![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social research & statistics > General
Published in 1996, this book presents an innovative method for studying the work of professionals with clients that was applied to an evaluation study of legislation and of lawyers working with clients seeking a divorce. With the simulated client methods, the researcher plays the role of simulated or hypothetical clients with predetermined characteristics who are consulting a lawyer, the research subject. The research is carried out in the natural setting of the lawyer's office and the lawyer conducts business as usual. The method overcomes problems of access due to client confidentiality that are commonly found in research of professional groups. It is a qualitative but focused method for evaluation research which has strengths for making comparisons across professional practice. The book will be useful to those conducting research on professionals and other elite groups working with clients as well as those interested in the socio-legal study of legal professionals. This book was originally published as part of the Cardiff Papers in Qualitative Research series edited by Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont and Amanda Coffey. The series publishes original sociological research that reflects the tradition of qualitative and ethnographic inquiry developed at Cardiff. The series includes monographs reporting on empirical research, edited collections focussing on particular themes, and texts discussing methodological developments and issues.
Political theory offers a great variety of interpretive traditions and models. Today, pluralism is the paradigm. But are all approaches equally useful? What are their limits and possibilities? Can we practice them in isolation, or can we combine them? Modeling Interpretation and the Practice of Political Theory addresses these questions in a refreshing and hands- on manner. It not only models in the abstract, but also tests in practice eight basic schemes of interpretation with which any ambitious reader of political texts should already be familiar. Comprehensive and engaging, the book includes: A straightforward typology of interpretation in political theory. Chapters on the analytical Oxford model, biographical and oeuvre- based interpretation, Skinner's Cambridge School, the esoteric model, reflexive hermeneutics, reception analysis and conceptual history. Original readings of Federalist Paper No. 10 , Plato's Statesman, de Gouges's The Three Urns, Rivera's wall painting The History of Mexico and Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing; with further chapters on Machiavelli, Huang Zongxi and a Hittite loyalty oath. An Epilogue proposing pragmatist eclecticism as the way forward in interpretation. An inspiring, hands- on textbook suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as experienced scholars of political theory, intellectual history and philosophy interested in learning more about types and models of interpretation, and the challenge of combining them in interpretive practice.
This open access book details tools and procedures for data collections of hard-to-reach, hard-to-survey populations. Inside, readers will discover first-hand insights from experts who share their successes as well as their failures in their attempts to identify and measure human vulnerabilities across the life course. Coverage first provides an introduction on studying vulnerabilities based on the Total Error Survey framework. Next, the authors present concrete examples on how to survey such populations as the elderly, migrants, widows and widowers, couples facing breast cancer, employees and job seekers, displaced workers, and teenagers during their transition to adulthood. In addition, one essay discusses the rationale for the use of life history calendars in studying social and psychological vulnerability while another records the difficulty the authors faced when trying to set-up an online social network to collect relevant data. Overall, this book demonstrates the importance to have, from the very beginning, a dialogue between specialists of survey methods and the researchers working on social dynamics across the life span. It will serve as an indispensable resource for social scientists interested in gathering and analyzing data on vulnerable individuals and populations in order to construct longitudinal data bases and properly target social policies.
This is the third and final book in the series Transformative Pedagogies in Teacher Education. Like the first two books in the series it is geared towards practitioners in the field of teacher education. This third book focuses on transformative leadership in teacher education. In other words, the kind of leadership and practices that will be important and necessary to bring about the kind of changes that both teachers and students seek to improve educational outcomes for all students, but in particular Black, Indigenous and racialized students who have been traditionally underserved by the education system. Teacher leadership plays an important role in transformative educational change that challenges all forms of oppression and white supremacy. This book features chapters by a collection of scholars, teacher educators, researchers, teacher advocates and practitioners drawing on their research and experiences to explore critical issues in teacher education. The book will be useful to teacher educators working with teacher candidates in different contexts, experienced teachers andschool leaders. Given demographic shifts and the need for educators to respond to growing diversity in schools, educators will find valuable strategies in Transformative Pedagogies in Teacher Education: Re-Imagining Transformative Leadership in Teacher Education they can employ in their own practice. In addition to valuable strategies, authors explore different approaches and perspectives critical in these changing and challenging times. Critical notions of education are posited from different perspectives and contexts. This book will be useful for teacher education programs, principal preparation programs, in-service teachers, school boards and districts engaging in ongoing professional development of teachers and school leaders.
