The book provides an argument why realism is a viable metatheoretical framework for psychological science. By looking at some variations of realism such as scientific realism, critical realism, situational realism and Ferraris' new realism, a realist view of science is outlined that can feature as a metatheory for psychological science. Realism is a necessary correction for the mythical image of science responsible for and maintained by a number of dichotomies and polarities in psychology. Thus, the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy, scientist-practitioner polarity and positivist-constructionist opposition feed off and maintains a mythic image of science on levels of practice, methods and metatheory. Realism makes a clear distinction between ontology and epistemic access to reality, the latter which easily fits with softer versions of constructionism, and the former which grounds science in resistance and possibility, loosely translated as criticism. By taking science as a critical activity an issue such as the quantitative imperative looses its defining force as a hallmark of science - it provides epistemic access to certain parts of reality. In addition, essentially critical activities characteristic of various qualitative approaches may be welcomed as proper science. Academics, professionals and researchers in psychology would find value in situating their scholarly work in a realist metatheory avoiding the pitfalls of traditional methodologies and theories.

Event history analysis--the study of individual life histories--has developed rapidly over the past few years. This volume illustrates the use of the new techniques at the frontier of the subject. The number of surveys undertaken throughout the world to collect detailed information on the timing of events in individual lives--such as fertility surveys or migration histories--has increased, and new methods to analyze such data have developed. Unresolved technical and practical issues remain, however, and researchers often have limited experience of the new techniques--this volume addresses these issues and provides information on the new methodologies. The book covers three main areas. First, it summarizes the work on the incorporation of unmeasured heterogeneity into the analysis of event histories; secondly, it introduces a series of 'competitions' in which pairs of teams are assigned to analyse the same topic using the same data; finally, it discusses other methodological issues such as the treatment of missing data, the analysis of current-status data, and the relation between discrete and continuous time models.

Showcases practical approaches to doing oral history work in qualitative educational research Considers how to best do both methodology and output of oral history research Written in the editors' typical accessible style with a range of contributing voices, making it particularly suitable for early career researchers

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

Although the impact that clients can have on therapists is well-known, most work on the subject consists of dire warnings: mental health professionals are taught early on to be on their guard for burnout, compassion fatigue, and countertransference. However, while these professional hazards are very real, the scholarly focus on the negative potential of the client-counselor relationship often implies that no good can come of allowing oneself to get too close to a client's issues. This sentiment obscures what every therapist knows to be true: that the client-counselor relationship can also effect powerful positive transformations in a therapist's own life.
"How Clients Transform Their Therapists" is Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson's testimony to the significant and often life-changing ways in which therapists have been changed by their patients. Kottler and Carlson draw not only upon their own extensive experience-between them, they have more than fifty years in the field-but also uponlengthy interviews with dozens of the country's foremost therapists and theorists. This novel work will present readers with a truly unique perspective on the business of therapy: not merely how it appears externally, but how practitioners experience it internally. Although these stories paint a complex and multi-layered portrait of the client-counselor relationship, they all demonstrate the profound and unexpected rewards that the profession has to offer.

As a consequence of the rapid diffusion of online media, the conditions for political communication, and research concerning it have radically changed. Is empirical communication research capable of consistently describing and explaining the changes in political communication in the online world both from a theoretical and methodological perspective? In this book, Gerhard Vowe, Philipp Henn, and a group of leading international experts in the field of communication studies guide the reader through the complexities of political communication, and evaluate whether and to what extent existing theoretical approaches and research designs are relevant to the online world. In the first part of the book, nine chapters offer researchers the opportunity to test the basic assumptions of prominent theories in the field, to specify them in terms of the conditions of political communication in the online world and to modify them in view of the systematically gained experiences. The second methodological section tests the variations of content analysis, surveys, expert interviews and network analyses in an online environment and documents how successful these methods of empirical analysis have proven to be in political communication. Written accessibly and contributing to key debates on political communication, this bookshelf essential presents an indispensable account of the necessary tools needed to allow researchers decide which approach and method is better suited to answer their online problem.

