Researching War provides a unique overview of varied feminist contributions to the study of war through case studies from around the world. Written by well-respected scholars, each chapter explicitly showcases the role of feminist methodological, ethical and political commitments in the research process. Designed to be useful for teaching also, the book provides insight into feminist research practices for students and scholars wanting to further their understanding what it means to study war (and other issues) from a feminist perspective. To this end, every author follows a four-part structure in the presentation of their case study: outlining a research puzzle, explaining the chosen approach, describing the findings and, finally, offering a reflection on the feminist commitments that guided the research. This book: Provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on war by drawing on disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, peace research, postcolonial theory, queer studies, security studies, and women's studies; Showcases a multiplicity of experiences with war and violence, emphasizing everyday experiences of war and violence with accounts from around the world; Challenges stereotypical accounts of women, violence, and war by pointing to contradictions and unexpected continuities as well as unexpected findings made possible by adopting a feminist perspective; Teases out linkages between various forms of political violence (against women, but increasingly also by women); Discusses theoretical and methodological innovation in feminist research on war. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Security Studies, Gender and Conflict, Women and War, Feminist International Relations and Research Methods.

The contributors to this volume demonstrate that it is now possible to undertake community prevention trials of alcohol-involved problems with the same precision, good design, and careful planning that has characterized similar prevention trials for heart disease and cancer prevention. This is the first book to establish a scientific basis for the integration of research into program design and in program evaluation, making it possible to determine if community programs are effective or worth the money spent for them.

In part I, the contributors address issues of outcome measures, selection of relevant community interventions, utilization of appropriate research designs and analyses, and adjustment to social and political realities. Part II reviews definitions, perspectives, and issues that provide a conceptual base for the rest of the book. Also considered are the selection and measurement of alcohol problems that may be candidate outcome variables for a community intervention study. Part III summarizes the perspectives and prior experiences of community-based approaches in other health areas (including heart disease, cancer, and adolescent health) that may be applicable to the prevention of alcohol-related problems. Experiences and implications of alcohol-prevention projects in Ontario, Texas, and Rhode Island are discussed in part IV. Part V evaluates different experimental designs, methodologies, and relative risk regression models of community-based intervention programs in alcohol prevention. The two chapters in part VI discuss the dynamic social and political realities facing community prevention trials for alcohol problems and guidelines for undertaking such trials. This book will be useful for state and local prevention program planners and evaluators, researchers in alcohol and substance abuse, teachers of applied research methods or social program development and planning, and government policy makers.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This prescient book presents the intellectual terrain of shrinking cities while exploring the key research questions in each of the field?s sub-domains and reviewing the range of methodologies within these topics. The book begins with an introduction outlining what shrinking cities are and how they are researched, highlighting both the opportunities and challenges that arise in this field, including the big ideas any researcher must grapple with. The next six chapters are each devoted to a different sub-domain within shrinking cities, offering a quick overview of the topics, relevant problems, paradoxes and key research questions. The book concludes with a review of the major themes and, most importantly, looks toward the future, predicting and anticipating the most significant future research trends related to shrinking cities. This accessible and compelling Research Agenda will be of interest to researchers looking to move into this area, urban studies and planning instructors who are teaching research methods courses, and students studying or independently researching shrinking cities.

This volume brings together three areas of interest: the rule-based approach, the entrepreneur, and Japan as an empirical application. It highlights the advantages of the rule-based approach for economic analysis by linking different methodological underpinnings. Using these, the author exemplifies how rule-based economics allows a systematic analysis of the entrepreneur as the key figure in bringing about economic change and diversity. The book includes an empirical methodology for applied research in rule-based economics, which it puts to the test in an empirical study of entrepreneurship in contemporary Japan. The choice of entrepreneurship and Japan showcases the integrative power that rule-based economics brings to further breaking a theoretical deadlock and to analytically capturing a very particular economy investigated very little so far. By offering a body of new and original research, the monograph shows how the idea of entrepreneurship as a rule helps to resolve the Schumpeter-Kirzner divide and to develop an empirical approach to the determinants of entrepreneurial activity.

Black Participatory Research explores research partnerships that disrupt inequality, create change, and empower racially marginalized communities. Through presenting a series of co-reflections from professional and community researchers in different locations, this book explores the conflicts and tensions that emerge when professional interests, class and socio-economic statuses, age, geography, and cultural and language differences emerge alongside racial identity as central ways of seeing and being ourselves. Through the investigations of black researchers who collaborated in participatory research projects in post-Katrina New Orleans, USA the greater Philadelphia-New Jersey-Delaware region in the northeastern USA, and Senegal, West Africa, this book offers candid reflections of how shared identity, experiences, and differences shape the nature and process of participatory research.

