Reflexivity is vital in social research projects, but there remains relatively little advice on how to execute it in practice. This book provides social science researchers with both a strong rationale for the importance of thinking reflexively and a practical guide to doing reflexivity within their research. The first book on the subject to build primarily on the theoretical and empirical contributions of Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive work, it combines academic analysis with practical examples and case studies, drawing both on recent reflexive research projects and original empirical data from new projects conducted by the author. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book will be of interest to researchers from all career stages and disciplinary backgrounds, but especially early-career researchers and students who are struggling with subjectivity, positionality, and the realities of being reflexive.

Religious ignorance is as dangerous for societal stability as religious extremism. In "The Great Leap-Fraud," author A. J. Deus shows that only through the cowardly behavior of a majority that is uneducated in religious questions can sectarian extremism and terrorism take shape and overtake societies. Modern civilizations fail to address the dangerous defect.

Based on a reassessment of primary documents from the beginning of Judaism through to the Reformation, "The Great Leap-Fraud" evaluates the Judaic scriptures of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims for their potential to stir hatred, violence, and terrorism. It searches for messages in the scriptures that may alter the economic behavior of societies.

While providing an overview of three major religions-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-"The Great Leap-Fraud" uncovers a series of frauds and premeditated deployment of "prophets" with the goal to establish or redeem the Jewish state of Israel. It also uncovers how the vested interest of Christian historians has pushed the rise of Christianity unto Roman Emperors. Deus shows that the way humans think and act are strongly influenced by a culture driven by the norms of religious organizations, both past and present.

This book examines how computer-based programs can be used to acquire 'big' digital cultural heritage data, curate, and disseminate it over the Internet and in 3D visualization platforms with the ultimate goal of creating long-lasting "digital heritage repositories.' The organization of the book reflects the essence of new technologies applied to cultural heritage and archaeology. Each of these stages bring their own challenges and considerations that need to be dealt with. The authors in each section present case studies and overviews of how each of these aspects might be dealt with. While technology is rapidly changing, the principles laid out in these chapters should serve as a guide for many years to come. The influence of the digital world on archaeology and cultural heritage will continue to shape these disciplines as advances in these technologies facilitate new lines of research. serif">The book is divided into three sections covering acquisition, curation, and dissemination (the major life cycles of cultural heritage data). Acquisition is one of the fundamental challenges for practitioners in heritage and archaeology, and the chapters in this section provide a template that highlights the principles for present and future work that will provide sustainable models for digital documentation. Following acquisition, the next section highlights how equally important curation is as the future of digital documentation depends on it. Preservation of digital data requires preservation that can guarantee a future for generations to come. The final section focuses on dissemination as it is what pushes the data beyond the shelves of storage and allows the public to experience the past through these new technologies, but also opens new lines of investigation by giving access to these data to researchers around the globe. Digital technology promises significant changes in how we approach social sciences, cultural heritage, and archaeology. However, researchers must consider not only the acquisition and curation, but also the dissemination of these data to their colleagues and the public. Throughout the book, many of the authors have highlighted the usefulness of Structure from Motion (SfM) work for cultural heritage documentation; others the utility and excitement of crowdsourcing as a 'citizen scientist' tool to engage not only trained students and researchers, but also the public in the cyber-archaeology endeavor. Both innovative tools facilitate the curation of digital cultural heritage and its dissemination. Together with all the chapters in this volume, the authors will help archaeologists, researchers interested in the digital humanities and scholars who focus on digital cultural heritage to assess where the field is and where it is going.