This book addresses the ethical and methodological issues that researchers face while conducting cross-cultural social research. With globalization and advanced means of communication and transportation, many researchers conduct research in cross-cultural, multicultural, and transnational settings. Through a range of case studies, and drawing on a range of disciplinary expertise, this book addresses the ethics, errors, and ethnocentrism of conducting law and crime related research in settings where power differences, as well as stereotypes, may come into play. Including chapters from scholars across cultures and settings - including Greece, Canada, Vienna, South Africa, India, and the United States - this book provides an invaluable survey of the issues attending cross-cultural social justice research today. Engaging issues confronted by all cross-cultural researchers this book will be invaluable to those working across the social sciences as well as professionals in criminal justice and social work.

Die fachliche und kulturelle Vielfalt der Praxis der Sozialen Arbeit und der Sozialpadagogik in Polen, Rumanien und Deutschland wird in diesem Tagungsband deutlich. Grundlagenthemen der Sozialen Arbeit, spezifische Ausbildungsaspekte, Aufsatze zum Themenfeld Gesundheit und Aufsatze zu spezifischen Praxisansatzen in der Sozialen Arbeit sind in diesem Band enthalten.

Global University Rankings explores the novel topic of global university rankings and their effects on higher education in Europe. The contributions in this volume outline different discourses on global university rankings and explore the related changes concerning European higher education policies, disciplinary traditions and higher education institutions. The first global university rankings were published less than a decade ago, but these policy instruments have become highly influential in shaping the approaches and institutional realities of higher education. The rankings have portrayed European academic institutions in a varying light. There is intense reflexivity over the figures, leading to ideational changes and institutional adaptation that take surprisingly similar forms in different European countries. The contributions in this book critically assess global university rankings as a policy discourse that would seem to be instrumental to higher education reform throughout Europe.

Now in its second edition, Text Analysis with R provides a practical introduction to computational text analysis using the open source programming language R. R is an extremely popular programming language, used throughout the sciences; due to its accessibility, R is now used increasingly in other research areas. In this volume, readers immediately begin working with text, and each chapter examines a new technique or process, allowing readers to obtain a broad exposure to core R procedures and a fundamental understanding of the possibilities of computational text analysis at both the micro and the macro scale. Each chapter builds on its predecessor as readers move from small scale "microanalysis" of single texts to large scale "macroanalysis" of text corpora, and each concludes with a set of practice exercises that reinforce and expand upon the chapter lessons. The book's focus is on making the technical palatable and making the technical useful and immediately gratifying. Text Analysis with R is written with students and scholars of literature in mind but will be applicable to other humanists and social scientists wishing to extend their methodological toolkit to include quantitative and computational approaches to the study of text. Computation provides access to information in text that readers simply cannot gather using traditional qualitative methods of close reading and human synthesis. This new edition features two new chapters: one that introduces dplyr and tidyr in the context of parsing and analyzing dramatic texts to extract speaker and receiver data, and one on sentiment analysis using the syuzhet package. It is also filled with updated material in every chapter to integrate new developments in the field, current practices in R style, and the use of more efficient algorithms.

What have jobs really been like for the past 40 years and what do the workers themselves say about them? In What Workers Say, Roberta Iversen shows that for employees in labor market industries-like manufacturing, construction, printing-as well as those in service-producing jobs, like clerical work, healthcare, food service, retail, and automotive-jobs are often discriminatory, are sometimes dangerous and exploitive, and seldom utilize people's full range of capabilities. Most importantly, they fail to provide any real opportunity for advancement. What Workers Say takes its cue from Studs Terkel's Working, as Iversen interviewed more than 1,200 workers to present stories about their labor market jobs since 1980. She puts a human face on the experiences of a broad range of workers indicating what their jobs were and are truly like. Iversen reveals how transformations in the political economy of waged work have shrunk or eliminated opportunity for workers, families, communities, and productivity. What Workers Say also offers an innovative proposal for compensated civil labor that could enable workers, their communities, labor market organizations, and the national infrastructure to actually flourish.

This volume includes contributions selected after a double blind review process and presented as a preliminary version at the 45th Meeting of the Italian Statistical Society. The papers provide significant and innovative original contributions and cover a broad range of topics including: statistical theory; methods for time series and spatial data; statistical modeling and data analysis; survey methodology and official statistics; analysis of social, demographic and health data; and economic statistics and econometrics.

