Multiple regression analysis has been widely used by researchers to analyze complex social problems since the 1950s. A specialization in economics, known as econometrics, developed out of a recognition that multiple regression is based upon a large number of assumptions-many of which are commonly violated in specific applications. Econometricians developed tests for violations of the regression model assumptions, as well as a variety of corrective measures for estimating regression models in the presence of many of the violations. Unfortunately, the mathematical sophistication required to understand the econometrics literature started out high and has continued to rise over the years. As a consequence, an understanding of the assumptions of the regression model, tests for violations, and corrective estimation approaches have failed to permeate widely many other policy-related disciplines such as political science, social work, public administration, and sociology. One of the key objectives of this book is to translate the results from the econometrics literature into language that policy analysts from other disciplines can understand easily. A second objective is to present a discussion of so-called limited-dependent variable models. One of the assumptions of the regression model is that the dependent variable is measured on an interval scale. But often the dependent variable of interest is discrete or categorical. Whether someone is in poverty or, whether they are working full-time, part-time, or out of the labor force, marital status-all are examples of categorical variables that might be of policy interest. Moreover, the growing availability of large-scale public use data sets containing information on individuals and families has heightened the relevance of categorical variables in policy analysis. The mathematical preparation required to understand procedures for estimating categorical models is, however, even more daunting than that for fully understanding and using the regression model. As with the theoretical development of the regression model, most presentations of categorical models, such as Logit and Probit, are to be found in econometric literature. Moreover, this literature offers little in the way of practical advice on how to estimate and interpret model results. This book is the first to present a detailed and accessible discussion of multiple regression and limited-dependent variable models in the context of policy analysis. As such it will be an invaluable resource for most scholars, researchers, and students in the social and behavioral sciences.

An R Companion for the Third Edition of The Fundamentals of Political Science Research offers students a chance to delve into the world of R using real political data sets and statistical analysis techniques directly from Paul M. Kellstedt and Guy D. Whitten's best-selling textbook. Built in parallel with the main text, this workbook teaches students to apply the techniques they learn in each chapter by reproducing the analyses and results from each lesson using R. Students will also learn to create all of the tables and figures found in the textbook, leading to an even greater mastery of the core material. This accessible, informative, and engaging companion walks through the use of R step-by-step, using command lines and screenshots to demonstrate proper use of the software. With the help of these guides, students will become comfortable creating, editing, and using data sets in R to produce original statistical analyses for evaluating causal claims. End-of-chapter exercises encourage this innovation by asking students to formulate and evaluate their own hypotheses.

This book contains a selection of the latest research in the field of Computational Social Science (CSS) methods, uses, and results, as presented at the 2021 annual conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA). Computational social science (CSS) is the science that investigates social and behavioral dynamics through social simulation, social network analysis, and social media analysis. The CSSSA is a professional society that aims to advance the field of computational social science in all areas, including basic and applied orientations, by holding conferences and workshops, promoting standards of scientific excellence in research and teaching, and publishing research findings and results.

This book discusses and analyses global policies and practices aimed at promoting equity in higher education participation and attainment. Although the massification of higher education systems has facilitated the participation of students from deprived backgrounds, socioeconomic inequalities persist in access to the most prestigious institutions and programmes. Privileged students benefit from a number of advantages in the competition for selective and scarce places: access to information, lower aversion to debt, higher expectations, better previous schooling and higher academic achievement. The chapters present a critical analysis of equity policies in different countries - with or without affirmative action policies, within a context of neoliberal policies or within a social democratic model - and the reasons why they have failed to promote equity and fairness, preventing students from achieving their full educational potential.This is an open access book.

This book argues that we are currently witnessing not merely a decline in the quality of social science research, but the proliferation of meaningless research, of no value to society, and modest value to its authors - apart from securing employment and promotion. The explosion of published outputs, at least in social science, creates a noisy, cluttered environment which makes meaningful research difficult, as different voices compete to capture the limelight even briefly. Older, more significant contributions are easily neglected, as the premium is to write and publish, not read and learn. The result is a widespread cynicism among academics on the value of academic research, sometimes including their own. Publishing comes to be seen as a game of hits and misses, devoid of intrinsic meaning and value, and of no wider social uses whatsoever. Academics do research in order to get published, not to say something socially meaningful. This is what we view as the rise of nonsense in academic research, which represents a serious social problem. It undermines the very point of social science. This problem is far from 'academic'. It affects many areas of social and political life entailing extensive waste of resources and inflated student fees as well as costs to tax-payers. Part two of the book offers a range of proposals aimed at restoring meaning at the heart of social research and drawing social science back address the major problems and issues that face our societies.