As academics in postcolonial Caribbean countries, we have been trained to believe that research should be objective: a measurable benefit to the public good and quantifiable in nature so as to generalize findings to develop knowledge societies for economic growth. What happens, however when the very word "research" connotes a derogatory term or semblance of distrust? Smith (1999) speaks towards the distrustful nature of the term as a legacy of European imperialism and colonialism. Against this backdrop, how do Caribbean researchers leverage recognized and valued (indigenous) methods of knowing and understanding for and by the Caribbean populace? How do we learn from indigenous research methods such as Kaupapa Maori (Smith, 1999) and develop an understanding of research that is emancipatory in nature? Decolonizing qualitative methods are rooted in critical theory and grounded in social justice, resistance, change and emancipatory research for and by the Other (Said, 1978). Rodney's (1969) legacy of "groundings" provides a Caribbean oriented ethnographic approach to collecting data about people and culture. It is an anti-imperialist method of data collection focused on the socioeconomic and political environment within the (post) colonial context. Similar to Rodney, other critical Caribbean scholars have moved the research discourse to center on the notions of resistance, struggle (Chevannes, 1995; Feraria, 2009) and decolonoizing methodologies. This proposed edited volume will provide a collective body of scholarship for innovative uses of decolonizing qualitative research. In order to theorize and conduct decolonizing research, one can argue that the researcher as self and as the Other needs to be interrogated. Borrowing from an autoethnographic ontology, the researcher or investigator recognizes the self as the unit of measure, and there is a concerted effort to continuously see the self, seeing the self through and as the other (Alexander, 2005; Ellis, 2004). This level of interrogation may require frameworks such as Reasonable Humanism in which there is a clear understanding of the role of the researcher and researched from a physiological and psychosocial standpoint. Thereafter, the researcher is better prepared to enter into a discourse about decolonizing methodologies. The origins of qualitative inquiry in the Caribbean can be traced to political and economic discourses - Marxism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, liberalism, postmodernism- which have challenged ways of knowing and the construction of knowledge. Evans (2009) traced the origins of qualitative inquiry to slave narratives, proprietor's journals, missionaries' reports and travelogues. Common to the Caribbean is an understanding of how colonial legacies of research have ridiculed oral traditions, language, and ways of knowing, often rendering them valueless and inconsequential. This proposed edited volume acknowledges the significance of decolonizing approaches to qualitative research in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean diaspora. It includes an audience of scholars, teacher/ researchers and students primarily in and across the humanities, social sciences and educational studies. This proposed volume would provide much needed knowledge and best practice strategies to the community of researchers engaged in decolonizing methodologies. Additionally, this volume will allow readers to think of new imaginings of research design that deconstruct power and privilege to benefit knowledge, communities and participants. It will spark key objectives, directions and frameworks for deeper discussions and interrogations of normative, westernized and hegemonic approaches to qualitative research. Lastly, the volume will welcome empirical studies of application of decolonizing methodologies and theoretical studies that frame critical discourse.

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.

Hand them this easy-to-use, comprehensive guide to researching 100 popular research papers, and high school students will get off on the right track on their research papers. Designed by a reference and young adult librarian for use in her library, this guide saves both student and librarian time and is a shortcut to effective research. Each photocopyable guide will help the student to locate print and nonprint information about the topic, narrow the scope of the paper, and find related topics. This will reduce student frustration in the research process and introduce the student to the full scope of materials the library has to offer on the topic. Each guide serves not only as a map to library resources but as an outline of library research procedures. From "abortion" to "youth gangs," the 100 topic guides are organized into sections on science and technology, social issues, social studies, and biography. Each guide contains a capsule description of the topic, call numbers for shelf browsing, subject headings, pamphlet file sources, reference materials, book and CD-ROM periodical indexes, online databases, key words and descriptors to use in searching indexes and databases, a list of videotapes on the topic, fiction relating to the topic, organizations to contact for further information, suggestions for narrowing the topic, and suggestions for related topics. In addition to the guides, an appendix of aids to research will help students with note-taking, bibliographic citations, and electronic database searching. The book is thoroughly indexed for easy access of topic information by students and librarians. Once you use these topic guides you'll wonder how you and your students ever gotalong without them.

This is the 19th volume in a series of reviews of research in organizational behaviour. This volume covers such topics as: motivational traits and skills; the dispositional causes of job satisfaction; the ways and means of studying group processes; and managing grand scale construction projects.

