This book presents a theory as well as methods to understand and to purposively influence complex systems. It suggests a theory of complex systems as nested systems, i. e. systems that enclose other systems and that are simultaneously enclosed by even other systems. According to the theory presented, each enclosing system emerges through time from the generative activities of the systems they enclose. Systems are nested and often emerge unplanned, and every system of high dynamics is enclosed by a system of slower dynamics. An understanding of systems with faster dynamics, which are always guided by systems of slower dynamics, opens up not only new ways to understanding systems, but also to effectively influence them. The aim and subject of this book is to lay out these thoughts and explain their relevance to the purposive development of complex systems, which are exemplified in case studies from an urban system. The interested reader, who is not required to be familiar with system-theoretical concepts or with theories of emergence, will be guided through the development of a theory of emergent nested systems. The reader will also learn about new ways to influence the course of events - even though the course of events is, in principle, unpredictable, due to the ever-new emergence of real novelty.

If all humor does indeed come from pain, then American educational policymaking has been a petri dish brimming with hilarity. Even before Betsy DeVos ascended to her perch atop the U.S. Department of Education, her predecessors had offered up an excruciating decade of fodder for satire. Ably assisted by a bevy of billionaires, foundations, and advocacy think tanks, these policymakers unleashed a torrent of rhetorical gibberish and evidence-free "innovations" on the nation's children and their schools. Potential Grizzlies: Making the Nonsense Bearable is one researcher's attempt to laugh instead of cry. The book will bring back memories of policymakers from more innocent times, from Michelle Rhee to Arne Duncan to Chris Christie. Sit back and relax with fond thoughts of your favorite policies, from testing to school choice to "parent trigger." Or maybe just smile and imagine a day when policymakers turn to research evidence and knowledgeable educators to build a sound future for our children.

Sociology in Portugal provides the first English-language account of the history of sociology in Portugal from 1945 to the present day. Banned by the fascist regime until 1974, the institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline came relatively late. Understanding academic disciplines as institutionalized struggles over meaning, Filipe Carreira da Silva gives a genealogy of sociology in Portugal from its origins in the political-administrative interstices of a dictatorship, through the 'cyclopean moment' of the political revolution of April 1974, which brought about its swift institutionalization and subsequent consolidation in the new democratic regime, to the challenges posed by internationalization since the 1990s. Attempts to define Portugal itself, he demonstrates, have been at the heart of these struggles. Analyzing agents, institutions, contexts, instruments and ideas, Carreira da Silva shows in fascinating detail how the sociological understanding of Portugal evolved from that of a developing society in the 1960s, to that of a modernizing European social formation in the 1980s, to the post-colonial or post-imperial Portugal of today.

Revealing Our Social World: Fundamentals of Social Research explores the myriad reasons social scientists conduct research and how published findings have the power to inform laws and social policies, influence therapeutic practices, and develop social theory. The text underscores the importance of quality research and the use of the scientific method to avoid the pitfalls of casual observation. The text features five dedicated sections. Section I introduces foundational information about social research, defining its components, outlining the research process, speaking to ethical considerations, and demonstrating the connections between paradigms, social theory, and methods. In Section II, students learn the preparatory steps to take before conducting research in the field. Dedicated chapters cover probability sampling and sample design and qualitative research. Sections III and IV focus on quantitative and qualitative research design and analysis, respectively. The final section of the text explores big data, machine learning, audio, image, video, and social media analytics, and more. Providing students with a comprehensive and valuable introduction, Revealing Our Social World is an excellent resource for courses in social research.

In Politics as a Science, two of the world's leading authorities on Comparative Politics, Philippe C. Schmitter and Marc Blecher, provide a lively introduction to the concepts and framework to study and analyze politics. Written with dexterity, concision and clarity, this short text makes no claim to being scientific. It contains no disprovable hypotheses, no original collection of evidence and no search for patterns of association. Instead, Schmitter and Blecher keep the text broadly conceptual and theoretical to convey their vision of the sprawling subject of politics. They map the process in which researchers try to specify the goal of the trip, some of the landmarks likely to be encountered en route and the boundaries that will circumscribe the effort. Examples, implications and elaborations are included in footnotes throughout the book. Politics as a Science is an ideal introduction for anyone interested in, or studying, comparative politics. "The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781003032144, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."

