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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Communication studies > Research methods
Developed in response to the theoretically driven mainstream sociology, institutional ethnography starts from people's everyday experiences, and works from there to discover how the social is organized. Starting from experience is a central step in challenging taken-for-granted assumptions and relations of power, whilst responding critically to the neoliberal cost-benefit ideology that has come to permeate welfare institutions and the research sector. This book explicates the Nordic response to institutional ethnography, showing how it has been adapted and interpreted within the theoretical and methodological landscape of social scientific research in the region, as well as the institutional particularities of the Nordic welfare state. Addressing the main topics of concern in the Nordic context, together with the way in which research is undertaken, the authors show how institutional ethnography is combined with different theories and methodologies in order to address particular problematics, as well as examining its standing in relation to contemporary research policy and university reforms. With both theoretical and empirical chapters, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, professional studies and anthropology with interests in research methods and the Nordic region.
By exploring how the religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, and social surroundings of African-American sufferers of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) impacts their understanding of the condition, this book develops a new model of effective adult learning. Presenting the findings of rigorous qualitative research undertaken with five individuals with T2DM, this volume considers how individuals' educational background, their personal experiences, and their relationship with African-American theism have impacted on their efforts to understand and manage the disease. Identification of the social and spiritual dynamics which govern adults' acceptance of a chronic condition such as diabetes, and their ability to manage the illness according to modern medical principles, informs the development of a new theory of adult learning known as permeated learning. This model, which extends beyond transformative learning to recognize the influence of social constructs specific to African-American communities, will have broad application to adult education and the management of chronic diseases. This scholarly text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, and policymakers in the field of adult education, African-American education, transformative learning, lifelong learning, and multicultural education.
Researchers in the rapidly growing field of intelligence studies face unique and difficult challenges ranging from finding and accessing data on secret activities, to sorting through the politics of intelligence successes and failures, to making sense of complex socio-organizational or psychological phenomena. The contributing authors to Researching National Security Intelligence survey the state of the field and demonstrate how incorporating multiple disciplines helps to generate high-quality, policy-relevant research. Following this approach, the volume provides a conceptual, empirical, and methodological toolkit for scholars and students informed by many disciplines: history, political science, public administration, psychology, communications, and journalism. This collection of essays written by an international group of scholars and practitioners propels intelligence studies forward by demonstrating its growing depth, by suggesting new pathways to the creation of knowledge, and by identifying how scholarship can enhance practice and accountability.
As computers proliferate and as the field of computer graphics matures, it has become increasingly important for computer scientists to understand how users perceive and interpret computer graphics. Experimental Design: From User Studies to Psychophysics is an accessible introduction to psychological experiments and experimental design, covering the major components in the design, execution, and analysis of perceptual studies. The book begins with an introduction to the concepts central to designing and understanding experiments, including developing a research question, setting conditions and controls, and balancing specificity with generality. The book then explores in detail a number of types of experimental tasks: free description, rating scales, forced-choice, specialized multiple choice, and real-world tasks as well as physiological studies. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each type and provides examples of that type of experiment from the authors' own work. The book also covers stimulus-related issues, including popular stimulus resources. It concludes with a thorough examination of statistical techniques for analyzing results, including methods specific to individual tasks.
Ethical dimensions of qualitative research are constantly emerging and shifting. This volume identifies relevant ethical principles that can guide novice researchers through the research process with the necessary wisdom and insight to shape a project in sound, meaningful, and thoughtful ways. Well known for their work in this area, the van den Hoonaards outline the domains on which ethics most often impinge. They address key ethical issues arising in different qualitative traditions and contexts. The volume concludes with guidance on how to navigate formal ethics reviews. Many key examples and other resources help the student engage the complicated literature on this topic.
