The book showcases a selection of peer-reviewed papers, the preliminary versions of which were presented at a conference held 11-13 June 2011 in Bologna and organized jointly by the Italian Statistical Society (SIS), the Institute national Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and the Bank of Italy. The theme of the conference was "Statistics in the 150 years of the Unification of Italy."

The celebration of the anniversary of Italian unification provided the opportunity to examine and discuss the methodological aspects and applications from a historical perspective and both from a national and international point of view. The critical discussion on the issues of the past has made it possible to focus on recent advances, considering the studies of socio-economic and demographic changes in European countries. "

Data Science in Education Using R is the go-to reference for learning data science in the education field. The book answers questions like: What does a data scientist in education do? How do I get started learning R, the popular open-source statistical programming language? And what does a data analysis project in education look like? If you're just getting started with R in an education job, this is the book you'll want with you. This book gets you started with R by teaching the building blocks of programming that you'll use many times in your career. The book takes a "learn by doing" approach and offers eight analysis walkthroughs that show you a data analysis from start to finish, complete with code for you to practice with. The book finishes with how to get involved in the data science community and how to integrate data science in your education job. This book will be an essential resource for education professionals and researchers looking to increase their data analysis skills as part of their professional and academic development.

Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives is a landmark volume providing students, university lecturers, and practitioners with a comprehensive and structured guide to the major topics and trends of research on counter-narratives. The concept of counter-narratives covers resistance and opposition as told and framed by individuals and social groups. Counter-narratives are stories impacting on social settings that stand opposed to (perceived) dominant and powerful master-narratives. In sum, the contributions in this handbook survey how counter-narratives unfold power to shape and change various fields. Fields investigated in this handbook are organizations and professional settings, issues of education, struggles and concepts of identity and belonging, the political field, as well as literature and ideology. The handbook is framed by a comprehensive introduction as well as a summarizing chapter providing an outlook on future research avenues. Its direct and clear appeal will support university learning and prompt both students and researchers to further investigate the arena of narrative research.

1. The author is forefront of the application of IRT (classic and innovative methodologies). 2. Covers all IRT in broad brushstrokes in an accessible manner. 3. Includes an abundance of original and secondary sources to facilitate learning, including further reading, simulated datasets, and graphics.

Organizational diversity has become a topic of interest for practitioners and academics alike. This book explores how diversity in organizations is, and can be researched, providing readers with insights into the potential research designs for studies in contemporary organizations. This includes paying attention to methods but also to the role of the researcher and research bodies in the field, their potential as activists as well as to the theoretical question of standpoints in researching organizational diversity. Chapters also consider the diversity of research participants, inclusive research, and intersectionality. All contributors are experts in diversity research, and in their contributions, they reflect upon the appropriate methods for the specific type of diversity research they conduct, noting strengths and weaknesses and illustrating their arguments with practical examples from their work. This handbook will be of great value to academics, students, researchers, practitioners, and professionals with an interest in broadening their understanding of how to research organizational diversity in contemporary organizations or seeking to develop their awareness of diversity when researching management and organization, more generally.

1. The author is forefront of the application of IRT (classic and innovative methodologies). 2. Covers all IRT in broad brushstrokes in an accessible manner. 3. Includes an abundance of original and secondary sources to facilitate learning, including further reading, simulated datasets, and graphics.

This important book examines the motives that drive family historians and explores whether those who research their ancestral pedigrees have distinct personalities, demographics or family characteristics. It describes genealogists' experiences as they chart their family trees including their insights, dilemmas and the fascinating, sometimes disturbing and often surprising, outcomes of their searches. Drawing on theory and research from psychology and other humanities disciplines, as well as from the authors' extensive survey data collected from over 800 amateur genealogists, the authors present the experiences of family historians, including personal insights, relationship changes, mental health benefits and ethical dilemmas. The book emphasises the motivation behind this exploration, including the need to acknowledge and tell ancestral stories, the spiritual and health-related aspects of genealogical research, the addictiveness of the detective work, the lifelong learning opportunities and the passionate desire to find lost relatives. With its focus on the role of family history in shaping personal identity and contemporary culture, this is fascinating reading for anyone studying genealogy and family history, professional genealogists and those researching their own history.