This single reference volume features every cutting-edge CQ Researcher report published in 2015. CQ Researcher is the most trusted source for in-depth reporting on current, vital issues, and is the top choice of librarians and students seeking original, comprehensive reporting and analysis on the issues shaping the world.

This handbook provides a comprehensive historical account of the field of Quality of Life. It brings together theoretical insights and empirical findings and presents the main items of global quality of life and wellbeing research. Worldwide in its scope of topics, the handbook examines discussions of demographic and health development, the spread of democracy, global economic accounting, multi-item measurement of perceived satisfaction and expert-assessed quality of life and the well-being of children, women and poor people. It looks at well-being in specific regions, including North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, South America and Eastern and Western Europe. In addition to contributions by leading and younger authors, the handbook includes contributions from International Organizations about their own work with respect to social reporting.

This book examines epistemic pluralism, a brand new area of research in epistemology with dramatic implications for the discipline. Challenging traditional assumptions about the nature of justification, an expert team of contributors explores pluralism about justification, with compelling first-order results - including analysis of the various requisites one might want to impose on the notion of justification (and therefore of knowledge) and why. It is shown why a long-lasting dispute within epistemology about the nature of justification has reached a stalemate and how embracing a different overarching outlook might lead to progress and aid better appreciation of the relationship between the various epistemic projects scholars have been pursuing. With close connections to the idea of epistemic relativism, and with specific applications to various areas of contemporary epistemology (such as the debate over epistemic norms of action and assertion, epistemic peers' disagreement, self-knowledge and the status of philosophical disputes about ontology) this fascinating new volume is essential reading for scholars, researchers and advanced students in the discipline.

'Soft' Counterinsurgency reviews the promise and actual achievement of Human Terrain Teams, the small groups of social scientists that were eventually embedded in every combat brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book, based on interviews with both HTT personnel and their military commanders, examines the military's need for sociocultural information, the ethical issues surrounding research carried out in combat zones, and the tensions between military and social science organizational cultures. The account provides a close, detailed account of HTT activities, a critical reflection on the possibilities of creating a 'softer, ' less violent counterinsurgency, and the difficulty of attempting to make war more 'intelligent' and discriminating.

This collection discusses and illustrates how educational research is affected by the economic, institutional and physical contingencies of its time, and in our time even increasingly is driven by them. It is argued that the antidote to this is, however, not to aspire to 'thought itself', but instead to do justice to its own rootedness in the 'material', including textuality. From an historical point of view such an innovative approach can itself revamp the material scholarly culture and the way it is represented. The chapters address a variety of topics such as the cultural heritage of the school desk, the significance of images for research into long-term educational processes, the way iconic signs function, and how modes of enquiry relate to the materiality of education. Attention is also given to standards for reporting on educational research studies and how these limit the scope and communication and moreover shape researchers, to the forms of citation practices as substantially influencing methods and content, and to the centrality of conversation not just as the means to an end but as what matters; further to representational and to non-representational theories for educational research. Some examples are drawn from the area of arts-based educational research, from mathematics education, and from the discourse on universities.

This book identifies the strengths and weaknesses of different methodological approaches to research in communication and social change. It examines the methodological opportunities and challenges occasioned by rapid technological affordances and society-wide transformations. This study provides grounded insights on these issues from a broad range of proficient academics and experienced practitioners. Overall, the different contributions address four key themes: a critical evaluation of different ethnographic approaches in researching communication for/and social change; a critical appraisal of visual methodologies and theatre for development research; a methodological appraisal of different participatory approaches to researching social change; and a critical examination of underlying assumptions of knowledge production within the dominant strands of methodological approaches to researching social change. In addressing these issues through a critical reflection of the methodological decisions and implications of their research projects, the contributors in this book offer perspectives that are highly relevant for students, researchers and practitioners within the broad field of communication for/and social change.