This book is a comprehensive guide to qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) using R. Using Boolean algebra to implement principles of comparison used by scholars engaged in the qualitative study of macro social phenomena, QCA acts as a bridge between the quantitative and the qualitative traditions. The QCA package for R, created by the author, facilitates QCA within a graphical user interface. This book provides the most current information on the latest version of the QCA package, which combines written commands with a cross-platform interface. Beginning with a brief introduction to the concept of QCA, this book moves from theory to calibration, from analysis to factorization, and hits on all the key areas of QCA in between. Chapters one through three are introductory, familiarizing the reader with R, the QCA package, and elementary set theory. The next few chapters introduce important applications of the package beginning with calibration, analysis of necessity, analysis of sufficiency, parameters of fit, negation and factorization, and the construction of Venn diagrams. The book concludes with extensions to the classical package, including temporal applications and panel data. Providing a practical introduction to an increasingly important research tool for the social sciences, this book will be indispensable for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in conducting qualitative research in political science, sociology, business and management, and evaluation studies.

The main purpose of this book is to address the statistical issues for integrating independent studies. There exist a number of papers and books that discuss the mechanics of collecting, coding, and preparing data for a meta-analysis, and we do not deal with these.
Because this book concerns methodology, the content necessarily is statistical, and at times mathematical. In order to make the material accessible to a wider audience, we have not provided proofs in the text. Where proofs are given, they are placed as commentary at the end of a chapter. These can be omitted at the discretion of the reader.
Throughout the book we describe computational procedures whenever required. Many computations can be completed on a hand calculator, whereas some require the use of a standard statistical package such as SAS, SPSS, or BMD. Readers with experience using a statistical package or who conduct analyses such as multiple regression or analysis of variance should be able to carry out the analyses described with the aid of a statistical package.

This book focuses on ethical and methodological issues faced by researchers working with young language learners in formal school contexts. It uncovers and explicitly discusses a range of ethical dilemmas, challenges and experiences that researchers have encountered and grappled with, in studies of all kinds from large scale, experimental studies to ethnographic studies focused on just a handful of children. The chapters are written by researchers working with children in different classroom contexts around the world and highlight how ethical dilemmas and tensions take on a complex form in child-focused research, requiring researchers to pay particular attention to the social and cultural norms of the different communities within which children are educated as well as their school-based experiences. The book comprises three sections, with the first part focused on involving children as active participants in research; part two on ethical challenges in multilingual contexts and part three on links between teacher education and researching children. The book includes a critical discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with applying the UNCRC (1989) document in second language research with children which will be of use to any researcher working in this area.

This volume offers insights into contemporary trends and perspectives in psychobiographical research. It applys new theoretical and methodological frameworks and presents discourses on psychobiography from transdisciplinary backgrounds and various socio-cultural contexts, displaying the new state-of-the-art, new trends and themes in psychobiography. The book outlines psychobiography's outstanding contribution to psychology from 36 internationally reputable authors. It also presents the ideas of five outstanding psychobiographers through interview excerpts. This book is a must for researchers, lecturers and practitioners in the field of psychology and social sciences interested in the use of new psychological theories and methodologies in life-span research.

Based on extensive analysis of surveys from recent decades, this book provides a detailed study of the attitudes of religious groups in Britain. It looks at continuity and change in relation to party support, ideology, abortion, homosexuality and gay rights, foreign policy, and public opinion towards religion in public life.

This book investigates how mental health in South Africa is conceptualised and constructed in public policy. Critiquing embedded assumptions within existing policy documentation, the book advocates for policy solutions centred on poverty alleviation and economic development.

Mental health in South Africa has historically been neglected within the health-care system, a stark reality underscored by the Life Esidimeni tragedy, which exposed widespread mismanagement, negligence, and insufficient resources in mental health-care services. While South Africa has enacted progressive mental health policies, their effective implementation remains hindered by systemic challenges. This book investigates the dominant problems represented in mental health policies, including the segregation of mental health from general health services, inadequate intersectoral collaboration in mental health care, community disconnection from mental health services, the association between poverty and mental health issues, and infringements upon the rights of individuals with mental health problems. Overall, the book underscores mental health as a socio-economic issue, requiring new policy solutions.