This important book examines the motives that drive family historians and explores whether those who research their ancestral pedigrees have distinct personalities, demographics or family characteristics. It describes genealogists' experiences as they chart their family trees including their insights, dilemmas and the fascinating, sometimes disturbing and often surprising, outcomes of their searches. Drawing on theory and research from psychology and other humanities disciplines, as well as from the authors' extensive survey data collected from over 800 amateur genealogists, the authors present the experiences of family historians, including personal insights, relationship changes, mental health benefits and ethical dilemmas. The book emphasises the motivation behind this exploration, including the need to acknowledge and tell ancestral stories, the spiritual and health-related aspects of genealogical research, the addictiveness of the detective work, the lifelong learning opportunities and the passionate desire to find lost relatives. With its focus on the role of family history in shaping personal identity and contemporary culture, this is fascinating reading for anyone studying genealogy and family history, professional genealogists and those researching their own history.

Discussions of street culture exist in a variety of academic disciplines, yet a handbook that brings together the diversity of scholarship on this subject has yet to be produced. The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture integrates and reviews current scholarship regarding the history, types, and contexts of the concept of street culture. It is comprehensive and international in its treatment of the subject of street culture. Street culture includes many subtypes, situations, locations, and participants, and these are explored in the various chapters included in this book. Street culture varies based on numerous factors including capitalism, market societies, policing, ethnicity, and race but also advances in technology. The book is divided into four major sections: Actors and street culture, Activities connected to street culture, The centrality of crime to street culture, and Representations of street culture. Contributors are well respected and recognized international scholars in their fields. They draw upon contemporary scholarship produced in the social sciences, arts, and humanities in order to communicate their understanding of street culture. The book provides a comprehensive and accessible approach to the subject of street culture through the lens of an inter- and/or multidisciplinary perspective. It is also intersectional in its approach and consideration of the subject and phenomenon of street culture.

Classic Writings for a Phenomenology of Practice features examples of newly translated classic phenomenological texts that have been largely forgotten or misunderstood. The writings are unique in that they speak to the practice of doing phenomenological research for the purpose of gaining insights and better understandings regarding aspects of professional practice and ordinary life phenomena and events. Phenomenology does not have to be impenetrable philosophy, dealing with tedious technical issues. Instead, phenomenology may offer relevance, value, and enduring allure to readers and researchers who are engaged with the quotidian life experiences and events of students, patients, clients, friends, and other individuals. This phenomenological approach aims to stay as close as possible to the ordinary events of everyday life: seeing the first smile of a child, feeling compulsive, being humorous, having a conversation, experiencing childhood secrecy, encountering new things-topics that span a manifold of life experiences. In this collection of classic phenomenological writings, each author is thoughtfully introduced, and each text is followed by a conversational descant: a reflection on the phenomenological reflection. The presentation of these classic writings and their reflections aims to show us what it means to do phenomenology directly on the phenomena that we live-thus asking us to be attentive to the fascinating varieties and subtleties of primal lived experiences and consciousness in all its remarkable complexities. This book is relevant for scholars and students who are interested in human science research and the origins and practices of the phenomenological method.

Action Research for Professional Selling by Peter McDonnell and Jean McNiff is for people working, or hoping to work in sales, who wish to improve their capacity for selling, and who may be involved in providing or participating in a structured sales training programme. It provides a basis for professional selling that connects the sales process to different philosophical models for understanding human interactions and contains much practical advice for selling in a tough economic environment. Action research is used across the professions as a powerful methodology for improving performance and outcomes and will enable sales practitioners to generate their practical theories of selling. The book answers calls for evidence-based practice in sales education, placing special emphasis on the strength of a values-based approach over the outmoded manipulative models of the past (many of which are still in evidence). It is essential to develop your understanding of what you are doing, and be able to explain it, and the book shows you how to do this through researching your practice in action. It focuses seriously on selling as a field of research offering an innovative, practical approach to selling, underpinned by strong theoretical and philosophical frameworks.