This book provides an up-to-date overview of demographic analysis and methods, including recent developments in demography. Concepts and methods, from the nature of demographic information through data collection and the basics of statistical measures and on to demographic analysis itself are succinctly explained. Measures and analyses of fertility, mortality, life tables, migration and demographic events such as marriage, education and labour force are described while later chapters cover multiple decrement tables, population projections, the importance of testing and smoothing demographic data, the stable population model and demographic software. An emphasis on practical aspects and the use of real-life examples based on data from around the globe make this book accessible, whilst comprehensive references and links to data and other resources on the internet help readers to explore further. The text is concise and well written, making it ideally suited to a wider audience from students to academics and teachers. Students of demography, geography, sociology, economics, as well as professionals, academics and students of marketing, human resource management, and public health who have an interest in population issues will all find this book useful.

From leading researcher and bestselling author, John McLeod, this new edition of Doing Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy is a book for students and practitioners who wish to undertake a small-scale publishable research study. The focus is on research projects that are appropriate for student and practitioner researchers: qualitative interview-based research, practice-based outcome studies, case studies, and autoethnographic research. These different genres of research provide a grounding in the main approaches used in counselling and psychotherapy research. This accessible and comprehensive 'how to' guide on conducting a successful research project in counselling and psychotherapy takes you step-by-step through the research journey: initial engagement with the idea of doing research, developing a research question, appreciating the strengths and limitations of both qualitative and quantitative methods, conducting a study, and then finally writing up the findings for potential publication. Supported by a wide range of case examples and points for reflection, as well as extensive on-line resources, this highly practical introduction to research in counselling, psychotherapy and allied disciplines is essential reading for any trainee or practitioner learning about the research process for the first time.

This textbook guides the reader on how to undertake high-quality literature reviews, from traditional narrative to protocol-driven reviews. The guidance covers a broad range of purposes, disciplines and research paradigms. Whether the literature review is part of a research project, doctoral study, dissertation or a stand-alone study, the book offers approaches, methods, tools, tips and guidelines to produce more effective literature reviews in an efficient manner. The numerous examples are drawn from an array of subject areas, such as economics, healthcare, education, medicine, psychology, software engineering amongst others. This makes it worthwhile for a wide range of studies and for reviews into evidence-based interventions, policies, practices and treatments. There is attention given to presenting, reporting and publishing literature reviews. With the additional clarity brought about by explanatory tables and graphs, this textbook is a 'must-have' for all students, researchers, academics and practitioners at any stage of their project or career when engaging with literature. In addition, citizens, policymakers and practitioners will benefit from the guidance with better insight into how literature reviews could and should have been conducted.

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.

The second edition of Qualitative Research Methods for Community Development teaches the basic skills, tools, and methods of qualitative research with special attention to the needs of community practitioners. This book teaches students entering planning, community development, nonprofit management, social work, and similar applied fields the core skills necessary to conduct systematic research designed to empower communities and promote social change. Focusing on the basic elements of qualitative research, such as field observation, interviewing, focus groups, and content analysis, this second edition of this book provides an overview of core methods and theoretical underpinnings of successful research. It also includes two new chapters on qualitative data analysis software and techniques for conducting online qualitative interviews and focus groups. From housing, community organizing, neighborhood planning, and urban revitalization, this book gives students the skills they need to undertake their own projects and provides professionals a valuable reference for their future research. This book serves as a primary text for courses in applied qualitative research and as a reference book for professionals and community-based researchers.

This volume brings together interviews with leading scholars to discuss some of the most important issues associated with radicalization, violent extremism and terrorism. The overall aim of these interviews is to move beyond the 'conventional wisdom' over radicalization and violent extremism best represented by many of its well-known slogans, metaphors, aphorisms alongside various other thought-terminating cliches. A vast range of topics are tackled in these conversations, including issues as diverse as the genealogy of radicalization and violent extremism, the rhetoric of emergency politics ('the language of fear'), the ethics of securitization, mutual radicalization, the challenges arising out of the relationship between cognitive and behavioural radicalization, Islamism bias in research on radicalization, the ethics of espionage (as an integral element of the 'war on terror'), the epistemic dimension of radicalization, the application of the just war conceptual framework to terrorism, and the ethics of exceptional means when addressing security-related issues, to name a few. The unifying assumption of the interviews in the volume is the complex nature of radicalization, violent extremism and conflicting diversity, as well as their interwoven relationship. While radicalization has become one of the 'great buzzwords' of the intelligence and security 'industry', pleas for its very abandonment as a useful analytical category have also started to emerge. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, radicalisation, violent extremism, security studies and International Relations, in general.