This book aims to stimulate debate in the growing and highly controversial area of measuring scholarly work. The authors examine key aspects of this topic through the lens of the latest theoretical developments in service science and associated fields. It includes chapters explaining the theoretical developments and methodological aspects of measuring the quality of academic teaching and research, while other chapters provide a review and analysis of various types of scholarly work metrics and processes with examples from several countries, cultures, and educational systems. The current growing concern about higher education (HE) quality has prompted institutions to divide university teachers' work into different areas and to design methods aimed at measuring the productivity of these areas. It is widely accepted that the need to evaluate HE service quality is a relevant issue for any society. However, the authors argue that most of the current practices used in the pursuit of this objective are jeopardizing the future of the university as a place of knowledge generation, science evolution and professional education.

A non-calculus based introduction for students studying statistics, business, engineering, health sciences, social sciences, and education. It presents a thorough coverage of statistical techniques and includes numerous examples largely drawn from actual research studies. Little mathematical background is required and explanations of important concepts are based on providing intuition using illustrative figures and numerical examples. The first part shows how statistical methods are used in diverse fields in answering important questions, while part two covers descriptive statistics and considers the organisation and summarisation of data. Parts three to five cover probability, statistical inference, and more advanced statistical techniques.

This book introduces the fundamentals of research methods and how they apply to the discipline of urban and regional planning. Written at a level appropriate for upper-level undergraduate and beginning master's level students, the text fills a gap in the literature for textbooks on urban planning. Additionally, the book can be used as a reference for planning practitioners and researchers when analyzing quantitative and qualitative data in urban and regional planning and related fields. The volume does not assume advanced knowledge of mathematical formulas. Rather, it begins with the essentials of research methods, such as the identification of the research problems in planning, the literature review, data collection and presentation, descriptive data analysis, and report of findings. Its discipline-specific topics include field research methods, qualitative data analysis, economic and demographic analysis, evaluation research, and methods in sub-disciplines such as land use planning, transportation planning, environmental planning, and housing analysis. Designed with instruction in mind, this book features downloadable materials, including learning outcomes, chapter highlights, chapter review questions, datasets, and certain Excel models. Students will be able to download review questions to enhance the learning process and datasets to practice methods.

Approaching qualitative research for the first time and unsure how to get started? This book captures what you need to know to jump into effective qualitative or mixed methods research. The book gets you up to speed on the specifics of qualitative research, while showing how it complements quantitative research and how to draw on and hone your existing skills to conduct impactful research. It covers the whole research process, from explaining what theories are for and planning your research design, through gathering and working with your data, to developing good practice in research reporting and dissemination. The book also: * Showcases the value of qualitative research, helping you understand its relevance, credibility and validity. * Grapples with how to decolonise your approach, do research in an ethical and inclusive way, and debias your thinking. * Challenges you to rethink how you conduct research and choose the most appropriate methods for your project. Giving you a fuller understanding of methods and methodologies to benefit your work regardless of the approach you choose, this book encourages you to discover the joy of qualitative research.

What is educational research? What are its current approaches, methods and methodologies? How should existing literature be reviewed and evaluated critically? What are the key philosophical debates in and on educational research? How should research in education be conducted and how should it be presented? And what is the value of such research?With this extensively revised edition of a much-admired and engaging guide, Jerry Wellington provides clear and constructive answers to these questions, complete with detailed advice on methods such as interviewing, surveys, documentary research and the use of focus groups. Thoroughly overhauled and updated, this edition includes new case studies, helpful 'key theories' and 'key theorist' boxes, and a range of activities or 'points to ponder' to foster engagement with current issues. Retaining the clarity and concision of the previous edition, and its approachable and practical style, Jerry Wellington provides an invaluable text for all those engaged in educational research.

This study explores the flow of information within and among academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities through analyses of the patterns of scholarly book reviewing. An elite sample of scholarly monographs published by university presses between 1971 and 1990 was used.

Beginning with Derek de Solla Price, the measurement of communication within the disciplines of science has been ongoing. In the present book that field of inquiry is summarized and provides a basis for examining the flow of information in the social sciences and humanities.

This supplemental volume is divided into parts covering the broad view of international human resources management, HRM issues and practices in Europe and in other important regions, and international HRM and expatriates.

