This book introduces the theory of stochastic processes with applications taken from physics and finance. Fundamental concepts like the random walk or Brownian motion but also Levy-stable distributions are discussed. Applications are selected to show the interdisciplinary character of the concepts and methods. In the second edition of the book a discussion of extreme events ranging from their mathematical definition to their importance for financial crashes was included. The exposition of basic notions of probability theory and the Brownian motion problem as well as the relation between conservative diffusion processes and quantum mechanics is expanded. The second edition also enlarges the treatment of financial markets. Beyond a presentation of geometric Brownian motion and the Black-Scholes approach to option pricing as well as the econophysics analysis of the stylized facts of financial markets, an introduction to agent based modeling approaches is given.

Rigorous research is crucial to effective work with young people and increasingly youth practitioners need to be able to develop, review and evidence their work using a variety of research and assessment tools. This text equips students and practitioners with a thorough understanding of research design, practice and dissemination, as well as approaches to evidence-based practice.

A clear practice framework informs the book, outlining the significance of research to youth work, especially in relation to designing and developing services for young people. Research and Research Methods for Youth Practitioners:

• Analyses the research/practitioner role
• Explores the ethical context of research in youth work
• Offers a thorough analysis of key methodological questions in research in practice
• Provides a guide to data collection and analysis
• Presents five principal research strategies for youth work: ethnographic work and visual methods; interviewing and evaluation; surveys and evaluation; the use of secondary data and documentary analysis; and researching virtual and online settings
• Discusses the implications of research for work with young people as well as its dissemination.

Written by experienced researchers and practitioner-researchers, each chapter in this accessible textbook includes an overview, a critical discussion of the pros and cons of the particular method or approach, a case study, a practice-based task, a summary and suggestions for further reading. This textbook is invaluable for student and practising youth workers. It is also a useful reference for other practitioners working with young people.

TThis book illustrates recent advances in applications of partial order theory and Hasse diagram techniques to data analysis, mainly in the socio-economic and environmental sciences. For years, partial order theory has been considered a fundamental branch of mathematics of only theoretical interest. In recent years, its effectiveness as a tool for data analysis is increasingly being realized and many applications of partially ordered sets to real problems in statistics and applied sciences have appeared. Main examples pertain to the analysis of complex and multidimensional systems of ordinal data and to problems of multi-criteria decision making, so relevant in social and environmental sciences. Partial Order Concepts in Applied Sciences presents new theoretical and methodological developments in partial order for data analysis, together with a wide range of applications to different topics: multidimensional poverty, economic development, inequality measurement, ecology and pollution, and biology, to mention a few. The book is of interest for applied mathematicians, statisticians, social scientists, environmental scientists and all those aiming at keeping pace with innovation in this interesting, growing and promising research field.

Why doesn't self-help help? Millions of people turn to self-improvement when they find that their lives aren't working out quite as they had imagined. The market for self-improvement products-books, audiotapes, life-makeover seminars and regimens of all kinds-is exploding, and there seems to be no end in sight for this trend. In Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life, cultural critic Micki McGee asks what our seemingly insatiable demand for self-help can tell us about ourselves at the outset of this new century. The answers are surprising. Rather than finding an America that is narcissistic or self-involved, as others have contended, McGee sees a nation relying on self-help culture for advice on how to cope in an increasingly volatile and competitive work world. For Americans today, a central component of working has become working on themselves. "Be all one can be," they are told. Build your own personal brand. As women have entered the paid labor force in growing numbers, the Protestant work ethic has been augmented by a Romantic imperative that one create a vision-a script-for one's life. More and more, Americans are compelled to regard themselves in effect as "human capital." No longer simply an enterprising or entrepreneurial individual, the new worker is the artist and the artwork, the "CEO of Me, Inc.," in Tom Peters' memorable phrase, and the central product line. Self-Help, Inc. reveals how makeover culture traps Americans in endless cycles of self-invention and overwork as they struggle to stay ahead of a rapidly restructuring economic order. A lucid and fascinating treatment of the modern obsession with work and self-improvement, this book will strike a chord with its diagnosis of the self-help trap and with its suggestions for how we can address the alienating conditions of modern work and family life.