In Politics as a Science, two of the world's leading authorities on Comparative Politics, Philippe C. Schmitter and Marc Blecher, provide a lively introduction to the concepts and framework to study and analyze politics. Written with dexterity, concision and clarity, this short text makes no claim to being scientific. It contains no disprovable hypotheses, no original collection of evidence and no search for patterns of association. Instead, Schmitter and Blecher keep the text broadly conceptual and theoretical to convey their vision of the sprawling subject of politics. They map the process in which researchers try to specify the goal of the trip, some of the landmarks likely to be encountered en route and the boundaries that will circumscribe the effort. Examples, implications and elaborations are included in footnotes throughout the book. Politics as a Science is an ideal introduction for anyone interested in, or studying, comparative politics. "The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781003032144, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."

Few subjects of social scientific inquiry need interpretive analysis more than the topic of racial politics, yet most US political science employs a narrowly behavioralist orientation. This book argues that it is time for political scientists studying race to more fully engage the issues that generate its political significance. Drawing on the work of interpretive political scholars and methods, Ron Schmidt, Sr. addresses core questions regarding racial politics in the US to demonstrate the value of using interpretive methods to better understand the meaning and significance of political actions, structures and conflicts involving racial identities-not instead of behavioral research but as a necessary addition. Interpreting Racial Politics in the United States will greatly enhance the evolving conversations concerning race and inequality within the US. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of politics and sociology, but also to those interested in deepening their understanding of racial politics.

This book introduces and applies the stochastic modeling techniques and the first exit time theory in demography through describing the theory related to the health state of a population and the introduced health state function. The book provides the derivation and classification of the human development stages. The data fitting techniques and related programs are also presented. Many new and old terms are explored and quantitatively estimated, especially the health state or "vitality" of a population, the deterioration and related functions, as well as healthy life expectancy. The book provides the appropriate comparative applications and statistics as connecting tools accompanied by the existing literature, and as such it will be a valuable source to demographers, health scientists, statisticians, economists and sociologists.

This volume seeks to address the emerging relationships between qualitative research and digital data. At the present time, ubiquitous digital data is altering the foci of research, the contexts in which research takes place, and the methods and tools available for qualitative research. Alongside new challenges and opportunities, there are many ways in which established qualitative methods are being used to situate and interpret digital phenomena. This book examines and engages with the ambivalence of digitization, illuminating the diverse ways in which researchers approach, negotiate, understand and interpret objects and practices of digital research. The chapters in this volume are organized around four key themes: researching impacts of digitization on social worlds; researching uses of digital data within social worlds; researching digital visualization of social worlds; researching with digital data and methods. The volume is designed to appeal to qualitative researchers seeking to study processes of digitization, adjust existing methodologies for digital worlds, and develop new ways of examining and using digital research.

How do scholars transform qualitative data into analysis? What does making analysis imply? What happens in the space in-between data and finalized analysis is notoriously difficult to talk about. In other parts of the research process, scholars and students are aided by method books that describe the technicalities of generating, processing and sorting through data, handbooks that teach academic writing, and scholarly works that offer meta-level, theoretical perspectives. Yet the path from qualitative data to analysis remains 'a black box.' Qualitative Analysis in the Making ventures into this black box. The volume provides a means of speaking about how analyses emerge in the Humanities. Contributors from disciplines such as anthropology, history, and sociology of religion all employ an analytical double take. They revisit one of their analyses, analyzing how this particular analysis came into being. Such analyses of an analysis are neither confessions nor step-by-step recounts of what happened. Rather, the volume argues that speaking of the space in-between requires analytical displacement, and the employment of fresh analytical takes. This approach contributes to demystifying the path from qualitative data to finalized analysis. It invites novel epistemological reflections among scholars, and assists students in improving their analytical skills.

Reflexivity is valuable in social research because it draws attention to the researcher as part of the world being studied and reminds us that the individuals involved in our research are subjects, not objects. By being reflexive we acknowledge that we cannot be separated from our biographies. This volume reviews key debates concerning reflexivity in theory, methods, and practice. It mounts a defence of reflexivity against new materialist and post-qualitative critiques and the pressures exerted on scholars from the neoliberal marketized university system which privileges fast academia at the expense of slow, reflective scholarship. While defending reflexivity, this book also those identifies issues which plague mainstream sociological operationalizations of a positivistic form of reflexivity. It argues for the extension of reflexivity into domains otherwise neglected in public accounts, and a shift from reflexivity as an individualized quality of the researcher (used to judge peers and navel-gaze) to a feminist, collaborative, reflexive sensibility which is mindful of the wider contexts shaping the construction of knowledge(s), experience(s), and of the role of research communities. Providing examples of reflexivity in action from academics at different stages of their careers, Reflexivity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Qualitative Research Methods, Criminology, Ethnography, and Ethics of Research.

