Building a better data culture can be the path to better results and greater equity in schools. But what do we mean by data? Your students are not just statistics. They aren't simply a set of numbers or faceless dots on a proficiency scale. They are vibrant collections of experiences, thoughts, perspectives, emotions, wants, and dreams. And taken collectively, all of that information is data-and should be valued as such. Equity in Data not only unpacks the problematic nature of current approaches to data but also helps educators demystify and democratize data. It shows how we can bake equity into our data work and illuminate the disparities, stories, and truths that make our schools safer and stronger-and that help our students grow and thrive. To this end, the authors introduce a four-part framework for how to create an equitable data culture (along with a complementary set of data principles). They demonstrate how we can rethink our approach to data in the interest of equity by making five shifts: Expand our understanding of data. Strengthen our knowledge of data principles. Break through our fear of data. Decolonize our data gathering processes. Turn data into meaningful, equitable action. We have an opportunity to realign school data with what students want out of their educational experiences. When we put equity first, we put students first.

Throughout the 20th century, grade-school teachers were trained in schools of education where progressive theories largely held sway and were licensed by state bureaucracies philosophically compatible with the education schools. Vested education interests now seek to make the monopoly even more controlling by requiring that all teachers be products of education schools accredited by a single national agency dedicated to progressive ideals.

Holland proposes an alternative vision compatible with the emerging 21st-century paradigm of a competitive education industry: Lower unnecessary barriers to teaching so that bright persons of diverse background and disposition can become teachers. Set up an alternative track--as in New Jersey--so that bright liberal arts graduates or persons with valuable real-world experience can be hired as teachers and put under the supervision of experienced mentors. Apply value-added assessment--as in Tennessee--to these new teachers, and to veteran teachers as well, so that principals can see how much each teacher has helped each child progress academically--or not--from school year to school year. Holland's plan to break up the teacher-prep monopoly is bound to be controversial, and, as such, should be of great interest to all--from parents and administrators to teachers and policy makers--concerned with improving the state of American education.

Micro social theory covers a rich tradition in sociological thinking and research that focuses on the self and social interaction. It includes the work of the Chicago School, Mead, Garfinkel and Goffman amongst others. This book traces the development of the tradition and assesses its contemporary importance. Throughout, the emphasis is on making theory intelligible to an undergraduate audience and demonstrating how it can shed light on substantive issues and contexts.

"... very helpful for its intended audience of both librarians and end users. Academic and large public libraries that provide or encourage electronic information retrieval will want this helpful aid". -- Booklist/Reference Books Bulletin

This reference helps users find meaningful words for natural language computer searching of bibliographic and textual databases in the social and behavioral sciences.

We live in a multilingual, transforming society in which language plays a dynamic and central role. We use it every day for communication and it is not possible to imagine life without it - it is generally recognised as a mark of what makes us human. But how often do we think about exactly what language is and how we actually use it? Language, society and communication introduces established and new linguistic concepts and theories, and links these to contemporary issues in society and the media, including new social media, with a particular focus on southern Africa. Language, society and communication explores how language is intricately bound up with issues of power, status and identity. It explores the tension between the diverse nature of everyday language practices, on the one hand, and the societal pressures towards managing and containing this diversity, on the other. It also demonstrates the relevance of linguistic study (e.g. phonology and syntax) to real world problems (e.g. analysis of a child's acquisition of language), within a southern African context. Study questions and case studies, which relate the theoretical ideas discussed to current research, are provided at the end of each chapter. Language, society and communication is aimed at undergraduate students studying linguistics, language and communication and related fields such as language education.

This reference summarizes and overviews current research on adolescence in 31 countries from around the world. The volume begins with a discussion of interdisciplinary and international perspectives on adolescence, with special attention to psychological and sociological approaches. Each of the chapters that follow considers adolescence in a particular country, and the chapters are arranged alphabetically for ease of use. To foster comparative research, each chapter shares a common format, with sections on the historical and sociodemographic background of adolescence since 1945, sociocultural patterns of rites of passage, psychological and social problem behaviors, and policy matters. Each chapter concludes with a list of current references, and the volume ends with a selected bibliography and an appendix of key researchers.

22 out of the 26 Chapters are available Open Access on Elgaronline under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. The complete Handbook containing all 26 chapters is available on Google Play (guide price GBP10) see link in 'More Information' below. The Handbook of Sociological Science offers a refreshing, integrated perspective on research programs and ongoing developments in sociological science. It highlights key shared theoretical and methodological features, thereby contributing to progress and cumulative growth of sociological knowledge. Reflecting 'unity in diversity', chapters explore a wide variety of research fields, ranging from cultural capital, migration, social networks, gender inequality, historical sociology and ethnography to the intersection of sociology and the life sciences. Examining basic methodological standards for theory construction and empirical research, the Handbook exemplifies commonalities between research programmes within these fields. The contributors also explore rigorous sociology related to theory construction, empirical research, and methods, including statistical modelling and the integration of theoretical and empirical research. Forward-thinking and original, the Handbook concludes by illustrating the common core of rigorous sociology, how it can contribute to understanding societal problems and to policy making, and how research into sociological science can continue to thrive in the future. Accessible and engaging, this Handbook will be invaluable for scholars and researchers of sociology and sociological theory, research methods in sociology and social policy, and comparative social policy. Exploring new developments and applications, it will also act as a useful reference guide for policy makers. The Handbook will likewise be an important resource for teaching advanced courses and training graduate students.

