This book provides descriptions and illustrations of cutting-edge text analysis methods for communication and marketing research; cultural, historical-comparative, and event analysis; curriculum evaluation; psychological diagnosis; language development research; and for any research in which statistical inferences are drawn from samples of texts. Although the book is accessible to readers having no experience with content analysis, the text analysis expert will find substantial new material in its pages. In particular, this collection describes developments in semantic and network text analysis methodologies that heretofore have been accessible only among a smattering of methodology journals.
The book's international and cross-disciplinary content illustrates the breadth of quantitative text analysis applications. These applications demonstrate the methods' utility for international research, as well as for practitioners from the fields of sociology, political science, journalism/communication, computer science, marketing, education, and English. This is an "ecumenical" collection that contains applications not only of the most recent semantic and network text analysis methods, but also of the more traditional thematic method of text analysis. In fact, it is originally with this volume that these two "relational" approaches to text analysis are defined and contrasted with more traditional "thematic" text analysis methods. The emphasis here is on "application." The book's chapters provide guidance regarding the sorts of inferences that each method affords, and up-to-date descriptions of the human and technological resources required to apply the methods. Its purpose is as a resource for making quantitative text analysis methods more accessible to social science researchers.

Over the past decade, several major natural disasters have had devastating impacts throughout the United States and the world. Since larger populations now live and work on land vulnerable to various hazards, natural disasters can be expected to affect more people each year. As a result, the social work profession soon will be stretched to its limits as it attempts to respond to growing human needs in the wake of hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and human-made technological disasters. Research on Social Work and Disasters provides the essential strategies social work researchers, other social scientists in the area of disaster research, and emergency management personnel need to prepare for and recover from all forms of disaster.Focusing on hazard, risk, and disaster research, this book presents conceptual approaches and empirical findings in this emerging and important area of social work. It includes research on natural and technological disasters as they impact both rural and urban environments. Research on Social Work and Disasters offers conceptual and methodological guidelines for social work researchers and provides insight into the range of opportunities and issues relevant for disaster research. Specific topics you will learn about include: research design, methodology, and measurement community awareness and activism traumatic stress and stress debriefing funding and ethical issues vulnerable populations hazard education action researchResearch on Social Work and Disasters not only addresses effective strategies for responding in the aftermath of particular disasters, but also suggests significant ways in which the social work profession can become involved in prevention, mitigation, and preparedness activities. The book features examples of recent research on disasters chosen to illustrate a variety of types of disasters, theoretical approaches, methodologies, and levels of analysis. The implications drawn from this book are consistent in suggesting the responsibility of society to care for vulnerable populations and to share the burdens caused by catastrophic events.

Over the past decade, several major natural disasters have had devastating impacts throughout the United States and the world. Since larger populations now live and work on land vulnerable to various hazards, natural disasters can be expected to affect more people each year. As a result, the social work profession soon will be stretched to its limits as it attempts to respond to growing human needs in the wake of hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and human-made technological disasters. Research on Social Work and Disasters provides the essential strategies social work researchers, other social scientists in the area of disaster research, and emergency management personnel need to prepare for and recover from all forms of disaster.Focusing on hazard, risk, and disaster research, this book presents conceptual approaches and empirical findings in this emerging and important area of social work. It includes research on natural and technological disasters as they impact both rural and urban environments. Research on Social Work and Disasters offers conceptual and methodological guidelines for social work researchers and provides insight into the range of opportunities and issues relevant for disaster research. Specific topics you will learn about include: research design, methodology, and measurement community awareness and activism traumatic stress and stress debriefing funding and ethical issues vulnerable populations hazard education action researchResearch on Social Work and Disasters not only addresses effective strategies for responding in the aftermath of particular disasters, but also suggests significant ways in which the social work profession can become involved in prevention, mitigation, and preparedness activities. The book features examples of recent research on disasters chosen to illustrate a variety of types of disasters, theoretical approaches, methodologies, and levels of analysis. The implications drawn from this book are consistent in suggesting the responsibility of society to care for vulnerable populations and to share the burdens caused by catastrophic events.