This volume covers the start of James Monroe's tenure as U.S. minister to France, commencing with his appointment in May 1794 and running through March 1796, a year before his return home. Consisting mainly of Monroe's correspondence with the U.S. and French governments, and with fellow American diplomats, the documents in this volume shed much light on the controversy surrounding the Jay Treaty and on Monroe's efforts to secure the release of two famous prisoners-Thomas Paine, author of "Common Sense," and Madame Lafayette, wife of the American Revolutionary War hero. Monroe's correspondents include President George Washington, Secretaries of State Edmund Randolph and Timothy Pickering, and future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. While most of the letters relate to official business, Monroe's correspondence with his uncle, Joseph Jones, and with Madison, often relate to personal matters. Including many letters not found in State Department records, this volume of carefully selected documents will engage the interest of both scholars and interested undergraduates.
Practice Methodologies in Education Research offers a fresh approach to researching practice in education. Addressing a major gap in research methodology scholarship, it highlights how integral practice theory is to the transformational agendas of education research, introducing a theory of activist practice methodologies informed by expansive theories of practice. With contributions from leading education researchers drawn from across the world, the book confronts onto-epistemological dilemmas for doing research that arise from taking practice theory seriously, including the theories of Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze, Haraway, Latour, Taylor, and Vygotsky. A defining feature of the chapters is their activist axiologies and their experimental approach to researching practice in education, in fields as diverse as educational leadership, schooling, higher education, adult and workplace education and training, professional practice, and informal learning. Practice Methodologies in Education is essential reading for education academics and postgraduates engaged in critical research using practice theory.
Organized around a metaphor of an academic journey, D. Jean Clandinin offers published tracings of an unfolding journey over 40 years that, at its outset, appeared to focus only on questions of epistemology. However, the book illuminates how that apparent beginning focus shape-shifted to questions of methodology, ethics, ontology, and subsequently, political concerns. Clandinin shows that, even at the outset, her research wonders were grounded in relational understandings of experience, understandings that were simultaneously ontological, methodological, epistemological and ethical. Jean's work is collaborative, an engagement alongside others and within the contexts in which they and she lived and worked, including those who were participants in the research. She continues to acknowledge that narrative inquiry changes people's ways of being in the world, and those changes have ethical significance. While what she and her colleagues now call relational ethics has always been central, recently her sense of ethics has become more explicitly political. She shows the development of ideas over time, beginning as she entered doctoral work and continuing through 2019 and onward. Jean's work, centered on relational understandings of experience, highlights ethical dimensions, and has come to define narrative understandings for generations of researchers. This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate students, and professional researchers in both educational and healthcare settings. .
This book explores the hospital via organisational ethnography (OE), an approach that involves a mix of fieldwork methods designed to analyse the hospital which also includes participatory observation, qualitative interviews and shadowing. One way to define a hospital is by its high level of formal organisation, resulting in written or digital communication as the main source of communication in patient journals, minutes and medical and quality guidelines. In contrast, in this book, the aspects of the informal organisation will be the focus. In spite of the many formal regulations of healthcare, hospitals are also chaotic organising places where many different groups of people interact in order to negotiate, to practice and to make sense of daily work tasks. The underlying argument is that, in the mundane everyday life of hospitals, frontline workers and their interactions with patients and local managers remain at the core of organising hospitals. The overall purpose of this book is to report stories back from the field of healthcare, demonstrating how people, spaces and work (as examples of events) become important elements of organising hospitals. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in and across healthcare management, organisation studies, ethnography, sociology, qualitative methods, anthropology, service management and cultural studies.
Living at the dawn of a digital twenty-first century, people living in Western societies spend an increasing amount of time interacting with a terminal and interacting with others at the terminal. Because the self emerges out of interaction with others (humans and non-humans), this increasingly pervasive and mandatory interaction with terminals prompts a 'terminal self'-a nexus of social and psychological orientations that are adjusted to the terminal logic. In order to trace the terminal self's profile, the book examines how five unique 'default settings' of the terminal incite particular adjustments in users that transform their perceptions of reality, their experiences of self, and their relations with others. Combining traditional interactionist theory, Goffman's dramaturgy, and the French hypermodern approach, using examples from everyday life and popular culture, the book examines these adjustments, their manifestations, consequences, and resonance with broader trends of a hypermodern society organized by the 'digital apparatus.' Suggesting that these adjustments infantilize users, the author proposes strategies to confront three interrelated risks faced by the terminal self and society. These risks pertain to users' subjectivity and need for recognition, to their declining abilities in face-to-face interactions, and to their dwindling abilities to retain control over terminal technologies. An accessibly written examination of the transformation of the self in the digital age, The Terminal Self will appeal to scholars of sociology, social psychology, and cultural studies with interests in digital cultures, new technologies, social interaction, and conceptions of identity.