The Research in the History of Economic Methodology (RHETM) 34A, includes original research from preeminent scholars in the field. RHETM is one of the oldest and most respected publications in the field, and the Vol 34A is crucial for economists, methodologists, and historians of the social sciences.
This book scrutinizes how contemporary practices of security have come to rely on many different translations of security, risk, and danger. Institutions of national security policies are currently undergoing radical conceptual and organisational changes, and this book presents a novel approach for how to study and politically address the new situation. Complex and uncertain threat environments, such as terrorism, climate change, and the global financial crisis, have paved the way for new forms of security governance that have profoundly transformed the ways in which threats are handled today. Crucially, there is a decentralisation of the management of security, which is increasingly handled by a broad set of societal actors that previously were not considered powerful in the conduct of security affairs. This transformation of security knowledge and management changes the meaning of traditional concepts and practices, and calls for investigation into the many meanings of security implied when contemporary societies manage radical dangers, risks, and threats. It is necessary to study both what these meanings are and how they developed from the security practices of the past. Addressing this knowledge gap, the book asks how different ideas about threats, risk, and dangers meet in the current practices of security, broadly understood, and with what political consequences. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, anthropology, risk studies, science and technology studies and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at: https://www.routledge.com/Translations-of-Security-A-Framework-for-the-Study-of-Unwanted-Futures/Berling-Gad-Petersen-Waever/p/book/9781032007090 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
These essays by no means cover all areas of interest in long-term care programs, but they offer new insights (and intriguing questions for future research) about how differently policies in this important area can be carried out in different countries.
Explaining Long-Term Trends in Health and Longevity is a collection of essays by Nobel laureate Robert W. Fogel on the theory and measurement of ageing and health-related variables. Dr Fogel analyzes historic data on height, health, nutrition and life expectation to provide a clearer understanding of the past, illustrate the costs and benefits of using such measures and note the difficulties of drawing conclusions from data intended for different purposes. Dr Fogel explains how the basic findings of the anthropometric approach to historical analysis have helped reinterpret the nature of economic growth. Rising life expectancies and lower disease rates in countries experiencing economic growth highlight the importance of improving nutrition and agricultural productivity.
This book investigates the interaction between complex transformational socio-economic processes, migratory vectors, and the role of ethnic belonging. It outlines the hitherto unexamined determining factors of the mass emigration of the Pontic and Urum Greeks of Georgia. The author addresses the following questions: How, if at all, did ethnic affiliation influence the decision-making process to emigrate? Therefore, should this migration be considered as a "repatriation" process, or should it rather be analyzed in the context of labor migration? The study triangulates qualitative and quantitative analyses of 47 interviews, spatial analysis, as well as materials on Georgia's and the destination countries' socioeconomic realities. This enables a clear understanding of the circumstances that stimulate emigration, the routes, and the experience of living abroad.
It is vital for students, policy makers and practitioners engaged in social policy, social work and other related academic disciplines and fields of practice to understand the importance of research and how to interpret research evidence and findings. They also need to know how to effectively carry out and report good quality research of their own. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition of the acclaimed international best-seller will enable readers to meet all these challenges. Comprehensive in scope, and written expertly by 80 leading contributors in an accessible and engaging style, this landmark book from The Policy Press' Understanding Welfare series includes dozens of new sections which highlight developments since the first edition. It also combines theoretical and applied discussions and case examples to provide the essential one-stop guide to research methods, approaches and debates. The book is essential reading for students and teachers of social policy, social work, public policy, criminology, nursing and health sciences, education and other applied social sciences; policy makers and practitioners who would like to improve their use of research evidence; and those who want to conduct high quality research of their own.