The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work presents and illustrates an anthropological model of child and youth care work and explores the associated benefits of such an approach. Author Rivka A. Eisikovits'model enhances workers'on-the-job effectiveness with clients and co-workers and improves intra- and inter-organizational communication with other human service providers. This book prepares child and youth care providers, educators, researchers, administrators, consultants, supervisors, and organizers to become change-sensitive, process-oriented observers, analysts, and co-designers of the systems within which they function and those with which they interact, such as families, communities, and referral agencies. The model presented in The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work offers readers an organic continuum between everyday work experience and conceptual practice, organizing such haphazard events into a systemized body of knowledge. Although providing specific skills, it is more than a technology--it is a humanistic worldview from which a humanistic practice philosophy can be derived. Specific points of this philosophy that child and youth care professionals learn about include: the cultural learning theory ethnographic inquiry and description staff-client relations the sick-role trap microcultural events in residential settings the relationship between treatment and education subsystems a heuristic approach to service delivery family cultural ethnography for cultural sensitizationEisikovits'anthropologic perspective broadens the horizons of child and youth care work and equips practitioners to transcend narrowly drawn organizational boundaries. By presenting caregivers as cultural translators between their clients and various decision-making forums, The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work prepares them to face the challenges of a dynamic emergent profession and helps them perform successfully in a rapidly changing social context that requires constant assessment of needs and evaluation of performance.

One of the most promising trends in modem political science is the develop ment of a theory of politics as rational action. Focussing on choice as the central topic of study, rational choice theorists set out to specify what alter native an actor should prefer if he has some given knowledge of the conse quences of each alternative and wants to see his preference system as fully realized as possible. But rational choice theory is not confmed to the norma tive sphere of science. It can also be used for explanatory purposes. Then, the alternatives actually chosen are specified and the task is to explain the decisions by fmding out what considerations lay behind them. The starting point for an emerging research program at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, on 'Politics as Rational Action' is to describe the major choices in fifteen different policy areas of Swedish domes tic politics and explain why they were made."

This collection of 11 original in-depth accounts of qualitative research and evaluation in developing countries argues that such innovative methods offer considerable advantages over traditional methods. With examples drawn from Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, Central America and the Caribbean, each chapter focuses upon a specific method-such as qualitative interviews, fieldwork or document analysis-and considers related theoretical and practical issues. Key issues addressed include the identification of appropriate research questions; access; research ethics; practitioner research; case study evaluation; North-South collaboration and the potential of qualitative research for policy-making and theory.

This book was written with the belief that ordinal statistical methods--sometimes discussed under the title of "nonparametric statistics"--deserve much more serious attention as research tools than they have traditionally had. There are three classes of reasons for this:
*Many behavioral variables constitute only ordinal scales, not interval measurements that are required for traditional statistics.
*Various research issues that are of primary interest in behavioral research are themselves questions about order: Which group scores higher? Is the order on this variable similar to the order on that?
*Inferences from ordinal statistics are less subject to distributional peculiarities of the data than are those from traditional statistics.
Taking an innovative approach, this book treats ordinal methods in an integrated way rather than as a compendium of unrelated methods, and emphasizes that the ordinal quantities are highly meaningful in their own right, not just as stand-ins for more traditional correlations or analyses of variance. In fact, since the ordinal statistics have desirable descriptive properties of their own, the book treats them parametrically, rather then nonparametrically. The author discusses how ordinal statistics can be applied in a much wider set of research situations than has usually been thought, and that they can often come closer to answering the researcher's primary questions than traditional ones can. And he includes some extensions of ordinal methods in order to accomplish that end.

Basic researchers unlock the secrets of nature; applied researchers unlock the means by which those secrets of nature can change people's lives. Neither basic nor applied research has an independent impact. These volumes examine the convergence of basic and applied research in the field of memory. "Volume 1: Theory and Context, " focuses on the methods for understanding and applying basic memory theory, while "Volume 2: Practical Applications, " expands the understanding of practical memory research by providing in-depth research examples and findings.
If the science of memory is to make a significant contribution to society, coordinating our basic and applied efforts and determining how they complement each other become of paramount importance. These volumes will help in this regard--both as textbooks demonstrating how to investigate memory and apply basic memory theory, and as reference sources leading to a better understanding of certain problems in basic and applied memory research.
Readers of these volumes will gain a thorough grasp of the way major themes relate to basic and applied research collaboration, how programmatic basic and applied research can be conducted on particular memory problems, and the manner in which basic and applied work in major problem areas has been incorporated into the field of memory. Both volumes present important information that will be indispensable to researchers and students alike.