This book focuses on the place sand purpose of emotions in the research process, and explores the appropriate boundaries. Designed to explore how to manage the emotional content of research, the text service as a supplemental to qualitative research method courses, and is an excellent reference for the professional as well.
Building Research Design in Education provides insights into the ways in which foundational knowledge of research and research processes can be applied in order to build rigorous research design. If your research is to have meaning and value, this text will enable you to make informed choices and decisions about your design, bearing in mind the complex ideas and theoretical framing needed to underpin it. Drawing on the research expertise of the contributors, this text initially introduces the foundations for differing ideas around epistemology and ontology, then splits into four parts looking at quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research approaches as well as other possibilities for research, including newer or emerging forms of research. Throughout, good research design is shown as taking many shapes with its premise always being rooted in a clear understanding of what is known and what is knowable according to the researcher's world view, in harmony with epistemological and ontological roots. Chapters include learning activities, case examples of international research, essential reading, as well as further advanced reading suggestions, and online resources with additional exemplars and activities. This book is for the advanced student who already has an insight into the basics of research and is wanting to ensure a robust approach to research construction and reflection.
Proposing Empirical Research: A Guide to the Fundamentals provides step-by-step instructions for students who will be writing their first research proposal in the social and behavioral sciences and using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The structure of the book enables students to work independently with confidence while writing the first drafts of their proposals. Each major section is divided into short topics and for each topic, students are asked to complete an exercise that leads them toward the goal of preparing a proposal. Numerous illustrative examples throughout the book make the recommendations for proposal writing come alive. In addition, the 10 model proposals provided at the end of the book illustrate proposal writing and provide material for classroom discussions. New to the Sixth Edition: Updates throughout to reflect research and learning in the digital/online environment, e.g., online surveys, digital organization tools, digital recruitment methods for research, and digital databases, records, and archives. Discussion of qualitative methods. Updated references, model proposals, end of chapter exercises etc. Proposing Empirical Research is ideal for use in research methods classes where students write a proposal as a term project, thesis/dissertation preparation classes, senior research seminars where proposing and conducting research is a culminating undergraduate activity, and any graduate-level seminar in which the instructor wants to incorporate a project that will engage students in critical thinking about the content area.
Networks and other collaborations are central to the public sector's ability to respond to their diverse responsibilities, from international development and regional governance, to policy development and service provision. Great strides have been made toward understanding their formation, governance and management, but more opportunities to explore methodologies and measures is required to ensure they are properly understood. This volume showcases an array of selected research methods and analytics tools currently used by scholars and practitioners in network and collaboration research, as well as emerging styles of empirical investigation. Although it cannot attempt to capture all technical details for each one, this book provides a unique catalogue of compelling methods for researchers and practitioners, which are illustrated extensively with applications in the public and non-profit sector. By bringing together leading and upcoming scholars in network research, the book will be of enormous assistance in guiding students and scholars in public management to study collaboration and networks empirically by demonstrating the core research approaches and tools for investigating and evaluating these crucially important arrangements.