Introducing the reader to grounded methodology and its ethical approach, this book explores the theory behind the method as well as how to use it to develop and evaluate learning and education projects. Grounded methodology is designed to challenge traditional educational research methodologies, and in doing so questions the notion of the need for highly formal research in institutional settings. In this respect, it is also a simple way of planning an educational project that needs an evaluative element. Covering data collection techniques used in the course of education research such as observations, interviews, course development, participant diaries and online data collection, this book investigates the practical realities of researching in education contexts and the differences in educational, national and cultural backgrounds. It is ideal reading for students and academics looking to update and increase their knowledge on grounded methodology, especially students who are researchers in final-year undergraduate or post-graduate level programs, or instructors planning to teach grounded theory or grounded methodology to their own emerging research students.

Austerity is perhaps the major challenge of our times, given the speed at which it arrived and the consequences of its impact upon society. The global financial crash and economic downturn was the catalyst for change and, against a backdrop of advice from experts adverse to Keynesian economics, the ideology of austerity grew and became the dominant thinking to steer economies out of recession. This comprehensive volume draws upon both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to provide a varied and contextually rich insight into sport, policy, and politics in an era of austerity. The authors cover a wide range of issues in a variety of organisational contexts and geographies, including sports participation across different socio-demographic groups; the impact of austerity on the provision of community sports; disability sport; public management of sport facilities; the performance of public sport facilities with respect to access, finance, utilisation, and customer satisfaction; the potential impact of austerity on sport for development; elite sport; and social inclusion and poverty. This book makes a significant contribution to the current academic debate, while raising important considerations for policymakers and managers. It was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics.

For over a century, creativity has unfolded as a valuable field of knowledge. Emerging from disciplines like psychology, management and education, the field of creativity is making strides in others including the arts and engineering. Research and education in this field helped it establish an identity as evidenced by a growing number of courses and specialised journals. However, this progress has come with a price. In a domain like management, institutionalisation of creativity in learning, research and practice has left creativity subordinated to concerns with standardisation, employability and economic growth. Values like personal fulfilment, uncertainty, improvement and connectedness which could characterise systemic views on creativity need to be rescued to promote more and inclusive dialogue between creativity stakeholders. The author aims to recover the importance of creativity as a systemic phenomenon and explores how applied systems thinking, or AST, can further support creativity. This demonstrates how creative efforts could be directed to improve quality of life for individuals as well as their environments. The book uses the systems idea as an enquiring device to bring together different actors to promote refl ection and action about creative possibilities. The chapters offer conceptualisations, applications and refl ections of systems ideas to help readers make sense of the field of creativity in academia and elsewhere. Complemented by the author's own personal, conceptual and practical journey, the insights of the book will act as a vital toolkit for management researchers, career-driven students, practitioners and all creators to define and pursue creative ideas and thrive through their journeys to benefit themselves, other people and organisations.

Health geographers are increasingly turning to a diverse range of interpretative methodologies to explore the complexities of health, illness, space and place to gain more comprehensive understandings of well-being and broader social models of health and health care. Drawing upon postmodernism, many health geographers are concerned with issues of representation, the body and health care policy. Also related to an emphasis on the body is the growing literature in feminist health geography that investigates the metaphorical, physical and emotional challenges of the body and disease. Reflecting these interests, the chapters in this book set out the host of creative qualitative methods being used to explore the psychosocial experiences of individuals more directly, using such traditional methods as in-depth interviews and group discussions, participant observation, diaries and discourse analysis, but also more novel techniques such as 'go-along interviews', reflexive writing, illustrations, and photographic techniques. There are several areas of qualitative research unique to geographers which figure prominently in this volume including: health and place, comparative case study analysis, and qualitative approaches to the use of geographic information systems (GIS). This collection brings together a wide range of empirical concerns related to questions of health and shines a light on the diversity of qualitative methods in practice. Illustrating how qualitative methodologies are used in diverse health contexts this book fills an important niche for health geographers but will have wide appeal to health and geographic researchers.