With cross-cultural perspectives from contributors in nine countries, this book showcases much-needed research on current issues around migration and social work in Europe. Focusing on the reception, experiences and integration of refugees and asylum seekers, the chapters also consider the impact of recent EU policies on borders and integration. With racism on the rise in some European societies, the book foregrounds international social work values as a common framework to face discriminatory practice at macro and micro levels. Featuring recommendations for inclusive practice that 'opens doors', this book features the voices of migrants and the practitioners aiding their inclusion in new societies.

This book highlights the existence of a diversity of methods in science, in general, in groups of sciences (natural, social or the artificial), and in individual sciences. This methodological variety is open to a number of consequences, such as the differences in the research according to levels of reality (micro, meso and macro), which leads to multi-scale modelling and to questioning "fundamental" parts in the sciences, understood as the necessary support for the whole discipline. In addition, this volume acknowledges the need to assess the efficacy of procedures and methods of scientific activity in engendering high quality results in research made; the relevance of contextual factors for methodology of science; the existence of a plurality of stratagems when doing research in empirical sciences (natural, social and of the artificial); and the need for an ethical component while developing scientific methods, because values should have a role in scientific research. The book is of interest to a broad audience of philosophers, academics in various fields, graduate students and research centers interested in methodology of science.

Contemporary Studies in Sociology

Showcases practical approaches to doing oral history work in qualitative educational research Considers how to best do both methodology and output of oral history research Written in the editors' typical accessible style with a range of contributing voices, making it particularly suitable for early career researchers

This book acts as an introductory guide to understanding and using the mapping sentence as a tool in social science and humanities research. The book fills the need for a concise text that simply instructs how and when to use a mapping sentence and provides practical examples. Mapping sentences are a major research component and tool of facet theory. The book begins by covering the background to mapping sentence, including the philosophy and theory underpinning it. The following chapter discuss what mapping sentence is, what different kinds of mapping sentences exist, and knowing when and which to use it in a given situation. The book then moves into describing how to write a mapping sentence and how to analyse the information gained from mapping sentence research. It ends with a consideration of the future developments of mapping sentences and their applications across the social sciences and humanities, including in particular psychology, marketing, behavioural biology, art and health.

This book offers an innovative perspective on the intersection of politics, education, and social problems. It considers how we can create social change by talking about politics and social problems in more open, direct, and inclusive ways in educational spaces. Drawing on data from a range of settings, this book closely examines how and when complicated conversations take place in classrooms, schools, and communities. The book tackles a series of hot-button, timely issues, including race, religion, politics, and gender, and turns a critical eye to schools and the communities in which they are situated; the conversations adults have-and pointedly ignore-with one another; and, perhaps most critically, the politics that shape our society.

This book provides an overview of the developments in the area of Bayesian evaluation of informative hypotheses that took place since the publication of the ?rst paper on this topic in 2001 [Hoijtink, H. Con?rmatory latent class analysis, model selection using Bayes factors and (pseudo) likelihood ratio statistics. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 36, 563-588]. The current state of a?airs was presented and discussed by the authors of this book during a workshop in Utrecht in June 2007. Here we would like to thank all authors for their participation, ideas, and contributions. We would also like to thank Sophie van der Zee for her editorial e?orts during the construction of this book. Another word of thanks is due to John Kimmel of Springer for his con?dence in the editors and authors. Finally, we would like to thank the Netherlands Organization for Scienti?c Research (NWO) whose VICI grant (453-05-002) awarded to the ?rst author enabled the organization of the workshop, the writing of this book, and continuation of the research with respect to Bayesian evaluation of informative hypotheses.

For centuries, Muslim countries and Europe have engaged one another through theological dialogues, diplomatic missions, political rivalries, and power struggles. In the last thirty years, due in large part to globalization and migration from Islamic countries to the West, what was previously an engagement across national and cultural boundaries has increasingly become an internalized encounter within Europe itself. Questions of the Hijab in schools, freedom of expression in the wake of the Danish Cartoon crisis, and the role of Shari'a have come to the forefront of contemporary European discourse.
The Oxford Handbook of European Islam is the first collection to present a comprehensive approach to the multiple and changing ways Islam has been studied across European countries. Parts one to three address the state of knowledge of Islam and Muslims within a selection of European countries, while presenting a critical view of the most up-to-date data specific to each country. These chapters analyze the immigration cycles and policies related to the presence of Muslims, tackling issues such as discrimination, post-colonial identity, adaptation, and assimilation. The thematic chapters, in parts four and five, examine secularism, radicalization, Shari'a, Hijab, and Islamophobia with the goal of synthesizing different national discussion into a more comparative theoretical framework. The Handbook attempts to balance cutting edge assessment with the knowledge that the content itself will eventually be superseded by events. Featuring eighteen newly-commissioned essays by noted scholars in the field, this volume will provide an excellent resource for students and scholars interested in European Studies, immigration, Islamic studies, and the sociology of religion.