Covering a wide variety of subjects and points of inquiry on women's sexuality, from genital anxieties about pubic hair to constructions of the body in the therapy room, this book offers a ground-breaking examination of women, sex, and madness, drawing from psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. Breanne Fahs argues that women's sexuality embodies a permanent state of tension between cultural impulses of destruction and selfishness contrasted with the fundamental possibilities of subversiveness and joy. Emphasizing cultural, social, and personal narratives about sexuality, Fahs asks readers to imagine sex, bodies, and madness as intertwined, and to see these narratives as fluid, contested, and changing. With topics as diverse as anarchist visions of sexual freedom, sexualized emotion work, lesbian haunted houses, and the insidious workings of capitalism, Fahs conceptualizes sexuality as a force of regressive moral panics and profound inequalities-deployed in both blatant and more subtle ways onto the body-while also finding hope and resistance in the possibilities of sexuality. By integrating clinical case studies, cultural studies, qualitative interviews, and original essays, Fahs offers a provocative new vision for sexuality that fuses together social anxieties and cultural madness through a critical feminist psychological approach. Fahs provides an original and accessible volume for students and academics in psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.
This book offers novel insights into the way in which people talk about politics across various countries. Drawing on focus groups research in nine countries, including 'mature' democracies, post-communist 'new' democracies and post-authoritarian 'new' democracies, it offers comparative reflection on how talk about political activity is shaped by peoples' perceptions of specific opportunities to participate, the issues that concern them and the broader political environment. It thus examines citizens' views of major issues and political grievances in their own words and helps to shed new light on reasons for engagement in political acts, whether through electoral or protest channels, or political disengagement.
Engaging with the wide sociological literature on emotions, this book explores the social representation of emotions, their management and their effects by making reference to creative sources. With a specific focus on literary narrative, including the works of figures such as Dante, Austen, Manzoni, Tolstoy and Kundera, the author draws out the capacity of literary works to describe and represent both the external aspects of social relations and the inner motivations of the involved actors. An interdisciplinary study that combines sociology, narratology, philosophy, historical analysis and literary criticism, Emotions through Literature invites us to re-think the role of emotions in sociological analysis, employing literary narratives to give plausible intellectual responses to the double nature of emotions, their being both individual and social.
How is it possible to understand society and the problems it faces? What sense can be made of the behaviour of markets and government interventions? How can citizens understand the course that their lives take and the opportunities available to them? There has been much debate surrounding what methodology and methods are appropriate for social science research. In a larger sense, there have been differences in quantitative and qualitative approaches and some attempts to combine them. In addition, there have also been questions of the influence of competing values on all social activities versus the need to find an objective understanding. Thus, this aptly named volume strives to develop new methods through the practice of 'social synthesis', describing a methodology that perceives societies and economies as manifestations of highly dynamic, interactive and emergent complex systems. Furthermore, helping us to understand that an analysis of parts alone does not always lead to an informed understanding, Haynes presents to the contemporary researcher an original tool called Dynamic Pattern Synthesis (DPS) - a rigorous method that informs us about how specific complex social and economic systems adapt over time. A timely and significant monograph, Social Synthesis will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, research professionals and academic researchers informed by sociology, economics, politics, public policy, social policy and social psychology.
This accessible, alphabetical guide provides concise insights into a variety of digital research methods, incorporating introductory knowledge with practical application and further research implications. A-Z of Digital Research Methods provides a pathway through the often-confusing digital research landscape, while also addressing theoretical, ethical and legal issues that may accompany each methodology. Dawson outlines 60 chapters on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative digital research methods, including textual, numerical, geographical and audio-visual methods. This book includes reflection questions, useful resources and key texts to encourage readers to fully engage with the methods and build a competent understanding of the benefits, disadvantages and appropriate usages of each method. A-Z of Digital Research Methods is the perfect introduction for any student or researcher interested in digital research methods for social and computer sciences.
While liberal-democratic states like America, Britain and Australia claim to value freedom of expression and the right to dissent, they have always actually criminalized dissent. This disposition has worsened since 9/11 and the 2008 Great Recession. This ground-breaking study shows that just as dissent involves far more than protest marches, so too liberal-democratic states have expanded the criminalization of dissent. Drawing on political and social theorists like Arendt, Bourdieu and Isin, the book offers a new way of thinking about politics, dissent and its criminalization relationally. Using case studies like the Occupy movement, selective refusal by Israeli soldiers, urban squatters, democratic education and violence by anti-Apartheid activists, the book highlights the many forms dissent takes along with the many ways liberal-democratic states criminalize it. The book highlights the mix of fear and delusion in play when states privilege security to protect an imagined 'political order' from difference and disagreement. The book makes a major contribution to political theory, legal studies and sociology. Linking legal, political and normative studies in new ways, Watts shows that ultimately liberal-democracies rely more on sovereignty and the capacity for coercion and declarations of legal 'states of exception' than on liberal-democratic principles. In a time marked by a deepening crisis of democracy, the book argues dissent is increasingly valuable.
