issues such as the repercussions of gender, nationality, institutional affiliation and the consequences of their entry into the field. This is examined in terms of the results of the research and the ethical aspect of the relationship with the object of study, as well as the implications of the chosen time framework in the methodological design and the clash between this decision and the interests of the actors studied.
Emphasizing the comparative aspects of research, this introduction to educational research traces the process through five stages--choosing what to study, including specifying the research problem; collecting information; organizing and summarizing information; interpreting results; and reporting the outcomes. Each of the stages offers diverse options available to researchers for solving the problems of that stage, and a research project checklist at the end of each chapter guides readers in applying the chapter's contents to their own research studies. In much educational discourse, comparative education has referred solely to the study of educational similarities and differences between regions of the world or between two or more nations. This book uses the broader definition of the term to encompass a large body of research including studies focusing on comparisons between local educational systems, schools, classrooms, language groups, religious denominations, genders, social classes, and individual students. Students who are planning research projects as well as staff members of such organizations as ministries of education, school systems, bureaus of educational research, and educational aid agencies will find this volume indispensable.
The law is heavily implicated in creating, maintaining, and reproducing racialised hierarchies which bring about and preserve acute global disparities and injustices. This essential book provides an examination of the meanings of decolonisation and explores how this examination can inform teaching, researching, and practising of law. It explores the ways in which the foundations of law are entangled in colonial thought and in its [re]production of ideas of commodification of bodies and space-time. Thus, it is an exploration of the ways in which we can use theories and praxes of decolonisation to produce legal knowledge for flourishing futures.
This book is the first dedicated collection aimed at examining teaching and learning issues within criminology. This collection of essays identifies how criminological practices are being shaped by larger developments and changes within the field of scholarship on teaching and learning. Changes include an increased university focus on 'good teaching' rankings and the associated emphasis on the professional development of teaching staff in order to shape them. In the past decade government funding for teaching and learning awards, and the move to sector funding on the basis of 'good teaching' outcomes (student satisfaction, completion rates, etc.), have further fostered developments in teaching and learning practices and the associated scholarship. However, criminology lags behind in responding to these changes. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Criminology aims to fill this gap by examining teaching practices in the hope of fostering a new generation of publications dedicated to scholarship on teaching and learning within the field.
Topics of complex system physics and their interdisciplinary applications to different problems in seismology, biology, economy, sociology, energy and nanotechnology are covered in this new work from renowned experts in their fields. Inparticular, contributed papers contain original results on network science, earthquake dynamics, econophysics, sociophysics, nanoscience and biological physics. Most of the papers use interdisciplinary approaches based on statistical physics, quantum physics and other topics of complex system physics.Papers on econophysics and sociophysics are focussed on societal aspects of physics such as, opinion dynamics, public debates and financial and economic stability. This work will be of interest to statistical physicists, economists, biologists, seismologists and all scientists working in interdisciplinary topics of complexity."
Autoethnography is a unique discipline which steps inside and outside the self to experience, embody and express social and cultural meaning. At once a performative, political and poetic genre of research writing, it holds the potential to uncover the 'heart of the world', if only for a moment. The author uses theory as story and story as theory to explore her place in the world through painstaking and intimate self and social narratives to lay bare the unique challenges and rewards of autoethnography. Framed around the metaphor of 'heartlines', the author explores autoethnographic practice as critical feminist and decolonial work and the power it holds for not only imagining a wise, ethical and loving world, but for making such a kind place possible. Through a performative journey of the heart, we travel with the author as she unearths the power of words, of writing and not-writing, evoking in particular the work of Helene Cixous and Virginia Woolf. This reflective, passionate and pioneering volume will be of interest and value to all those interested in autoethnography and the ways in which it can be applied as critical, ethical and political work in the social sciences.
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.
Research doesn't exist in a bubble but co-exists with a multitude of other tasks and commitments, yet there is more need for people to save time than ever before. Brilliantly attuned to the demands placed on researchers, this book considers how students, academics and professionals alike can save time and stress without compromising the quality of their research or its outcomes. This third edition: - is fully revised with new chapters on research and evaluation ethics, creative methods of collecting data and how research can make a positive difference; - includes illustrative case studies throughout the book, and each chapter concludes with exercises, discussion questions and a debate topic; - is accompanied by a fully updated companion website. This supportive book is designed for any student or practitioner who wants to know how to do research on top of their main job, and still have a life.
Advancing Culturally Responsive Research and Researchers: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods encourages readers to design and engage in methodologies and methods that place cultural relevancy at the center of inquiry. In doing so, it highlights the need to uplift voices and needs of people who have been historically marginalized in the environments that we both inhabit and engage in as part of knowledge construction. The scholars whose work is featured in this volume take up research from different paradigmatic, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and methodological approaches - yet, with adherence to centering cultural responsiveness in all research decisions. Each chapter seeks to extend understandings of social inequities, methodologies, and/or methods - and to contribute to meaningful and evolving social change through innovative and cutting-edge research strategies. While doing this work, the authors illustrate and highlight the importance of researcher positions and reflexivity in supporting the expansion of culturally responsive approaches; they also do so while considering global sociopolitical conditions of this moment in time. The contributions to this volume were initially presented at the first biennial Advanced Methods Institute in 2021. The Institute was hosted by QualLab in The Ohio State University's College of Education and Human Ecology and shared this volume's thematic focus. As a handbook, the volume can help faculty and advanced researchers with interest in doing culturally responsive projects to better understand frameworks, approaches, and considerations for doing so. It includes activities to support readers in developing said understandings.
This book brings together selected peer-reviewed contributions from various research fields in statistics, and highlights the diverse approaches and analyses related to real-life phenomena. Major topics covered in this volume include, but are not limited to, bayesian inference, likelihood approach, pseudo-likelihoods, regression, time series, and data analysis as well as applications in the life and social sciences. The software packages used in the papers are made available by the authors. This book is a result of the 47th Scientific Meeting of the Italian Statistical Society, held at the University of Cagliari, Italy, in 2014.
The great forces of population change - the balance of births, deaths and migrations - have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans. The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway. Tomorrow's People ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way - portents for still larger migrations ahead - which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change - remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production - which have made all these developments possible. Tomorrow's People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.
- The book will the first to focus specifically on IE as a form of ethnography. - The volume is interdisciplinary offering chapters which illustrate use of IE in a range of educational sub-disciplines including medical education, teacher ed, arts and literacy research, as well as examples of IE in settings with relevance to the social sciences, anthropology, and cultural studies. - Considerations around ethics, researcher positionality, data collection, and analysis have implications beyond IE, to other qualitative research methods. - Judith L. Green is an internationally regarded scholar and a key contributor to the literature on ethnography and education.
This detailed textbook critically examines methods used in sociolinguistc studies, including the ways in which the categories of age, gender, ethnicity and social class have been employed to chart language variation. It discusses the nature of data and encourages students to examine the evidence with a more critical eye.
This book illustrates tensions, absences, and unresolved challenges experienced in research - experiences that are so often left out of the conventional, smooth, and linear discussion of research that generally appears in academic publications. Laying bare the messy details of research is increasingly important because leisure scholars' engagement in reflexive, collaborative, critical, arts-based, participative, and social justice-oriented research heightens the need to explore and examine significant moments that punctuate and undoubtedly shape both research and researchers. The chapters in this book make explicit the negotiations, contradictions, questions, doubts, and uncertainties often underlying research. As loose ends of the research process are unravelled, this book inspires researchers across disciplines to expand the ways we come to know and do research. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Leisure Sciences. |
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