Concept analysis is an established genre of inquiry in nursing, introduced in the 1970s. Currently, over 100 concept studies are published annually, yet the methods used within this field have rarely been questioned. In Concept Analysis in Nursing: A New Approach, Paley provides a critical analysis of the philosophical assumptions that underpin nursing's concept analysis methods. He argues, provocatively, that there are no such things as concepts, as traditionally conceived. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Construction Grammar, the book first makes a case for dispensing with the traditional concept of a 'concept', and then provides two examples of a new approach, examining the use of 'hope' and 'moral distress'. Casting doubt on the assumption that 'hope' always stands for an 'inner' state of the person, the book shows that the word's function varies with the grammatical construction it appears in. Similarly, it argues that 'moral distress' is not the name of a mental state, but a normative classification used to bolster a narrative concerning nursing's identity. Concept Analysis in Nursing is a fresh and challenging book written by a philosopher interested in nursing. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of nursing, health, philosophy and linguistics. It will also interest those familiar with the author's previous book, Phenomenology as Qualitative Research.
Many researchers in recent years have begun to reflect on their gender identity and how this impacts on the research process and discuss how this helps build rapport with participants and creates successful or unsuccessful pieces of qualitative research. However, how does this intersect with other forms of identity, such as class, ethnicity, disability, age, sexuality? In this volume contributors explore these issues by reflecting on their own studies and research careers and address how important or unimportant gender has been in building research relationships. While the gender identity of the respondent/researcher relationship is undoubtedly important, what must also be acknowledged are the attributes which create a good fieldworker and competent social science researchers capable of understanding and engaging in different social situations and thought interaction with different participants.
In this comprehensive review of urban ethnography, Steven Lubet encountered a field that relies heavily on anonymous sources, often as reported by a single investigator whose underlying data remain unseen. Upon digging into the details, he discovered too many ethnographic assertions that were dubious, exaggerated, tendentious, or just plain wrong. Employing the tools and techniques of a trial lawyer, Lubet uses original sources and contemporaneous documentation to explore the stories behind ethnographic narratives. Many turn out to be accurate, but others are revealed to be based on rumors, folklore, and unreliable hearsay. Interrogating Ethnography explains how qualitative social science would benefit from greater attention to the quality of evidence, and provides recommendations for bringing the field more closely in line with other fact-based disciplines such as law and journalism.
This book provides a contemporary treatment of quantitative economics, with a focus on data science. The book introduces the reader to R and RStudio, and uses expert Hadley Wickham's tidyverse package for different parts of the data analysis workflow. After a gentle introduction to R code, the reader's R skills are gradually honed, with the help of "your turn" exercises. At the heart of data science is data, and the book equips the reader to import and wrangle data, (including network data). Very early on, the reader will begin using the popular ggplot2 package for visualizing data, even making basic maps. The use of R in understanding functions, simulating difference equations, and carrying out matrix operations is also covered. The book uses Monte Carlo simulation to understand probability and statistical inference, and the bootstrap is introduced. Causal inference is illuminated using simulation, data graphs, and R code for applications with real economic examples, covering experiments, matching, regression discontinuity, difference-in-difference, and instrumental variables. The interplay of growth related data and models is presented, before the book introduces the reader to time series data analysis with graphs, simulation, and examples. Lastly, two computationally intensive methods-generalized additive models and random forests (an important and versatile machine learning method)-are introduced intuitively with applications. The book will be of great interest to economists-students, teachers, and researchers alike-who want to learn R. It will help economics students gain an intuitive appreciation of applied economics and enjoy engaging with the material actively, while also equipping them with key data science skills.
Theoretical Frameworks in College Student Research was written to offer those who engage in college student research a framework, tool, or guide for understanding the role that theory plays in research. Each of the seven chapters in the volume are organized around five major questions which address the essence of theory, central tenants and concepts of prevailing theories, examples of how the author and others have used the theory in previous research, as well as insights for future research. An impressive set of references points to the expansive literature that informs this new volume.