During the early development and throughout the short history of green/conservation criminology, limited attention has been directed toward quantitative analyses of relevant environmental crime, law and justice concerns. While recognizing the importance of establishing a theory and terminology in the early stages of development, this book redresses this imbalance. The work features contributions that undertake empirical quantitative studies of green/conservation crime and justice issues by both conservation and green criminologists. The collection highlights the shared concerns of these groups within important forms of ecological crime and victimization, and illustrates the ways in which these approaches can be undertaken quantitatively. It includes quantitative conservation/green criminological studies that represent the work of both well-established scholars in these fields, along with studies by scholars whose works are less well-known and who are also contributing to shaping this area of research. The book presents a valuable contribution to the areas of Green and Conservation Criminology. It will appeal to academics and students working in these areas.
An ethnographic study of anti-nuclear movement groups that both challenges assumptions of traditional social movement studies of strategic action and shows what can be gained through microanalysis of talk in meetings, this book advances social movement studies methodologically and theoretically through the application of a new method of sequential analysis. Drawing on both conversation analysis and objective hermeneutics, it builds on microanalysis to scale up from sequences of talk to meetings, from meetings to groups, and from groups to the anti-nuclear movement, thus addressing a common criticism of analyses of face-to-face interactions: that they fail to demonstrate how their findings are relevant for questions beyond the interaction itself and thus for a broader sociological audience. A demonstration of the ways in which strategic deliberations by activists are subject to dynamics of face-to-face interaction, Talking Collective Action shows how groups adopt different styles of planning to engage with their environment and affect the groups' development over time. As such, it will appeal to social scientists with interests in social movements, organizations and conversation analysis.
The frequency with which people move home has important implications for national economic performance and the well-being of individuals and families. Much contemporary social and migration theory posits that the world is becoming more mobile, leading to the recent 'mobilities turn' within the social sciences. Yet, there is mounting evidence to suggest that this may not be true of all types of mobility, nor apply equally to all geographical contexts. For example, it is now clear that internal migration rates have been falling in the USA since at least the 1980s. To what extent might this trend be true of other developed countries? Drawing on detailed empirical literature, Internal Migration in the Developed World examines the long-term trends in internal migration in a variety of more advanced countries to explore the factors that underpin these changes. Using case studies of the USA, UK, Australia, Japan, Sweden, Germany and Italy, this pioneering book presents a critical assessment of the extent to which global structural forces, as opposed to national context, influence internal migration in the Global North. Internal Migration in the Developed World fills the void in this neglected aspect of migration studies and will appeal to a wide disciplinary audience of researchers and students working in Geography, Migration Studies, Population Studies and Development Studies.
Serving as a touchstone for a much-needed research program on social scales, this volume challenges disciplinary boundaries and brings into focus a paradoxical state of affairs in contemporary thought: the domain of local-global interactions has not yet been identified as an object of analysis in its own right, despite engaging a large, multi-disciplinary research community with strong potential for cross-fertilization. Bringing together internationally renowned as well as emerging scholars, this book presents concrete case studies framed by theoretical concern with the issue of scale. It demonstrates that a diverse array of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives can productively converge on a common set of problems related to social, temporal and spatial scales and contemporary globalization. Local Politics, Global Impacts will stimulate empirical and theoretical research that focuses on understanding how political concepts, practices, and instruments translate across scales, and contribute to the emergence of a self-aware community of scholars and practitioners focusing explicitly on modelling the dynamics of local-regional-global interactions. |
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