Disability studies has engaged with discourse analysis in key works both from the UK and the USA. While the perspectives and analyses of discourse analysis have proved well suited for exploring disability, however, its methods have not been sufficiently developed in a disability studies context. Conversely, discourse analysts have traditionally been concerned with social issues and fields in which asymmetric power relations, marginalization, and discrimination play a central role, e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, all of which share many analytical features with disability. But although efforts have been made to integrate disability into the discourse analysis and conversation analysis canon, the link between the two fields needs to be strengthened. This ground-breaking volume contributes to this link by thoroughly applying the analytical vocabulary of discourse analysis to issues that are central to the field of disability studies. It strengthens disability studies by supplying case studies of representations and constructions of disability and disabled people in discourse, theorizes the role played by language in the social construction of disability, and makes disability a more salient topic for discourse analysts.

In this book, Hackett introduces the traditional usage of the mapping sentence within quantitative research, reviews its philosophical underpinnings, and proposes the "declarative mapping sentence" as an instrument and approach to qualitative scholarship. With a helpful glossary and a range of illustrative tables, Hackett takes the reader through a straightforward introduction to mapping sentences and their construction, before discussing declarative mapping sentences and possible future research directions. This innovative direction for social research provides a flexible structure for research domain, and it allows qualitative research results to be uniformly sorted. Declarative Mapping Sentences in Qualitative Research will be essential reading for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of qualitative psychology and psychological methods, as well as philosophical psychology and social science research methods.

Departing from the sociological dual process model that divides thoughts into automatic and unconscious, or deliberate and conscious occurrences, this book draws on empirical cases to demonstrate the existence of "automatic deliberation." Through research into the ways in which people address difficult subjects, such as death and dying, pedophilia, and career decision-making, the author sheds light on a mode of thinking which is both habitual and effortful, displaying a combination of habituated understandings and conscious deliberation. Advancing a blended view of cognition by which individuals draw on schemas and frames to think through complex topics, this volume will appeal to sociologists and psychologists with interests in cognition and the ways in which we make decisions.

In today's world of modern research methods, the irony is that even though more materials are readily available now than ever before, this proliferation of sources has actually made the process more difficult for the novice researcher. In addition, today's professors expect high-quality sources to be used in students' undergraduate research precisely because so much information is available; however, without instruction, many students are not even aware of the standard history sources that they should be using routinely for history research projects. Finding History is a practical and modern guide to research for history projects, helping to sort through the available resources and technology for students, scholars, and librarians. Finding History includes practical, step-by-step instructions for discovering historical evidence using library catalogs, databases, and websites. It simplifies and clarifies the research process so that students new to the experience may locate appropriate research material with the same skill as seasoned historians. This book addresses the information literacy skills defined by the American Library Association and the American Historical Association, which include *recognizing the need for scholarly historical information; *defining and identifying the need for primary, secondary, and tertiary sources; *knowing what finding tools are available to help locate historical sources; *using history research tools efficiently and effectively; *learning research vocabulary as well as the vocabulary of the historical profession; *making evaluative judgments about the scholarly value of materials once they are located; *physically acquiring research materials; *using research material effectively to support a thesis or argument; and *using research material ethically and responsibly. Including search samples and tables, Finding History is a valuable resource for anyone wanting to ensure their research draws from the best available sources and those needing instruction in locating, obtaining, evaluating, and using scholarly sources efficiently, directly, and ethically.

Dialogues on Agential Realism is built up around dialogues with key scholars in the field: Magdalena Gorska, Astrid Schrader, Elizabeth de Freitas, Ericka Johnson and Karen Barad. The book investigates agential realist-inspired research practices and provides illustrations of what response-able knowledge production may involve. Based on thorough readings of the scholars' work, careful dialogues concerning the challenges, messiness, thrill and inventiveness of research processes are brought to the fore. The dialogues with Gorska, Schrader, de Freitas and Johnson were based on specific research projects, which drew inspiration from agential realist theory, in combination with the ideas of other thinkers. The dialogue with Barad focuses on the continuous development of agential realism. In addition, the book consists of a chapter that introduces agential realism and a closing chapter focusing on some of the main insights agential realism has to offer in relation research practices. The book offers new entry points to agential realism and the conduct of research. It may vitalize methodological prudence and creativity and spark new and previously unimagined ways of thinking and doing research. As such, it will be an essential resource to both newcomers and scholars and students who are already familiar with the theory of agential realism.