'Morland predicts the future of humanity in 10 illuminating statistics (could the Japanese and Italians now go the way of the dodo?) and looks back to how ebbs and flows of population have shaped history, such as the Soviet Union's plummeting birth rate in the 1960s, which hastened the end of the Cold War.' - The Daily Telegraph 'The Best Books for Summer 2022' The great forces of population change - the balance of births, deaths and migrations - have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans. The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway. Tomorrow's People ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way - portents for still larger migrations ahead - which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change - remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production - which have made all these epochal developments possible. Tomorrow's People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.

This book focuses on the emergence of creative ideas from cognitive and social dynamics. In particular, it presents data, models, and analytical methods grounded in a network dynamics approach. It has long been hypothesized that innovation arises from a recombination of older ideas and concepts, but this has been studied primarily at an abstract level. In this book, we consider the networks underlying innovation - from the brain networks supporting semantic cognition to human networks such as brainstorming groups or individuals interacting through social networks - and relate the emergence of ideas to the structure and dynamics of these networks. Methods described include experimental studies with human participants, mathematical evaluation of novelty from group brainstorming experiments, neurodynamical modeling of conceptual combination, and multi-agent modeling of collective creativity. The main distinctive features of this book are the breadth of perspectives considered, the integration of experiments with theory, and a focus on the combinatorial emergence of ideas.

"Research on Accounting Ethics" is devoted exclusively to the advancement of ethics research and education in the profession and practice of accounting. Its threefold mission is to: advance innovative and applied ethics research in all accounting related disciplines on a global basis; improve ethics education in and throughout the professional accounting and management curricula at the undergraduate and graduate levels; provide a source of information for the professional accounting and auditing community for integrating ethics and good business practices in public firms, business corporations, and governmental organizations. This series features articles on a broad range of important and timely topics, including professionalism, social responsibility, individual morality, accountability, good business practices in public accounting and the litigation crisis. Papers will be empirical or theoretical in nature, and will draw upon paradigms in related disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, theology, economics and sociology.

This book presents a systematic overview of cutting-edge research in the field of parametric modeling of personal income and wealth distribution, which allows one to represent how income/wealth is distributed within a given population. The estimated parameters may be used to gain insights into the causes of the evolution of income/wealth distribution over time, or to interpret the differences between distributions across countries. Moreover, once a given parametric model has been fitted to a data set, one can straightforwardly compute inequality and poverty measures. Finally, estimated parameters may be used in empirical modeling of the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the evolution of personal income/wealth distribution. In reviewing the state of the art in the field, the authors provide a thorough discussion of parametric models belonging to the " -generalized" family, a new and fruitful set of statistical models for the size distribution of income and wealth that they have developed over several years of collaborative and multidisciplinary research. This book will be of interest to all who share the belief that problems of income and wealth distribution merit detailed conceptual and methodological attention.

This serial publication focuses more on theoretical than practical analyses. It encourages historical as well as contemporary cases of social policy development and implementation, and also stresses unconventional interpretations of social policies.

Expository Discourse describes the social science research genre in an entirely original light. The authors present a comprehensive model which characterizes the generic, registerial and discoursal options as they interweave within a text, formulating explicit realization statements that relate the abstract categories of move and act (as described by Swales) to the way these units actually are created by lexical and grammatical choices. The realization networks draw on the work of systemic functional linguists, primarily Halliday, Hasan, Martin, and Ventola.

This first volume in a series on research in human social conflict covers such topics as demography and ethnic conflict, racial and ethnic conflict, psychological perspectives on inter-racial and inter-ethnic group conflict, and attitudes related to racial and ethnic conflict.