This book explores women's militant activities in insurgent wars and seeks to understand what women 'do' in wars. In International Relations, inter-state conflict, anti-state armed insurgency and armed militancy are essentially seen as wars where collective violence (against civilians and security forces) is used to achieve political objectives. Extending the notion of war as 'politics of injury' to the armed militancy in Indian administered Kashmir and the Tamil armed insurgency in Sri Lanka, this book explores how women participate in militant wars, and how that politics not only shapes the gendered understandings of women's identities and bodies but is in turn shaped by them. The case studies discussed in the book offer new comparative insight into two different and most prevalent forms of insurgent wars today: religio-political and ethno-nationalist. Empirical analyses of women's roles in the Sri Lankan Tamil militant group, the LTTE and the logistical, ideological support women provide to militant groups active in Indian administered Kashmir suggest that these insurgent wars have their own gender dynamics in recruitment and operational strategies. Thus, Women and Militant Wars provides an excellent insight into the gender politics of these insurgencies and women's roles and experiences within them. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical war and security studies, feminist international relations, gender studies, terrorism and political violence, South Asia studies and IR in general.

Demographic trends and patterns provide valuable insights into social structure and behavior, both past and present, and are particularly useful in gauging the effect and extent of social change. While national, state, and local records of pre-1900 demographic information exist, they are often incomplete, inaccurate, or missing altogether. An alternative source of information is genealogical material, which can be used to cross-check the accuracy of demographic directions generalized from locational records. "Historical Demography through Genealogies" makes extensive use of genealogical information to measure pre-1900 trends in various vital statistics. In a series of research inquiries, author Albert E. McCormick pursues the relationship of these demographic processes to the social structure, values, and customs of the times. Individual chapters focus on fertility, marriage, and mortality; childlessness; bachelor/spinsterhood and remarriage; infant mortality and child-naming; occupational/structural mobility, including the status of women. McCormick's results shed further light upon demographic processes as they existed before the advent of reliable national records, adding intriguing comprehensions of nineteenth century society and social life. Demographers, sociologists, social historians, and students of social change will find "Historical Demography through Genealogies" a valuable, comprehensive addition to their research collection.

This book turns the traditional approach to student success on its head by examining the learning habits of successful students based on what they have told us about their learning strategies, on what they do to succeed in college, and on the teaching practices they think best foster their learning. This approach is in stark contrast to most recent studies of learning at the college level which focus on what students need to do to succeed, but are written from the point of view of "experts" who provide advice to struggling students. Learning from the Learners: Successful College Students Share Their Effective Learning Habits is based on what "expert" students tell us about what they - as learners - do to succeed. It is grounded in a 10-year study that rests on a rich qualitative data set that includes open-ended survey responses gathered on a term-by term basis and in depth interviews during the freshman and junior years with over 700 students of diverse backgrounds. Additionally, since many students interviewed were the first in their family to attend college and from backgrounds traditionally underserved by higher education, the book's insights will be of particular interest to educators elsewhere who are increasingly expected to help similar students succeed. Themes include student success, academic challenges, diversity, pedagogy, and technology in the classroom. No other book on the widely discussed subject of student success relies on such a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data about what works from the point of view of students themselves.

This book provides an overview of ninety key concepts which often trouble those who are new to researching within the social sciences. It covers theories of knowledge, methodologies and methods. Each entry offers a definition of a concept, shows how researchers have used that concept in their research and discusses difficulties that the concept presents. The book supports those undertaking their own social research projects by providing detailed critical commentary on key concepts in a particularly accessible way. In exploring these concepts, a wide range of research reports across many different fields are described. These include not only classic accounts, but also a broad selection of recent studies, some written by new researchers. The book will be useful for higher-education students carrying out projects within social science faculties at the end of their first degree or during a master's programme, though it will also be helpful for those undertaking doctoral research, and some entries have been written with the production of a thesis in mind. This second edition of Research Methods: The Key Concepts provides a more comprehensive and up-to-date coverage, as old entries have been updated and 19 new entries added. It helps new researchers to navigate the changing landscape of social research by recognising a) the changes in the ways researchers are thinking about knowledge and acquiring knowledge, b) the increasing use of digital tools to collect data, and c) the desire many contemporary researchers feel to promote social justice through their research.