Approaches to Ethnography illustrates the various modes of representation and analysis that typify participant observation research. In contrast to the multitude of ethnographic textbooks, handbooks, and readers on the market, this book is neither a "how-to" guide nor a catalogue of substantive themes such as race, community, or space; it also avoids re-hashing epistemological debates, such as grounded theory versus the extended case method. Instead, this volume concisely lays out the predominant analytic lenses that ethnographers use to explain social action-for instance, whether they privilege micro-interaction or social structure, people and places or social processes, internal dispositions or situational contingencies. Each chapter features a prominent ethnographer delineating a distinct approach to the study of everyday life and reflecting on how their approach shapes the way they analyze and represent the field. Taken together, the collection is a practical guide that spells out how different styles of ethnography illuminate different dimensions of everyday social life. As such, Approaches to Ethnography complements and augments-but not duplicate-existing ethnographic methods and logic of inquiry texts for undergraduate and graduate courses on qualitative research methods.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This Advanced Introduction provides a critical review and discussion of research concerning spatial statistics, differentiating between it and spatial econometrics, to answer a set of core questions covering the geographic-tagging-of-data origins of the concept and its theoretical underpinnings, conceptual advances, and challenges for future scholarly work. It offers a vital tool for understanding spatial statistics and surveys how concerns about violating the independent observations assumption of statistical analysis developed into this discipline. Key Features: A concise overview of spatial statistics theory and methods, looking at parallel developments in geostatistics and spatial econometrics, highlighting the eclipsing of centography and point pattern analysis by geostatistics and spatial autoregression, and the emergence of local analysis Contemporary descriptions of popular geospatial random variables, emphasizing one- and two-parameter spatial autoregression specifications, and Moran eigenvector spatial filtering coupled with a broad coverage of statistical estimation techniques A detailed articulation of a spatial statistical workflow conceptualization The helpful insights from empirical applications of spatial statistics in agronomy, criminology, demography, economics, epidemiology, geography, remotely sensed data, urban studies, and zoology/botany, will make this book a useful tool for upper-level students in these disciplines.

Introducing the idea of conversational storytelling interviewing (CSI) as an 'indirect' method of interviewing, David Boje and Grace Ann Rosile explore this innovative methodological framework as a way for respondents to tell their own story, without resorting to structured or semi-structured interviews. Bringing together theory, method and praxis of storytelling in an iterative process of self-correcting induction, How to Use Conversational Storytelling Interviews for Your Dissertation offers researchers ways to move beyond the bystander role, urging them to be co-creators of their findings. Complete with exercises to train practitioners in new methods of inquiry and in-depth discussions of an array of philosophical issues, this illuminating book illustrates how rigorous self-correcting methods move inquiry from conversation to storytelling science. Pioneering in both method and framework, this book is a crucial guide for using CSI in qualitative research for PhD students and researchers in management and organizational studies. Scholars of feminist and indigenous studies and other critical studies fields will benefit from alternative interviewing methods as these disciplines undergo an ontological turn.

Using citation analysis, this study examines the influence and prestige of scholars, journals, and university departments in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. In the tradition of Marvin E. Wolfgang's "Evaluating Criminology," the authors apply this quantitative method to evaluate the impact of individuals and their research efforts on two fields and to identify interconnections among scholars and their publications. This examination of the most-cited scholars, works, and topics in major American and international journals from 1986 to 1990 and from 1991 to 1995 provides valuable and unbiased feedback for researchers and practitioners.

The nine chapters of this book detail a wide range of findings in both criminology and criminal justice. After an introduction to the methodology, chapters two, three, and four divide recent scholarship into two periods, 1986 to 1990 and 1991 to 1995, in order to consider the most-cited scholars, works, and topics. Chapter five provides a longitudinal analysis of scholars in the discipline since 1945. Chapters six and seven provide a system of prestige-ratings for relevant journals as well as page coverage analysis of the most influential scholars. The continuing controversy over whether the two fields are converging or diverging is the subject of chapter eight, and the work concludes with a prescription for further research.

This book is a collection of mortality abstracts based on recent follow-up studies on the results of health disorders from the abstracts and articles appearing recently in the Journal of Insurance Medicine. The widely different types of investigators who may have repeated need of outcome data (death or morbid event) in a particular disease or risk factor will find this collection invaluable. Such a collection is valuable not only to users in the insurance industry, but to all physicians and health scientists who are interested in prognosis of chronic diseases, in clinical trials, in cost/benefit questions, in clinical decision-making, and similar fields of inquiry.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of current developments, issues and good practices regarding assessment in social science research. It pays particular attention to the challenges in evaluation policies in the social sciences, as well as to the specificities of publishing in the area. The Handbook discusses the current societal challenges facing researchers, from digital societies, to climate change and sustainability, to trust in democratic societies. Chapters provide ways to strengthen research assessment in the social sciences for the better, by offering a diverse range of experiences and views of experts from all continents. The Handbook also outlines major data sources that can be used to assess social sciences research, as well as looking at key dimensions of research quality in the social sciences including journal peer review, the issue of identifying research quality, and gender disparities in social science research. This book will be an essential read for scholars interested in research assessment in the social sciences. It will also be useful to policy makers looking to understand the key position of the social sciences in science and society and provide appropriate frameworks for key societal challenges.

An introduction to established and new linguistic concepts and theories, and how these link up to contemporary issues in society and the media, including new social media. Explores how language is intricately bound up with issues of power, status and identity. Aimed at undergraduate students studying linguistics, language and communication, and related fields such as language education. Contents include the following: Communication in context; semiotics and multimodality; phonetics and phonology; morphology and syntax; first and second language acquisition; sociolinguistics; linguistic diversity; language and identity; branding and culture jamming.