This book presents the fundamental theory for non-standard diffusion problems in movement ecology. Levy processes and anomalous diffusion have shown to be both powerful and useful tools for qualitatively and quantitatively describing a wide variety of spatial population ecological phenomena and dynamics, such as invasion fronts and search strategies. Adopting a self-contained, textbook-style approach, the authors provide the elements of statistical physics and stochastic processes on which the modeling of movement ecology is based and systematically introduce the physical characterization of ecological processes at the microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic levels. The explicit definition of these levels and their interrelations is particularly suitable to coping with the broad spectrum of space and time scales involved in bio-ecological problems. Including numerous exercises (with solutions), this text is aimed at graduate students and newcomers in this field at the interface of theoretical ecology, mathematical biology and physics.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the age of data-driven problem-solving, applying sophisticated computational tools for explaining substantive phenomena is a valuable skill. Yet, application of methods assumes an understanding of the data, structure, and patterns that influence the broader research program. This Element offers researchers and teachers an introduction to clustering, which is a prominent class of unsupervised machine learning for exploring and understanding latent, non-random structure in data. A suite of widely used clustering techniques is covered in this Element, in addition to R code and real data to facilitate interaction with the concepts. Upon setting the stage for clustering, the following algorithms are detailed: agglomerative hierarchical clustering, k-means clustering, Gaussian mixture models, and at a higher-level, fuzzy C-means clustering, DBSCAN, and partitioning around medoids (k-medoids) clustering.

This is the first technical book that considers tests as public tools and examines how to engineer and process test data, extract the structure within the data to be visualized, and thereby make test results useful for students, teachers, and the society. The author does not differentiate test data analysis from data engineering and information visualization. This monograph introduces the following methods of engineering or processing test data, including the latest machine learning techniques: classical test theory (CTT), item response theory (IRT), latent class analysis (LCA), latent rank analysis (LRA), biclustering (co-clustering), and Bayesian network model (BNM). CTT and IRT are methods for analyzing test data and evaluating students' abilities on a continuous scale. LCA and LRA assess examinees by classifying them into nominal and ordinal clusters, respectively, where the adequate number of clusters is estimated from the data. Biclustering classifies examinees into groups (latent clusters) while classifying items into fields (factors). Particularly, the infinite relational model discussed in this book is a biclustering method feasible under the condition that neither the number of groups nor the number of fields is known beforehand. Additionally, the local dependence LRA, local dependence biclustering, and bicluster network model are methods that search and visualize inter-item (or inter-field) network structure using the mechanism of BNM. As this book offers a new perspective on test data analysis methods, it is certain to widen readers' perspective on test data analysis.

'Human Communication' is a field of interest of enormous breadth, being one which has concerned students of many different disciplines. It spans the imagined 'gap' between the 'arts' and the 'sciences', but it forms no unified academic subject. There is no commonly accepted terminology to cover aU aspects. The eight articles comprising this book have been chosen to illustrate something of the diversity yet, at the same time, to be comprehensible to readers from different academic disciplines. They cannot pretend to cover the whole field Some attempt has been made to present them in an order which represents a continuity of theme, though this is merely an opinion. Most publications of this type form the proceedings of some sympo sium, or conference. In this case, however, there has been no such unifying influence, no collaboration, no discussions. The authors have been drawn from a number of different countries. The first article, by John Marshall and Roger Wales (Great Britain) concerns the pragmatic values of communication, starting by considering bird-song and passing to the infinitely more complex 'meaningful' values of human language and pictures. The 'pragmatic aspect' means the usefulness - what does language or bird song do for humans and birds? What adaptation or survival values does it have? These questions are then considered in relation to brain specialisation for representation of experience and cognition."

This is the first book to provide a systematic description of statistical properties of large-scale financial data. Specifically, the power-law and log-normal distributions observed at a given time and their changes using time-reversal symmetry, quasi-time-reversal symmetry, Gibrat's law, and the non-Gibrat's property observed in a short-term period are derived here. The statistical properties observed over a long-term period, such as power-law and exponential growth, are also derived. These subjects have not been thoroughly discussed in the field of economics in the past, and this book is a compilation of the author's series of studies by reconstructing the data analyses published in 15 academic journals with new data. This book provides readers with a theoretical and empirical understanding of how the statistical properties observed in firms' large-scale data are related along the time axis. It is possible to expand this discussion to understand theoretically and empirically how the statistical properties observed among differing large-scale financial data are related. This possibility provides readers with an approach to microfoundations, an important issue that has been studied in economics for many years.