As we head into the new millennium, we are witnessing a growing and heightened interest among organizational scholars on the topics of conflict and negotiation. New research questions are being identified, while new theory is being applied to "old" questions. The result is exciting research that has organizational and social relevance. The papers in this volume, which grew out of the eighth biannual Conference on Negotiation in Organizations, are representative of the provocative and "cutting edge" theory and research emerging in the area of conflict and negotiation.

The UK Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) worked for ten years to improve outcomes for learners in schools and other sectors through high quality research. One outcome of individual projects and across-Programme thematic work was the development of ten ?evidence-informed? principles for effective pedagogy. Synopses of these principles have been widely disseminated, particularly to practitioners. However, the evidence and reasoning underpinning them has not yet been fully explained. This book fills this gap by providing a scholarly account of the research evidence that informed the development of these principles, as well as offering some evidence of early take-up and impact. It also includes responses from highly-respected researchers throughout the world in order to locate the work in the broader international literature, to extend it by drawing on similar work elsewhere, to provide critique and to stimulate further development and debate. Principles for Effective Pedagogy contributes to international dialogue on effective teaching and learning, providing a focus for scholarly comment, sharing of expertise and knowledge accumulation.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Research Papers in Education.

Since initiating the journal Social Indicators Research in 1974, Alex C. Michalos has been a pioneer in social indicators and quality-of-life research. This collection of nineteen articles provides an overview of nearly 30 years of work, including papers drawn from diverse sources and papers never published before. The final paper, on multiple discrepancies theory (MDT), is the author's unique contribution to an empirically testable new foundation for theories of utility, satisfaction and happiness.

Focusing upon the area of social methodology, this volume examines diverse approaches toward sociological research. These include case-orientated research versus variable orientated research, a multi-methodological approach and comparing historical sequences. The book should serve as a source of reference for research into approaches to social methodology.

This work was developed for graduate students, professors, and others involved in research in the social sciences. This practical work emphasizes that science is more than an organized body of knowledge. It is a method of reasoned thinking that manages the research process and the reporting of reliable knowledge. The work goes through the steps of identifying and stating a problem, formulating and stating an hypothesis, developing and conducting analysis, interpreting results, and drawing conclusions.

This third volume in the series covers a variety of topics in the field.

This textbook is for graduate students and research workers in social statistics and related subject areas. It follows a novel curriculum developed around the basic statistical activities: sampling, measurement and inference. The monograph aims to prepare the reader for the career of an independent social statistician and to serve as a reference for methods, ideas for and ways of studying of human populations. Elementary linear algebra and calculus are prerequisites, although the exposition is quite forgiving. Familiarity with statistical software at the outset is an advantage, but it can be developed while reading the first few chapters.

Examining the increasingly powerful role of standards in the governing of economic, political and social life, this book draws upon governmentality and actor network theory to explore how standards and standardizing projects are articulated and rendered workable in practice, and the objects, subjects and forms of identity to which this gives rise.

Hardbound. Over the last three decades there have been marked developments in the field of measurement in education and psychology. Advances in Measurement in Educational Research and Assessment presents the developments that have occurred and puts them into perspective. It discusses the continuing challenge to improve measurement both for research and for the assessment of student performance and learning in schools, and looks at the substantial advances that are likely to continue to occur in the future. The volume specifies procedures that have been developed to cover a wide range of situations in both research and the assessment of student learning. Although emphasis is placed on the use of the Rasch model, it is recognized that there is a range of different strategies that might be employed for successful measurement, that there are many unresolved issues, and that progress is still being made in this field.

In When Work Disappears, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson (1996) notes that African Americans in Chicago who attended Catholic schools are viewed more favorably by employers than African Americans who attended public schools. Such findings corroborate a widely though not univer sally-held view that Catholic schools succeed in boosting mobility for children of less-privileged families. Can its success bebroadened? Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Fogel (2000) drawing upon the research by Wilson and oth ers suggests that Catholic schools might play a larger role in promoting an egalitarian society, if grants were made available to poor students that could be used in the parochial school sector. Nobel-prize winning economists Milton Friedman (1962) and Gary Becker (1989) also make strong cases for education vouchers and for more competition in primary and secondary education in the United States. From a different perspective, Archbishop of Chicago Francis Cardinal George argues that Catholic "education that is faith-based, that pro vides values and discipline, that is Jesus-centered, has the potential to trans form the world" (Archdiocese of Chicago, 2000b). Despite such opinions, there is controversy concerning the measured effects of Catholic schooling on educational attainment, academic achieve ment, and other tangible outcomes."