Community-Based Participatory Action Research: It's All About the Community is deeply grounded in the belief that social sciences research should have a direct connection to helping people and improving communities. This text explores how to achieve community engagement and community involvement to bring about positive change through research and action. The opening chapter introduces participatory action research, an inclusive process that involves researchers as well as subjects, leverages the strengths of all involved, and features strong social justice tenets that lead to a positive change outcome. Additional chapters provide an historical overview of community-based participatory research and its development, as well as models for defining and mapping communities. Readers explore the unique research processes and distinctions of participatory action research and community-based participatory action research (CBPAR). They are provided with a step-by-step guide to conducting CBPAR, grow to understand its transformative nature, and are encouraged to think through ethical considerations. An accessible and concise guide, Community-Based Participatory Action Research is an outstanding supplementary resource for courses with focus in social sciences research.
Rethinking School-University Partnerships: A New Way Forward provides educational leaders in K-12 schools and colleges of education with insight, advice, and direction into the task of creating partnerships. In current times, colleges of education and local school districts need each other like never before. School districts struggle with pipeline, recruitment, and retention issues. Colleges of education face declining enrollment and a shifting educational landscape that fundamentally changes the way that teachers are trained and what local school districts expect their teachers to be able to do. It is with these overlapping constraints and converging interests that partnerships emerge as a foundational strategy for strengthening the education of our teachers. With nearly 80 contributors from 16 states (and Jamaica) representing 39 educational institutions, the partnerships described in this book are different from the ways in which colleges of education and school districts have traditionally worked with one another. In the past, these loose relationships centered primarily on student teaching and/or field experience placements. In this arrangement, the relationship was directed towards ensuring that the local schools were amenable to hosting students from the college of education so that the student/ candidate could complete the requirements to earn a teaching license. In our view, this paradigm needs to be enlarged and shifted.
Rethinking School-University Partnerships: A New Way Forward provides educational leaders in K-12 schools and colleges of education with insight, advice, and direction into the task of creating partnerships. In current times, colleges of education and local school districts need each other like never before. School districts struggle with pipeline, recruitment, and retention issues. Colleges of education face declining enrollment and a shifting educational landscape that fundamentally changes the way that teachers are trained and what local school districts expect their teachers to be able to do. It is with these overlapping constraints and converging interests that partnerships emerge as a foundational strategy for strengthening the education of our teachers. With nearly 80 contributors from 16 states (and Jamaica) representing 39 educational institutions, the partnerships described in this book are different from the ways in which colleges of education and school districts have traditionally worked with one another. In the past, these loose relationships centered primarily on student teaching and/or field experience placements. In this arrangement, the relationship was directed towards ensuring that the local schools were amenable to hosting students from the college of education so that the student/ candidate could complete the requirements to earn a teaching license. In our view, this paradigm needs to be enlarged and shifted.
Because statistical confidentiality embraces the responsibility
for both protecting data and ensuring its beneficial use for
statistical purposes, those working with personal and proprietary
data can benefit from the principles and practices this book
presents. Researchers can understand why an agency holding
statistical data does not respond well to the demand, "Just give me
the data; I'm only going to do good things with it." Statisticians
can incorporate the requirements of statistical confidentiality
into their methodologies for data collection and analysis. Data
stewards, caught between those eager for data and those who worry
about confidentiality, can use the tools of statistical
confidentiality toward satisfying both groups.
Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore-true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction-whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts.