Innovative Skills to Support Well-Being and Resiliency in Youth emphasizes the step-by-step procedures readers will need to implement evidence-based, innovative techniques and skills that emphasize well-being and resilience in youth. The strategies are specifically chosen to capture and hold the interest of youth who are often reticent to counseling. Furthermore, the skills-based approach of the book aims to demystify what one actually does in session with youth by moving away from the vagueness of talk therapy when youth have nothing to say, and toward sessions that engage youth in action, stimulating communication and change. Innovative Skills to Support Well-Being and Resiliency in Youth also advocates for practice interventions that empower youth to be in charge of their personal well-being and the healing process. By doing so, youth can take an active role in their own healthy functioning, as opposed to passively receiving treatment.

In this first book of the series Survey Methods in Educational Research, we have brought together leading authors and scholars in the field to discuss key introductory concepts in the creation, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of survey instruments and their resultant findings. While there are other textbooks that might introduce these concepts adequately well, the authors here have focused on the pragmatic issues that inevitably arise in the development and administration process of survey instruments. Drawing from their rich experiences, the authors present these potential speed bumps or road blocks a survey researcher in education or the social sciences might encounter. Referencing their own work and practice, the authors provide valuable suggestions for dealing with these issues "your advisor never told you about." And all of the recommendations are aligned with standard protocols and current research on best practices in the field of research methodology. This book is broken into four broad units on creating survey items and instruments, administering surveys, analyzing the data from surveys, and stories of successful administrations modeling the entire research cycle. Each chapter focuses on a different concept in the survey research process, and the authors share their approaches to addressing the issues. These topics include survey item construction, scale development, cognitive interviewing, measuring change with self-report data, translation issues with surveys administered in multiple languages, working with school and program administrators when implementing surveys, a review of current software used in survey research, the use of weights, response styles, assessing validity of results, and effectively communicating your results and findings ... and much more. The intended audience of the volume will be practitioners, administrators, teachers as researchers, graduate students, social science and education researchers not experienced in survey research, and students learning program evaluation. In brief, if you are considering doing survey research, this book is meant for you

Ordinal Data Modeling is a comprehensive treatment of ordinal data models from both likelihood and Bayesian perspectives. Written for graduate students and researchers in the statistical and social sciences, this book describes a coherent framework for understanding binary and ordinal regression models, item response models, graded response models, and ROC analyses, and for exposing the close connection between these models. A unique feature of this text is its emphasis on applications. All models developed in the book are motivated by real datasets, and considerable attention is devoted to the description of diagnostic plots and residual analyses. Software and datasets used for all analyses described in the text are available on websites listed in the preface.

This book is a collection of essays that explore commonalities and contrasts between strategy in armed conflict and strategy in public health. The first part uses the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories to study strategy as an exchange of messages between adversaries, in the context of underlying power relations. The 'messages' to be exchanged are constructed from an 'alphabet' of tactics available to each contender, in a large sense. The second part of the book explores four case histories from this perspective, ranging across agribusiness-generated pandemics, through tuberculosis and COVID-19. The final chapter attempts a strategic synthesis applicable more specifically to public health than to the remarkably - and disturbingly -- close parallel of armed conflict. Taking a unique approach to public health tactics and strategy this volume will be of interest to social epidemiologists, public health economists, public policy scientists, as well as public health researchers and practitioners.

This volume of Research on Negotiation in Organizations focuses on three new and emerging areas in the domain of negotiation and conflict within organizations. In the first section, the problem of "deviance" within organizations is approached from a conflict and justice perspective. Earlier research attention to these issues tended to treat deviance largely as a problem created by selected individuals who did not adapt to the organization, rather than as a systemic problem created by certain organizational conditions. By seeing deviant behavior in organizations as a possible response to unfair treatment, and by employing conflict management concepts to explain how individuals respond to organizational constraints and pressures, the papers in this section extend the work on conflict and justice to a new, rich, and largely unexplored domain.

The second section of this volume addresses an increasingly important challenge in our world - the effective management of environmental conflict; the authors demonstrate factors contributing to the intractability of environmental disputes, and the importance of perceptions of fairness in attaining conflict resolution.

The third and final section offers diverse but important papers in the application of conflict and negotiation to the international environment, including an examination of conflict in a Chinese cultural context, and commentary on the role of power differences in conflict management and negotiation.

This is V3 in the Cultural Studies series edited by Norman K.Denzin