Published annually since 1985, the Handbook series provides a compendium of thorough and integrative literature reviews on a diverse array of topics of interest to the higher education scholarly and policy communities. Each chapter provides a comprehensive review of research findings on a selected topic, critiques the research literature in terms of its conceptual and methodological rigor, and sets forth an agenda for future research intended to advance knowledge on the chosen topic. The Handbook focuses on twelve general areas that encompass the salient dimensions of scholarly and policy inquiries undertaken in the international higher education community. The series is fortunate to have attracted annual contributions from distinguished scholars throughout the world.

The depth, intensity, and long-standing nature of the disagreements between differing schools of social thought renders more critical than ever the treatment of dialectical reasoning and its relationship to the social sciences. The nature of these disagreements are deeply rooted in fundamentally differing beliefs regarding, among many things: (1) the nature of man, (2) the role of theory versus data in constructing social theories, (3) the place and function of values versus facts in inquiry, etc. It has become more and more apparent that such fundamental differences cannot be resolved by surface appeals to rationality or to consensus. Such for it is precisely the definitions of appeals are doomed to failure 'rationality' and 'consensus' that are at odds. That is, different schools not only have different definitions of rationality and consensus but different notions regarding their place and function within a total system of inquiry. A dialectical treatment of conflicts is called for because such conflicts demand a method which is capable of recognizing first of all how deep they lie. Secondly, a method is demanded which is capable of appreciating that the various sides of the conflict fundamentally depend on one another for their very existence; they depend, in other words, on one another not 'in spite of' their opposition but precisely 'because of' it.

Doing Fieldwork in Japan taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting longterm research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In lively first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers; on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets; with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid, and social welfare policy; inside radical political movements; among adherents of "New Religions"; inside a prosecutor's office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers; with journalists in the NHK newsroom; while researching race, ethnicity, and migration; and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture.

"Data Analysis with SPSS"is designed to teach students how to explore data in a systematic manner using the most popular professional social statistics program on the market today. Written in ten manageable chapters, this book first introduces students to the approach researchers use to frame research questions and the logic of establishing causal relations. Students are then oriented to the SPSS program and how to examine data sets. Subsequent chapters guide them through univariate analysis, bivariate analysis, graphic analysis, and multivariate analysis. Students conclude their course by learning how to write a research report and by engaging in their own research project. Each book is packaged with a disk containing the GSS (General Social Survey) file and the States data files. The GSS file contains 100 variables generated from interviews with 2,900 people, concerning their behaviors and attitudes on a wide variety of issues such as abortion, religion, prejudice, sexuality, and politics. The States data allows comparison of all 50 states with 400 variables indicating issues such as unemployment, environment, criminality, population, and education. Students will ultimately use these data to conduct their own independent research project with SPSS. Note: MySearchLab does not come automatically packaged with this text. To purchase MySearchLab, please visit: www.mysearchlab.com or you can purchase a ValuePack of the text + MySearchLab with Pearson eText (at no additional cost). ValuePack ISBN-10: 0205863728 / ValuePack ISBN-13: 9780205863723

Conducting Research in Conservation is the first textbook on social science research methods written specifically for use in the expanding and increasingly multidisciplinary field of environmental conservation. The first section on planning a research project includes chapters on the need for social science research in conservation, defining a research topic, methodology, and sampling. Section two focuses on practical issues in carrying out fieldwork with local communities, from fieldwork preparation and data collection to the relationships between the researcher and the study community. Section three provides an in-depth focus on a range of social science methods including standard qualitative and quantitative methods such as participant observation, interviewing and questionnaires, and more advanced methods, such as ethnobiological methods for documenting local environmental knowledge and change, and participatory methods such as the PRA' toolbox. Section four then demonstrates how to analyze social science data qualitatively and quantitatively; and the final section outlines the writing-up process and what should happen after the end of the formal research project. This book is a comprehensive and accessible guide to social science research methods for students of conservation related subjects and practitioners trained in the natural sciences. It features practical worldwide examples of conservation-related research in different ecosystems such as forests; grasslands; marine and riverine systems; and farmland. Boxes provide definitions of key terms, practical tips, and brief narratives from students and practitioners describe the practical issues that they have faced in the field.