Dialogues on Agential Realism is built up around dialogues with key scholars in the field: Magdalena Gorska, Astrid Schrader, Elizabeth de Freitas, Ericka Johnson and Karen Barad. The book investigates agential realist-inspired research practices and provides illustrations of what response-able knowledge production may involve. Based on thorough readings of the scholars' work, careful dialogues concerning the challenges, messiness, thrill and inventiveness of research processes are brought to the fore. The dialogues with Gorska, Schrader, de Freitas and Johnson were based on specific research projects, which drew inspiration from agential realist theory, in combination with the ideas of other thinkers. The dialogue with Barad focuses on the continuous development of agential realism. In addition, the book consists of a chapter that introduces agential realism and a closing chapter focusing on some of the main insights agential realism has to offer in relation research practices. The book offers new entry points to agential realism and the conduct of research. It may vitalize methodological prudence and creativity and spark new and previously unimagined ways of thinking and doing research. As such, it will be an essential resource to both newcomers and scholars and students who are already familiar with the theory of agential realism.

This book represents a primer on artistic research, presenting diverse perspectives, strategies, methodologies, and concrete examples of research projects situated at the crossroads of art and academia. Exposing international work of significant research projects from Europe, Asia, Australia, South- and North America, it provides a multidisciplinary overview on different discourses and practices, exploring cutting-edge questions coming from the burgeoning field of artistic research. The first part includes chapters on artistic research and diverse artistic fields, addressing a common thread of questions and problematics. The second part provides insights into six internationally relevant artistic research projects. The comprehensive editors' introduction offers a much-needed and extensive overview practice-based artistic research in general. Ideal for graduate students across Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Art, Music, Performance Studies and more, The book is enhanced by a range of multimedia components (images, videos, sounds).

This book addresses the growing demand for collaborative and reflexive scholarly engagement in the Arctic directed at providing relevant insights to tackle local challenges of arctic communities. It examines how arctic research can come to matter in new ways by combining methods and engagement in the field of inquiry in new and meaningful ways. Research informs decisions affecting the futures of arctic communities. Due to its ability to include local concerns and practices, collaborative research could play a greater role in this process. By way of example of how to bring new voices to the fore in research, this edited collection presents experiences of researchers active in collaborative arctic research. It draws multidisciplinary perspectives from a broad range of academics in the fields such as law and medicine over tourism and business studies, planning and development, cultural studies, ethnology and anthropology. It also shares personal experiences of working in Greenland and with Greenlanders, whether communities, businesses and entrepreneurs, public officials and planners, patients or students. Offering useful insights into the current problems of Greenland representative of the arctic region, this book will be beneficial for researchers and scientists involved in arctic research.

This book explores the weak explanatory and predictive power of theories across disciplines, explains reasons for limited expertise after centuries of scientific effort, and sets forth strategies to accelerate knowledge and manage a future we can only dimly comprehend. Gaps in knowledge arose because common, natural and artificial phenomena are fundamentally hard to understand, and in expertise persists because research is unproductive. This book argues that weak research comes with huge opportunity cost because it stymies optimum decision making by government, corporations and individuals. Research needs restructuring which must come from governments' top down requirement that funding bodies foster applied research with real-world impact, and that universities influence scientific publishers to improve their publications' integrity. This book seeks to catalyse extinction events for theories in most disciplines, which would clear a path for solving multiple crises in research. The author cautions that this process would be disruptive, unpopular and painful.

This book draws on both traditional and emerging fields of study to consider consider what a grounded definition of quantitative and qualitative research in the Digital Humanities (DH) might mean; which areas DH can fruitfully draw on in order to foster and develop that understanding; where we can see those methods applied; and what the future directions of research methods in Digital Humanities might look like. Schuster and Dunn map a wide-ranging DH research methodology by drawing on both 'traditional' fields of DH study such as text, historical sources, museums and manuscripts, and innovative areas in research production, such as knowledge and technology, digital culture and society and history of network technologies. Featuring global contributions from scholars in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and Australia, this book draws together a range of disciplinary perspectives to explore the exciting developments offered by this fast-evolving field. Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities is essential reading for anyone who teaches, researches or studies Digital Humanities or related subjects.