This volume analyses the quantification of the effect of factors measuring subjective well-being, and in particular on the metrics applied. With happiness studies flourishing over the last decades, both in number of publications as well as in their exposure, researchers working in this field are aware of potential weaknesses and pitfalls of these metrics. Contributors to this volume reflect on different factors influencing quantification, such as scale size, wording, language, biases, and cultural comparability in order to raise awareness on the tools and on their conditions of use.

The term "skill" encompasses an array of topics and issues. For example, individuals are skilled in a variety of domains such as chess, typing, air traffic control, or knitting; researchers study skill in a variety of ways, including speed of acquisition, accuracy of performance, and retention over time; and there are a variety of approaches to the study of skill such as computer modeling or experimental analysis. Contributing to the understanding of whether, how, when, and why skills may decline as a function of age is the goal of this volume.
This book is based on the Aging and Skill Conference sponsored by the Center for Applied Cognitive Research on Aging. The broad focus of the conference was to discuss cognitive theories underlying age-related skill acquisition, transfer, and retention and to discuss applications of these theories to such issues as age-adaptive training, compensatory strategies and devices, and utilization of new and existing technology. The contributors were asked to discuss the cognitive theory relevant to their topic, explain how the theory informs the field about aging, examine where gaps exist among general cognitive theory in this area and theories of aging, and demonstrate the practical relevance of the theory to enhancing or enabling activities of daily living--for work, home, or leisure--for older adults.
This is the first book to focus exclusively on aging and skill. It covers a range of abilities, provides the theoretical basis for the current status of age-related differences in skill, and offers direct evidence of the applicability of research on proficiency to aspects of daily living. Each chapter was written either by an expert in the field of aging, or by an expert in the field of skill--many expert in both areas.

Combining anecdotal accounts, inter-professional experiences, critical debate and practical pointers to being a good observer, this book explores issues surrounding observation in social science-orientated research.

The papers in this volume focus on the broad issues of public sector reform. They address issue-oriented and comparative research such as: analysis of civil service systems at the theoretical level; reforming the wing of national level governmetns; the wave of public sector reform that has swept the West over the past fifteen years; a comparison of two recent programs to improve efficiency and legitimacy of geovernment in the US and the Netherlands; the problems of insufficient capacity in managing the public sector; the impediments in the current system of public sector job evaluation in the US; the shortcomings in managerial capacities that currently trouble the European Union; Nicaragua and its struggle for public sector reform; the history of Egyptian civil service; and the development of the Argentine civil service.

Thirty-three of the top scholars in this fast moving domain present a picture of work at the cusp in social psychology -- work that deals with cognition and affect in close relationships. The present volume contains a wealth of research findings and influential theoretical accounts that spring as much from indigenous work in the close relationship field as from purebred social cognition. The chapters introduce theories and research programs concerned with the role of individual and couple differences in close relationship knowledge structures. They deal with the role of emotion and affect in close relationships. And they discuss the function of cognition and knowledge structures in relation to the developmental course of close relationships. Each section is accompanied by a critical review written by an expert in the field.
This volume is a must for any close relationship scholar interested in the latest research and theorizing about close relationships that adopt a social psychological perspective. It will also be of interest to scholars and students working in clinical psychology, social cognition, communication, individual differences, and family studies.

This is a study of the work and life of district midwives from 1948 to 1972 in Nottingham, which was one of the last UK cities to build a central maternity unit. The author statistically examines the outcome of home births in the area, taking into account the Parliamentary Reports of 1992 and 1993 and demonstrating the safety and value to society of district midwives.

The authors of "Research as Social Change" argue in clear and accessible language that teaching, learning and research are essentially social and deeply personal activities. This is not a conventional text, for although it is about ways in which research can be used by those in various areas of professional practice, it does not simply catalog or describe conventional research methods. The book's main concerns are qualitative research, research in action (rather than in abstraction) and case study methods. Rob Walker and Michael Schratz give examples of research that are concerned with the nature of personal memories and discuss what is worth doing in reviewing research literature. Other topics covered include the social nature of perception, the uses that research can make of drawings and photographs, the emotional relationships implicit in research and research in the context of the contemporary workplace.
Walker and Schratz develop new directions and new possibilities for research and find ways of bringing together theory and practice, the personal and the social as well as organizations and their clients. It is an important resource and means of support for all who are interested in doing research but are critical of most studies that are currently available.