This book explains and illustrates criminal justice research topics, including ethics in research, research design, causation, operationalization of variables, sampling, methods of data collection (including surveys), reliance on existing data, validity, and reliability. For each approach, the book addresses the procedures and issues involved, the method's strengths and drawbacks, and examples of actual research using that method. Every section begins with a brief summary of the research method. Introductory essays set the stage for students regarding the who, what, when, where, and why of each research example, and relevant discussion questions and exercises direct students to focus on the important concepts. Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology: A Text and Reader features interesting and relevant articles from leading journals, which have been expertly edited to highlight research design issues. The text offers instructors a well-rounded and convenient collection that eliminates the need to sift through journals to find articles that illustrate important precepts. All articles are recent and address issues relevant to the field today, such as immigration and crime, security post-9/11, racial profiling, and selection bias in media coverage of crime. Ensuring a rich array, additional articles are downloadable at the Support Materials tab at www.routledge.com/9780367508890. The book encourages classroom discussion and critical thinking and is an essential tool for undergraduate and graduate research methods courses in criminal justice, criminology, and related fields.
The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education approaches theory as a method for doing research, rather than as a background framework. Educational research often reduces theory to a framework used only to analyze empirically collected data. In this view theories are not considered methods, and studies that apply them as such are not given credence. This misunderstanding is primarily due to an empiricist stance of educational research, one that lacks understanding of how theories operate methodologically and presumes positivism is the only valid form of research. This limited perspective has serious consequences on essential academic activities: publication, tenure and promotion, grants, and academic awards. Expanding what constitutes methods in critical theoretical educational research, this edited book details 21 educationally just theories and demonstrates how theories are applied as method to various subfields in education. From critical race hermeneutics to Bakhtin's dialogism, each chapter explicates the ideological roots of said theory while teaching us how to apply the theory as method. This edited book is the first of its kind in educational research. To date, no other book details educationally just theories and clearly explicates how those theories can be applied as methods. With contributions from scholars in the fields of education and qualitative research worldwide, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students.
This book studies the process of demographic transition which has played a key role in the economic development of Western countries. The special focus is on France, which constitutes the first clear case of fertility decline in Europe. The book analyzes the reasons behind this phenomenon by examining the evolution of demographic variables in France over the past two hundred years. To better understand the reasons of the changing patterns of demographic behavior, the authors investigate the development of the female labor force, study educational investments, and explore the evolution of gender roles and relations.
Cultural anthropologists can be an intellectually adventurous crowd: open-even eager-to building bridges across disciplines in the name of understanding human behavior and the human experience more broadly. In this first-of-its-kind book, Caroline Brettell explores the cross-disciplinary conversations that have engaged cultural anthropologists both past and present. Brettell highlights a handful of conversations between the discipline of anthropology on the one hand and history, geography, literature, biology, psychology and demography on the other. She also pinpoints how these exchanges address three enduring issues of anthropological concern: the temporal and the spatial dimensions of human experience; the scientific and the humanistic dimensions of the anthropological enterprise; and the individual and the group/population as units of analysis in research. Anthropological Conversations offers detailed accounts of particular ethnographic methodologies and findings (and the theoretical trends informing them) as a means of grasping the big-picture issues. Brettell clearly shows that, by engaging with other fields, cultural anthropologists have been able to think more deeply about what they mean by culture; through this book, she invites readers to continue the conversation. |
You may like...
Complements of Higher Mathematics
- Marin Marin, Andreas Oechsner
Hardcover
R2,699
Discovery Miles 26 990
Mathematical Modeling and Computational…
Antonio Jose da Silva Neto, Orestes Llanes Santiago, …
Hardcover
R1,426
Discovery Miles 14 260
Complementarity, Equilibrium, Efficiency…
G. Isac, V.A. Bulavsky, …
Hardcover
R4,266
Discovery Miles 42 660
A Discipline of Mathematical Systems…
Matthew Collinson, Brian Monahan, …
Paperback
R901
Discovery Miles 9 010
Lecture Notes On The Mathematical Theory…
Nicola Bellomo, Mauro Lo Schiavo
Hardcover
R2,907
Discovery Miles 29 070
Fractional-order Modeling of Nuclear…
Vishwesh Vyawahare, Paluri S. V. Nataraj
Hardcover
R2,661
Discovery Miles 26 610
|