This book will be an essential read for mental health professionals and policy makers in South Africa, as well as for researchers working on the good governance of mental health, both within the country and at global and multilateral levels.

This book explains, with case examples, a variety of social science research methods suitable for studying the unconscious components of irrational social and political actions in world affairs, which can be defined as those that are intensely destructive, self-destructive, or extremely bizarre. The book argues that they are driven in part by feelings and fantasies that are outside of conscious awareness. Meyers explores the role of empathy in clinical understanding, as well as the value of exposing assertions to empirical disconfirmation. With a variety of research methods such as survey research, content analysis, and narrative analysis, and case examples such as studies of 'irreal' statements by authoritarian leaders, fabricated newspaper articles and climate change denial, this book sheds light on how to conduct research on psychodynamic matters in a scientifically valid and credible way.

This book analyzes the effects of wives' employment on the economic status of families, using both descriptive and empirical research. The historical and socio-economic causes of change in the employment status of wives and husbands are detailed. The empirical studies respond to some basic questions about dual-earner families: How does having an employed wife influence family lifestyles? What effects do dual-earners have on the finances of their households and on the distribution of income? What policy changes are needed to recognize the economic importance of dual-earner families? In Working Wives and Dual-Earner Families, one-earner and dual-earner families are differentiated, with particular attention to the impact of wives' employment status (full-time or part-time) on household decision making. Among the most interesting research findings are: total family income or tax bracket and the cost of child care are among the critical determinants of dual-earner employment; married-couple families at the same level of income have very similar expenditure patterns regardless of whether the wife is employed; full-time working wives make the distribution of income less equal, but part-time working wives generate greater equality in the distribution of income; families with full-time working wives have higher income, but they do not save more or have greater financial assets than other families; families with part-time employed wives are similar to those with non-employed wives and differ from families with full-time employed wives. The authors conclude that the real incomes of dual-earner families will continue to grow, as one-earner real income remains the same or declines. Household planning and decision making will increasingly be predicated upon having two earners, which will be perceived as the norm. Dual-earner families, based on amenities, mobility, growing families, and demands for public goods, will drive private markets and public policy.

The purpose of this book is twofold. First, this book is an attempt to map the state of quantitative research in Asian tourism and hospitality context and provide a detailed description of the design, implementation, application, and challenges of quantitative methods in tourism in Asia. Second, this book aims to contribute to the tourism literature by discussing the past, current and future quantitative data analysis methods. The book offers new insights into well-established research techniques such as regression analysis, but goes beyond first generation data analysis techniques to introduce methods seldom - if ever - used in tourism and hospitality research. In addition to investigating existing and novel research techniques, the book suggests areas for future studies. In order to achieve its objectives the analysis is split into three main sections: understanding the tourism industry in Asia; the current status of quantitative data analysis; and future directions for Asian tourism research.

Conducting social science and education research studies that require involvement in fieldwork is not an easy task. Many graduate students and novice researchers face difficulties efficiently and effectively conducting the practical aspects of their research in fieldwork. One reason for this difficulty may be due to the lack of finding and/or accessing authentic and realistic descriptions of previously conducted fieldwork experiences and processes in a variety of fields. This could be the case whether the research is going to be on a virtual platform or in a real and actual context. Thus, it is critical to shed light on the successes and pitfalls of the personal experiences of fieldwork. Overcoming Fieldwork Challenges in Social Science and Higher Education Research is an essential reference book that draws on the experience of conducting fieldwork in different contexts and world regions that are relevant to social science and education studies. The diverse experiences in research processes and contexts that this book offers provide readers with an authentic and realistic description of how research data is collected, the tools needed to envision some of the challenges that they might face, and how to effectively solve them. Highlighting topics such as methodology, data collection, and fieldwork partnerships in fields that include counseling, psychology, language studies, and teacher education, this book is ideal for social science and education studies professors who have research as a mandatory part of their curriculum, administrators and policymakers, independent and novice researchers, and graduate students planning to conduct their research studies with humans in different contexts.

