For courses in Research Methods, Reading and Understanding Research, and Quantitative Methods/Statistics. This uniquely accessible text shows precisely how to decipher and critique statistically-based research reports. Praised for its non-intimidating writing style, the text emphasizes concepts over formulas. The 6th edition contains 492 new excerpts drawn from recent journal articles, as well as three new chapters. An author-generated companion website has chapter outlines and quizzes, lists of misconceptions, links to online resources, and more.(www.readingstats.com) Reading Statistics and Research gives readers the knowledge and confidence they need to understand, evaluate, and write research reports.

This text provides a streamlined and accessible introduction to statistics for students in sociology, criminal justice, political science, social work, and other social sciences. This edition of the text offers an essential and accessible overview to the introduction to social statistics. Clearly written with detailed step-by-step illustrations of statistical procedures, the text provides clear and logical explanations for the rationale and use of statistical methods of social research. Numerous end-of-chapter questions in every chapter reinforce key concepts to students.

Emphasizing meaning and concepts, not just symbols and numbers Statistics for Psychology, 6th edition places definitional formulas center stage to emphasize the logic behind statistics and discourage rote memorization. Each procedure is explained in a direct, concise language and both verbally and numerically. MyStatLab is an integral part of the Statistics course. MyStatLab gives students practice with hundreds of homework problems. Every problem includes tools to help students understand and solve each problem - and grades all of the problems for instructors. MyStatLab also includes tests, quizzes, eText, a Gradebook, a customizable study plan, and much more. Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers should be able to: * Know both definitional and numerical formulas and how to apply them * Understand the logic behind each formula * Expose students to the latest thinking in statistical theory and application * Prepare students to read research articles * Learn how to use SPSS

This book describes an action research approach to engaging respectfully with First Nations communities in a diverse range of contexts, disciplines and projects. It offers a valuable guide for professionals, students and teaching staff that recognises all participants as equal partners while acknowledging the diversity of First Peoples and culture, and prioritising local knowledge. While the book is adaptable to a diverse range of cultures and disciplines, it is specifically focused on cross-cultural collaborative case studies in Noongar Country, which is located in the southwest of Western Australia. The case studies demonstrate how action research can be applied not only in the traditional areas of education and social justice, but also in a diverse range of disciplines, communities and circumstances, including media, education, environmental management and health. The book's aim is to highlight successful cross-cultural First Nations community projects and to discuss each one in terms of its action research philosophy and process. In this regard, the voices of the participants are prioritised, especially those of First Nations communities. While this book is specifically pitched at Australian readers, the action research approach described may be adapted and applied to many cross-cultural collaborative relationships, making it of interest and value to international students and researchers.

The dynamics of population systems cannot be understood within the framework of ordinary differential equations, which assume that the number of interacting agents is infinite. With recent advances in ecology, biochemistry and genetics it is becoming increasingly clear that real systems are in fact subject to a great deal of noise. Relevant examples include social insects competing for resources, molecules undergoing chemical reactions in a cell and a pool of genomes subject to evolution.When the population size is small, novel macroscopic phenomena can arise, which can be analyzed using the theory of stochastic processes. This thesis is centered on two unsolved problems in population dynamics: the symmetry breaking observed in foraging populations and the robustness of spatial patterns. We argue that these problems can be resolved with the help of two novel concepts: noise-induced bistable states and stochastic patterns.
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Hardbound. The chapters in this volume illustrate the ways in which U.S. sociologists of education continue to plumb the depths of fundamental questions about how schools are organized and consequences of school organization for students and teachers. These studies present new ideas and/or findings in an engaging way, and they attempt to enlarge the audience for sociological research on education. Perhaps even more importantly, however, they generate a host of questions that warrant sustained inquiry by our community. If these authors lead us to think in new ways or to ask new questions, their efforts will have been well-rewarded.

The contributors to this volume, the third in the series, refine ideas that have been part of the conceptual toolkit of gender scholarship from its inception, identifying new challenges to and new applications for the concepts of the public/private dichotomy and of patriarchy.

Understanding Research is an accessible and visually-appealing introduction to research. Whether students become producers or consumers of research, this text shows them that the subject is both interesting and highly relevant for their lives and professional work.

This is the 15th volume in a series examining research in finance. It examines issues such as indirect financial distress and sales performance, stock market volatility and the business cycle, the behaviour of futures prices, and curved option pay-offs.

This volume describes the development and application of the Mmogo-method (R) as a projective visual data-gathering method, applied in different contexts and with different groups of people. "Mmogo" means togetherness in Setswana, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. The Mmogo-method (R) provides a deep understanding of personal, relational and group experiences and is particularly useful in cross-cultural contexts and across age groups. By allowing visual expressions of the self as a complex, dynamic social system it overcomes some of the limitations of traditional data-collection methods, such as questionnaires or interviews. The book draws together contributions by leading social scientists to show how this flexible, visual data-collection method can be used independently or jointly with other data-gathering techniques, such as journalling or in-depth interviewing, to acquire rich information. The research method described here enables investigators to access perceptions, feelings and personal experiences participants might otherwise find hard to verbalize and explain. Researchers in disciplines such as education, social sciences, consumer sciences, market research, and city and town planning will find this book and its innovative method particularly valuable in addressing a gap in available visual and other data collection resources.