Individuals, firms, governments and nations behave strategically, for good and bad. Over the last few decades, game theory has been constructed and progressively refined to become the major tool used by social scientists to understand, predict and regulate strategic interaction among agents who often have conflicting interests. In the surprisingly anodyne jargon of the theory, they play games'. This book offers an introduction to the basic tools of game theory and an overview of a number of applications to real-world cases, covering the areas of economics, politics and international relations. Each chapter is accompanied by some suggestions about further reading.

"The present volume is highly informative in that it provides a good and highly readable overview of the history and political situation of German populations all over Europe." . International Migration Review

..". an excellent and informative book, well-written, and essential reading for anyone interested in the fate of Europe's regional cultural minorities." . H-German

The study of ethnic minorities and their role in the domestic politics of their host states has long attracted scholars from a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. By contrast, national (or external) minorities, have been under-represented in the literature on ethnic minorities, although the interest has increased since the collapse of communism and more recently since the eruption of violent conflict in Kosovo. Ethnic Germans in particular, although still numbering millions and spread over twenty countries in western, central, and eastern Europe, have attracted only little attention.

This volume addresses the issue of Germany's external minorities, exploring the complex interrelationship between their ethnic identity and sense of cultural belonging on the one hand, and the political, economic, legal, and social situation in their respective societies, on the other. Leading specialists, representing a wide spectrum of viewpoints on the social and political conditions under which German minorities live today, provide case studies of all the major individual minority groups. In this way, a comprehensive picture of Germans and German culture in Europe emerges that provides both historical and contemporary perspectives on a diaspora community with an uncertain future between assimilation, segregation, and emigration.

Stefan Wolff was educated at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He received an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the London School of Economics. He is currently Chair in Political Science at the University of Nottingham."

This book pursues an interdisciplinary approach to open a discourse on innovative methodologies and practices associated with narrative and metaphor. Scholars from diverse fields in the humanities and social sciences report on how they use narrative and/or metaphor in their scholarship/research to arrive at new ways of seeing, thinking about and acting in the world. The book provides a range of methodological chapters for academics and practitioners alike. Each chapter discusses various aspects of the author's transformative methodologies and practices and how they contribute to the lives of others in their field. In this regard, the authors address traditional disciplines such as history and geography, as well as professional practices such as counselling, teaching and community work.

"Advances in gender research" is a new series aimed at presenting current methodological and theoretical research in an area of rapid change and with a subject which is interdisciplinary spanning the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. The papers in volume 1 reflect the current state of gender research in terms of the variety of material and the approach. The authors take various positions within the configuration which include liberal, radical and material feminisms. The pieces also vary in the extent to which the authors' theoretical orientation and ideas about social change are implicit or explicit. The diversity of current gender research is shown in the subjects presented ranging from an examination of the everyday world experienced by poor women and women of colour in American society and post-colonial women on a global basis to research along the critical lines of postmodernism and queer theory. Focus is placed on 'advances' and developments in gender theory. This new series will be of interest to scholars and experts in sociology, anthropology, ethnography, political science and to those with a particular interest in gender studies and race and ethnic relations.

While there are many ways to collect information, many students have trouble understanding how to employ various research methods effectively. Since everyone learns and processes information differently, instructing students on successfully using these methods continues to be a challenge. Teaching Research Methods in Public Administration combines empirical research and best practices on various research methods being employed by administrators. Emphasizing theoretical concepts, this publication is an essential reference source for academics, public administration practitioners, and students interested in how information is gathered, processed, and utilized.

The workshop provided an overview of the status and perspectives of Technology Assessment (TA) in the individual countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It also showed the complexity of creation of space for TA type activities in individual countries - for independent activity of both experts and the public based on individual responsibility. The book consists of the final version of the presented papers and new contributions initiated by the workshop. Moreover, the authors reflect the ideas and incentives sounded in the discussions. The book is addressed to researchers in the fields of social science, humanities, information technology and technology assessment in particular. It may also be of interest to policy-makers and the wider public concerned with the information society.