Show business is a multimillion dollar business, and its celebrities and sports figures are the most famous people on earth. Yet, most entertainers are neither rich nor famous. In "Life upon the Wicked Stage," author Jacqueline Boles provides an academic portrait of live performers and offers insight into their unique world.

Based on the biographies and autobiographies of one hundred and seventeen American show people, "Life upon the Wicked Stage" delves into the lives of entertainers-musicians, singers, dancers, comics, and variety artists. This sociological study first shares the history of show business from its beginnings to present-day, where the public's fascination with entertainers and celebrities is avid. Then, Boles analyzes the entertainers and their family backgrounds, investigates their reasons for choosing entertainment, and explores their career patterns. This study also shows the affects that show business has on family and relationships, and it discusses the costs and rewards of life as a performer.

"Life upon the Wicked Stage" illustrates that live entertainment has changed dramatically over the last one hundred and fift y years while remaining remarkably unchanged. Boles communicates that the show must go on.

This book integrates current advances in biology, economics of information and linguistics research through applications using agent-based modeling and social network analysis to develop scenarios of communication and language emergence in the social aspects of biological communications. The book presents a model of communication emergence that can be applied both to human and non-human living organism networks. The model is based on economic concepts and individual behavior fundamental for the study of trust and reputation networks in social science, particularly in economics; it is also based on the theory of the emergence of norms and historical path dependence that has been influential in institutional economics. Also included are mathematical models and code for agent-based models to explore various scenarios of language evolution, as well as a computer application that explores language and communication in biological versus social organisms, and the emergence of various meanings and grammars in human networks. Emergence of Communication in Socio-Biological Networks offers both a completely novel approach to communication emergence and language evolution and provides a path for the reader to explore various scenarios of language and communication that are not constrained to the human networks alone. By illustrating how computational social science and the complex systems approach can incorporate multiple disciplines and offer an integrated theory-model approach to the evolution of language, the book will be of interest to researchers working with computational linguistics, mathematical linguistics, and complex systems.

The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography provides an expansive overview of the challenges presented by qualitative, and particularly ethnographic, enquiry. The chapters reflect upon the means by which ethnographers aim to gain understanding, make sense of what they learn and the way they represent their finished work. The Handbook offers urgent insights relevant to current trends in the growth of imprisonment worldwide. In an era of mass incarceration, human-centric ethnography provides an important counter to quantitative analysis and the audit culture on which prisons are frequently judged. The Handbook is divided into four parts. Part I ('About Prison Ethnography') assesses methodological, theoretical and pragmatic issues related to the use of ethnographic and qualitative enquiry in prisons. Part II ('Through Prison Ethnography') considers the significance of ethnographic insights in terms of wider social or political concerns. Part III ('Of Prison Ethnography') analyses different aspects of the roles ethnographers take and how they negotiate their research settings. Part IV ('For Prison Ethnography') includes contributions that convincingly extend the value of prison ethnography beyond the prison itself. Bringing together contributions by some of the world's leading scholars in criminology and prison studies, this authoritative volume maps out new directions for future research. It will be an indispensable resource for practitioners, students, academics and researchers who use qualitative social research methods to further their understanding of prisons.

How to apply statistical methods to survey data—a guide to effective analysis of health surveys.

With large health surveys becoming increasingly available for public use, researchers with little experience in survey methods are often faced with analyzing data from surveys to address scientific and programmatic questions. This practical book provides statistical techniques for use in survey analysis, making health surveys accessible to statisticians, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, and health researchers. The authors clearly explain the theory and methods of survey analysis along with real-world applications. They draw on their work at the National Institutes of Health as well as up-to-date information from across the literature to present:

• The sampling background necessary to understand health surveys.
• The application of such techniques as t-tests, linear regression, logistic regression, and survival analysis to survey data.
• The use of sample weights in survey data analysis.
• Dealing with complications in variance estimation in large health surveys.
• Applications involving cross-sectional, longitudinal, and multiple cross-sectional surveys, and the use of surveys to perform population- based case-control analyses.
• Guidance on the correct use of statistical methods found in software packages.
• Extensive bibliography.