Drawing on varied expertise from specialisms across the sub-disciplines of social and cultural geography, this book seeks to interrogate what it is to do research with people widely considered to be vulnerable. Written from an emancipatory standpoint, this book addresses the ethical and practical challenges that face researchers working with marginalised people. With chapters exploring the authors' own experiences of working with a wide range of participants including homeless people, indigenous peoples, drug addicts, learning disabled children, and prisoners, the book draws on research undertaken by academics across the globe. Geographical Research with 'Vulnerable Groups' unpicks and interrogates each part of the research process, from obtaining ethics permission from review bodies, to recruitment and gatekeepers, through to dissemination of research findings. Throughout the discussion, authors foreground the relational identities of the actors in the research process, highlighting the ways in which institutional attempts to protect marginalised people from risk, perpetuate a perceived, and even material, vulnerability. This honest and empirically driven text will provide an illuminating insight for researchers embarking on research with marginalised people. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social & Cultural Geography.

Classic Grounded Theory: Applications With Qualitative and Quantitative Data provides practical "how to" guidance for doing grounded theory (GT) using the classic approach articulated by Barney Glaser. The authors emphasize the philosophical flexibility of classic GT as a "full package" approach that can be applied to any study and any type of data where the goal is to discover and generate a conceptually integrated theory. Drawing on the experiences of novice researchers who have participated in GT troubleshooting seminars, the book provides step-by-step guidance on undertaking a research study that stays true to the classic GT practice paradigm.

Belonging, Solidarity and Expansion in Social Policy examines processes of social policy formation and shifting solidarities from the perspective of the actors most affected. Using the examples of nineteenth century mutual benefit societies in the UK and Germany, and EU level social policy, it shows empirically how actors are able to shift their solidarities towards strangers and reveals the argumentative patters concerning such a transformation. The book's innovative research programme provides theoretical and empirical insights on the question regarding the relationship of belonging and social policy. It offers a new theory on the formation of redistributive preferences based on an approach combining theories of solidarity and structural incentives. The analysis shows how these preferences are shaped by available institutional alternatives, cost-benefit-calculations and identity-oriented interests, and thus offers new empirical evidence on how individuals are able to reintegrate wider identities and align their solidarities also at the European level.

This book combines two distinctive topics: data science/image analysis and materials science. The purpose of this book is to show what type of nano material problems can be better solved by which set of data science methods. The majority of material science research is thus far carried out by domain-specific experts in material engineering, chemistry/chemical engineering, and mechanical & aerospace engineering. The book could benefit materials scientists and manufacturing engineers who were not exposed to systematic data science training while in schools, or data scientists in computer science or statistics disciplines who want to work on material image problems or contribute to materials discovery and optimization. This book provides in-depth discussions of how data science and operations research methods can help and improve nano image analysis, automating the otherwise manual and time-consuming operations for material engineering and enhancing decision making for nano material exploration. A broad set of data science methods are covered, including the representations of images, shape analysis, image pattern analysis, and analysis of streaming images, change points detection, graphical methods, and real-time dynamic modeling and object tracking. The data science methods are described in the context of nano image applications, with specific material science case studies.

This open access book shows how to use sensitivity analysis in demography. It presents new methods for individuals, cohorts, and populations, with applications to humans, other animals, and plants. The analyses are based on matrix formulations of age-classified, stage-classified, and multistate population models. Methods are presented for linear and nonlinear, deterministic and stochastic, and time-invariant and time-varying cases. Readers will discover results on the sensitivity of statistics of longevity, life disparity, occupancy times, the net reproductive rate, and statistics of Markov chain models in demography. They will also see applications of sensitivity analysis to population growth rates, stable population structures, reproductive value, equilibria under immigration and nonlinearity, and population cycles. Individual stochasticity is a theme throughout, with a focus that goes beyond expected values to include variances in demographic outcomes. The calculations are easily and accurately implemented in matrix-oriented programming languages such as Matlab or R. Sensitivity analysis will help readers create models to predict the effect of future changes, to evaluate policy effects, and to identify possible evolutionary responses to the environment. Complete with many examples of the application, the book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in human demography and population biology. The material will also appeal to those in mathematical biology and applied mathematics.