COVID-19 has once again illuminated the ways in which health risks and negative health outcomes are tied to economic and social inequalities. Disabled people rank among those most disadvantaged in terms of education, income, and social inclusion and this exacerbated their risk of negative pandemic-related outcomes. From the start, it was clear that disabled people would be disproportionately affected by the pandemic and this solidified as the pandemic unfolded. Disability in the Time of Pandemic is a timely exploration of emerging research into the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for people with disabilities in their varied communities and across their complex identities. Using the insights, perspectives, and methods of a variety of disciplines including Anthropology, Disability Studies, Education, Physical and Rehabilitation Therapies, Public Health, Psychology, Sociology, and Women's and Gender Studies, authors explore the initial and ongoing effects of the global pandemic on people with disabilities in Canada, India, Poland, and the United States. The Research in Social Science and Disability series is essential reading for researchers and students across the social sciences interested in disability, social movements, activism, and identity.

Women are more religious than men. Despite being excluded from leadership positions, in almost every culture and religious tradition, women are more likely than men to pray, to worship, and to claim that their faith is important to them. Women also dominate the world of 'New Age' spirituality and are far more superstitious than men. This book reviews the now sizeable body of social research to consider if the gender gap in religion is indeed universal. Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce extensively critique competing explanations of the differences found. They conclude that the gender gap is not the result of biology but is rather the consequence of important social differences over-lapping and reinforcing each other. Responsibility for managing birth, child-rearing and death, for example, and attitudes to the body, illness and health, each play a part. In the West, the gender gap is exaggerated because the social changes that undermined the plausibility of religion bore most heavily on men first. Where the lives of men and women become more similar, and where religious indifference grows, the gender gap gradually disappears. Written in an accessible style whilst drawing some robust conclusions, the book's main purpose is to serve as a state-of-the-art review for those interested in one of the largest differences between male and female behaviour.

This book seeks to introduce students to the challenges of 'real life' social research through a detailed consideration of eight recent empirical studies. Designed to complement existing introductory methods texts, it emphasises the importance of context in understanding and interpreting both the practice and 'product' of empirical research. The book focuses on research from eight key sub-areas of sociology, making it a useful secondary text for introductory courses on contemporary British society.

Imagination and Arts-Based Practices for Integration in Research explores the philosophical assumptions, defining concepts, and methodological issues related to the introduction of intentional imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices into some or all phases of investigation, and data integration of particular research approaches. Although typically central to mixed, multi-method, and arts-based research, the practice of integrating diverse forms of data might be applied to other research traditions. The integration of data diversity represents a deviation from traditional scientific thinking demanding a dramatic paradigm shift inclusive of multi-dimensional, nondiscursive, aesthetic, rhizomatic, and imaginative mental processes. In this book, imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices are described and illustrated as approaches to investigating, revealing, and understanding the elusive yet essential meanings hidden in the crevices, shadows, and liminal spaces in between diverse data sets leading to integration, illumination, and synthesis. The book will appeal to arts-based, mixed methods, and adventurous researchers. It walks the reader through the revisionist philosophical assumptions and offers aligned methodological suggestions to the induction of imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices into research.

This textbook and guide focuses on methodologies for bias analysis in epidemiology and public health, not only providing updates to the first edition but also further developing methods and adding new advanced methods. As computational power available to analysts has improved and epidemiologic problems have become more advanced, missing data, Bayes, and empirical methods have become more commonly used. This new edition features updated examples throughout and adds coverage addressing: Measurement error pertaining to continuous and polytomous variables Methods surrounding person-time (rate) data Bias analysis using missing data, empirical (likelihood), and Bayes methods A unique feature of this revision is its section on best practices for implementing, presenting, and interpreting bias analyses. Pedagogically, the text guides students and professionals through the planning stages of bias analysis, including the design of validation studies and the collection of validity data from other sources. Three chapters present methods for corrections to address selection bias, uncontrolled confounding, and measurement errors, and subsequent sections extend these methods to probabilistic bias analysis, missing data methods, likelihood-based approaches, Bayesian methods, and best practices.