Rejecting those who urge a bootstrap approach to people living in extreme poverty on the edge of society, sociologist Barbara Arrighi makes an eloquent, compassionate plea for empathy and collective responsibility toward those for whom either the boots or the straps are missing. This book further offers solutions in consciousness raising, community collaboration, and informed, responsible public policy. The book is a critique of a system that purports to serve yet sometimes impedes the welfare of those who are in need of the basic elements for survival, including affordable shelter. It analyzes the structural factors of poverty and the social psychological costs of being poor and lacking a home. Utilizing interview findings from families who have lived in a shelter in northern Kentucky and from staff members, the book examines the degrading effects of shelter life on women's self-respect and children's development. Rather than an examination of individual pathologies leading to lack of shelter, it centers on women and children living in shelters and offers a sociological study of poverty and the family.

Preface.- 1 Questions that Can Be Answered with CFA.- 2 Elements of CFA.- 3 Models of CFA.- 4 Models of Longitudinal CFA.- 5 Designs for CFA.- 6 Special Variables in CFA.- 7 The CFA Treasure Chest.- 8 CFA Software.- Index.

Categorical data arise often in many fields, including biometrics, economics, management, manufacturing, marketing, psychology, and sociology. This book provides an introduction to the analysis of such data. The coverage is broad, using the loglinear Poisson regression model and logistic binomial regression models as the primary engines for methodology. Topics covered include count regression models, such as Poisson, negative binomial, zero-inflated, and zero-truncated models; loglinear models for two-dimensional and multidimensional contingency tables, including for square tables and tables with ordered categories; and regression models for two-category (binary) and multiple-category target variables, such as logistic and proportional odds models. All methods are illustrated with analyses of real data examples, many from recent subject area journal articles. These analyses are highlighted in the text, and are more detailed than is typical, providing discussion of the context and background of the problem, model checking, and scientific implications. More than 200 exercises are provided, many also based on recent subject area literature. Data sets and computer code are available at a web site devoted to the text. Jeffrey S. Simonoff is Professor of Statistics at New York University. He is author of Smoothing Methods in Statistics and coauthor of A Casebook for a First Course in Statistics and Data Analysis, as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

The latest edition in the China Statistics Series, China Statistical Abstract 1989 offers essential basic information on China's economic and social development in 1988. It also illustrates the major trends in this development since 1978. This book contains key statistics for principal sectors of the national economy by selected years since 1978. There are nine sections: General Survey; Population and Labor Force; Agriculture; Industry; Transportation, Postal and Telecommunication Services; Investment in Fixed Assets; Finance, Trade and Price; People's Livelihood; Education, Science, Culture, Public Health and Sports. A glossary of major indicators is included at the end of the book. China Statistical Abstract 1989 is a revised and improved English language edition of the official China Statistical Abstract compiled by the State Statistical Bureau of the People's Republic of China (SSB). The English Language Editorial Board was responsible for the translation and annotation of this volume. The English Language Editorial Board is composed of representatives of the China Statistical Information and Consultancy Service Center, and affiliate of the SSB, and the China Statistical Archives, a research center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This is the fifth volume in a series of statistical annuals. The volumes so far published are China Statistical Abstract 1988, China Social Statistics 1986, China Trade and Prices Statistics 1988, and China Rural Statistics 1988.

Soviet and Western sociologists come together in this book to present results of recent sociological surveys and to analyse important social issues against the background of the revelations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book spans six major issues: the family and women, social care, young people, deviance (including prostitution), leisure and privilege (including the black market).

This book bridges the current quantitative and qualitative text analyses, using grammar as a crucial source of investigation. Taking data from Czech, an inflected language, in which the most optimal conditions to respond to this research question are met, the book expands the understanding of language and text in ways that have not been executed before. For predominantly English-based quantitative research, this volume fills a crucial gap by examining the relationship between inflection and other phenomena (including discourse, translation and literature). For the current qualitative research, the volume provides large empirical data to confirm some of its claims, but more importantly, it demonstrates the important role of detailed grammatical concepts that have not been considered before. Besides addressing fundamental questions about text analysis methods, the volume presents a diverse array of Czech data that are unique in their own right and worthy of dissemination to the general audience. Taming the Corpus: From Inflection and Lexis to Interpretation is divided into three sections. Section 1 deals with phonotactics, poetic structure, morphological complexity used to differentiate literary style, and native speakers' sense of grammaticality - issues pertinent to linguistic typology, cognition and language, and literary studies. Section 2 focuses on inter-language relations, especially the theory of translation. Section 3 demonstrates how quantitative analysis of texts can contribute to our understanding of society and connects the volume to legal language, construction of gender and discourse position and implicit ideology.