Social movement studies have grown enormously in the last few decades, spreading from sociology and political science to other fields of knowledge, as varied as geography, history, anthropology, psychology, economics, law and others. With the growing interest in the field, there has been also an increasing need for methodological guidance for empirical research. This volume addresses this need by introducing the main methods of data collection and data analysis as they have been used in past research on social movements. Unlike other volumes, the book offers a practical, how-to approach and not simply a review of the methodological literature. Each author writes on a method they are very familiar with, having used it extensively in their own work. And each chapter presents specific discussions on every stage of research: from research design to data collection and the use of the information gathered. Throughout, research dilemmas and choices are presented, illustrated, and discussed. The volume offers an essential point of references for anyone undertaking research on social movements.

Statistical illiteracy can have an enormously negative impact on decision making. This volume of collected papers brings together applied and theoretical research on risks and decision making across the fields of medicine, psychology, and economics. Collectively, the essays demonstrate why the frame in which statistics are communicated is essential for broader understanding and sound decision making, and that understanding risks and uncertainty has wide-reaching implications for daily life. Gerd Gigerenzer provides a lucid review and catalog of concrete instances of heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people and animals rely on to make decisions under uncertainty, explaining why these are very often more rational than probability models. After a critical look at behavioral theories that do not model actual psychological processes, the book concludes with a call for a "heuristic revolution" that will enable us to understand the ecological rationality of both statistics and heuristics, and bring a dose of sanity to the study of rationality.

This book highlights recent advancements and innovations in trenchless technology via the adoption of combined micro-tunnelling and pipe-jacking techniques. This technique is more environmentally friendly, cost effective, less time-consuming and less disruptive compared to conventional open trench excavations for urban construction and urban infrastructure renewal projects. Pipe jacking is a non-destructive technique used in the installation of underground pipelines using a tunnel boring machine (TBM) and thrust forces derived from the hydraulic jack set-up in a deep jacking shaft. It is popular and commonly used worldwide for the installation of sewer and common services cable tunnels as well as for oil and gas pipelines.

During the last two decades, structural equation modeling (SEM) has emerged as a powerful multivariate data analysis tool in social science research settings, especially in the fields of sociology, psychology, and education. Although its roots can be traced back to the first half of this century, when Spearman (1904) developed factor analysis and Wright (1934) introduced path analysis, it was not until the 1970s that the works by Karl Joreskog and his associates (e. g., Joreskog, 1977; Joreskog and Van Thillo, 1973) began to make general SEM techniques accessible to the social and behavioral science research communities. Today, with the development and increasing avail ability of SEM computer programs, SEM has become a well-established and respected data analysis method, incorporating many of the traditional analysis techniques as special cases. State-of-the-art SEM software packages such as LISREL (Joreskog and Sorbom, 1993a, b) and EQS (Bentler, 1993; Bentler and Wu, 1993) handle a variety of ordinary least squares regression designs as well as complex structural equation models involving variables with arbitrary distributions. Unfortunately, many students and researchers hesitate to use SEM methods, perhaps due to the somewhat complex underlying statistical repre sentation and theory. In my opinion, social science students and researchers can benefit greatly from acquiring knowledge and skills in SEM since the methods-applied appropriately-can provide a bridge between the theo retical and empirical aspects of behavioral research."

Research Methods: A Practical Guide for the Social Sciences is an essential resource for the social researcher. It offers a comprehensive introduction for first time researchers right through to thorough and practical advice for those undertaking more advanced work. The book draws on real life experiences from a wide variety of disciplines to show how theory translates into practice, and offers a rigorous analysis of why researchers choose the methods they use. Think about it boxes throughout the text offer questions and ideas to help the researcher to focus on core issues and practical considerations, whilst your research summaries present questions, activities and checklists to help the researcher to develop their ideas. The book is supported by a fantastic companion website that contains learning materials, interactive exercises, videos, questionnaires, datasets and much more. The website can be found at: www.pearsoned.co.uk/matthews Written to reflect the breadth of the social sciences, Research Methods is essential for anyone conducting research in sociology, health policy, social work, criminology, social policy, cultural studies, political studies, public policy and related fields.