This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable. While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of "institutional rationality" of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments. This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data.

This book visualizes mortality dynamics in the Lexis diagram. While the standard approach of plotting death rates is also covered, the focus in this book is on the depiction of rates of mortality improvement over age and time. This rather novel approach offers a more intuitive understanding of the underlying dynamics, enabling readers to better understand whether period- or cohort-effects were instrumental for the development of mortality in a particular country. Besides maps for single countries, the book includes maps on the dynamics of selected causes of death in the United States, such as cardiovascular diseases or lung cancer. The book also features maps for age-specific contributions to the change in life expectancy, for cancer survival and for seasonality in mortality for selected causes of death in the United States. The book is accompanied by instructions on how to use the freely available R Software to produce these types of surface maps. Readers are encouraged to use the presented tools to visualize other demographic data or any event that can be measured by age and calendar time, allowing them to adapt the methods to their respective research interests. The intended audience is anyone who is interested in visualizing data by age and calendar time; no specialist knowledge is required. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Explores the development and implementation of the Clay Emboidement Research Method (CERM) in working alongside stigmatised, oppressed, and marginalised groups, emphasising the need for a sensitive, ethical methodology for self-empowerment and opening doors for further research in this area.

This annual publication is devoted to the advancement of ethics research and education in the profession and practice of accounting. It aims to advance innovative and applied ethics research in all accounting-related disciplines on a global basis and to improve ethics education in the field.

The first volume presents a collection of exciting papers exploring several new areas of disability research. The contributions include: examination of the media representation of disability and coverage of disability policy issues which gives an understanding of the far reaching impact of the fourth estate; an historical analysis of the correspondence between the identifier of Down syndrome and Darwin that lends insights into the development of interpretations of mental retardation particularly Down syndrome as a throwback to the more primitive nature of man; analysis of hospital discharge data which demonstrates that persons with chronic conditions and impairments are more likely than those without to need hospitalization for injuries resulting from violence; and an overview of voting behavior among persons with disabilities. Subsequent volumes will focus on specific subjects related to disability issues.

Communication Research: Asking Questions, Finding Answers covers basic research issues and processes, both quantitative and qualitative, appropriate for communication students with little or no previous research methods experience. The text's guiding principle is that methodological choices are made from one's research questions or hypotheses. This avoids the pitfall in which students learn one methodology or one methodological skill and then force that method to answer all types of questions. Instead of working with one methodology to answer all types of questions, students come away understanding a variety of methods and how to apply them appropriately. This approach is strengthened in the new edition with a suite of Connect tools designed to improve student outcomes while streamlining grading for instructors: *SmartBook 2.0 provides a personalized and adaptive learning experience for students, while highlighting the most impactful communication concepts the learner needs to study at that time. *Progress dashboards to quickly show how students are performing on assignments and tips for improvement.

What is the relationship between social science research and public health policy, particularly in the developing world? This question is at the heart of this collection of essays drawn from Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored conferences at Harvard University. The book examines the theoretical impact of social science research as well as specific case studies of successful applied research.

Beginning with a section on broad issues and the conceptualization of behavioral change, the volume then examines the anti-smoking movement in the United States; measures to prevent and control HIV infection in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States; anti-malaria measures; and the application of dietary management and lot quality assurance sampling to public health issues in Peru. The volume concludes with a section re-examining ways social science research can have an impact on improving public health. Scholars and researchers as well as policy makers involved with health research and international development will find this collection particularly valuable.

Models of Society and Complex Systems introduces readers to a variety of different mathematical tools used for modelling human behaviour and interactions, and the complex social dynamics that drive institutions, conflict, and coordination. What laws govern human affairs? How can we make sense of the complexity of societies and how do individual actions, characteristics, and beliefs interact? Social systems follow regularities which allow us to answer these questions using different mathematical approaches. This book emphasises both theory and application. It systematically introduces mathematical approaches, such as evolutionary and spatial game theory, social network analysis, agent-based modelling, and chaos theory. It provides readers with the necessary theoretical background of each toolset as well as the underlying intuition, while each chapter includes exercises and applications to real-world phenomena. By looking behind the surface of various social occurrences, the reader uncovers the reasons why social systems exhibit both cultural universals and at the same time a diversity of practices and norms to a degree that even surpasses biological variety, or why some riots turn into revolutions while others do not even make it into the news. This book is written for any scholar in the social sciences interested in studying and understanding human behaviour, social dynamics, and the complex systems of society. It does not expect readers to have a particular background apart from some elementary knowledge and affinity for mathematics.

This text takes up the debate about matching vocational education with the labour market, and shows progress in terms of theoretical models, tools (transformation and matching processes), and learning environments. The contributions address the concepts of qualifications and skilling, the role, strengths and weaknesses of practical training, models and processes of becoming skilled, and whether or not one should try to plan the content of vocational programmes in accordance with changing qualifications requirements and skill needs in the labour market is the essential question.