The social sciences continue to generate vast amounts of research, which is typically published in scholarly monographs and journal articles. This research, in turn, is summarized in a wide range of reference sources, such as bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks, and yearbooks. Now in its third edition, this essential guide provides entries for roughly 1,600 reference sources in the social sciences, including anthropology, business, economics, education, geography, history, law, political science, psychology, and sociology. Most titles published before 1980, which are listed in the second edition, have been excluded, while the present volume gives special attention to electronic resources, including more than 200 web sites.

The first part of the volume contains chapters on the social sciences in general, including discussions of available research tools. It also provides brief descriptions of the features and search methods of online vendors and reviews the specialized reference sources available in selected periodicals. The second part contains chapters on reference sources in particular social science disciplines. The first section of each chapter examines access to these sources through such tools as bibliographies, indexes, and abstracts, while the second looks at particular types of works, such as directories and encyclopedias. In most cases, entries are listed alphabetically under each heading and subheading, with full bibliographic information provided.

"... very helpful for its intended audience of both librarians and end users. Academic and large public libraries that provide or encourage electronic information retrieval will want this helpful aid". -- Booklist/Reference Books Bulletin

This reference helps users find meaningful words for natural language computer searching of bibliographic and textual databases in the social and behavioral sciences.

This book constitutes an up-to-date methodology reference work for International Relations (IR) scholars and students. The study of IR calls for the use of multiple and various tools to try and describe international phenomena, analyze and understand them, compare them, interpret them, and try to offer theoretical approaches. In a nutshell, doing research in IR requires both tools and methods-from the use of archives to the translation of results through mapping, from conducting interviews to analyzing quantitative data, from constituting a corpus to the always touchy interpretation of images and discourses. This volume assembles twenty young researchers and professors in the field of IR and political science to discuss numerous rich and thoroughly explained case studies. Merging traditional political science approaches with methods borrowed from sociology and history, it offers a clear and instructive synthesis of the main resources and applied methods to study International Relations.

This volume presents for the first time a collection of historically important papers written on the concept of rationality in the social sciences. In 1939-40, the famed Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter and the famous sociologist Talcott Parsons convened a faculty seminar at Harvard University on the topic of rationality. The first part includes their essays as well as papers by the Austrian phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, the sociologist Wilbert Moore, and the economist Rainer Schickele. Several younger economists and sociologists with bright futures also participated, including Alex Gerschenkron, John Dunlop, Paul M. Sweezy, and Wassily W. Leontief, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for developing input-output analysis. The second part presents essays and commentaries written by today's internationally noted social scientists and addressing the topic of rationality in social action from a broad range of perspectives. The book's third and final part shares the recently discovered correspondence between the seminar principals regarding the original but failed plan to publish its proceedings. It also includes letters, not previously published, between Richard Grathoff, Walter M. Sprondel and Talcott Parsons on the rationality seminar and the exchanges between Parsons and Schutz.

The American Educational History Journal is devoted to the examination of educational questions using perspectives from a variety of disciplines. With AEHJ, the Midwest History of Education Society encourages communication between scholars from numerous disciplines, nationalities, institutions, and backgrounds. Authors come from disciplines ranging from political science to curriculum to philosophy to adult education. Although the main criterion of acceptance for publication in AEHJ requires that the author present a well-articulated argument concerning an educational issue, the editors ask that all papers offer a historical analysis.

This book is a selection of peer-reviewed contributions presented at the third Bayesian Young Statisticians Meeting, BAYSM 2016, Florence, Italy, June 19-21. The meeting provided a unique opportunity for young researchers, M.S. students, Ph.D. students, and postdocs dealing with Bayesian statistics to connect with the Bayesian community at large, to exchange ideas, and to network with others working in the same field. The contributions develop and apply Bayesian methods in a variety of fields, ranging from the traditional (e.g., biostatistics and reliability) to the most innovative ones (e.g., big data and networks).

Capitalism is under attack. Defenders say that capitalism has raised billions of people from poverty. But a central activity of capitalism today, Wall Street style, is speculation (gambling), using other people's money, and privatizing the profits while socializing the debts. Skeptics argue that capitalism has redistributed the wealth of the planet in favor of a very few, meanwhile leaving the planet in bad shape and leaving billions of people out in the cold. Wealth is now extremely mal-distributed, opportunity is far from equal, and upward social mobility has declined significantly in recent decades. This book reviews the evidence and arguments pro and con in considerable detail. The evidence is mixed. The main virtue of capitalism is its emphasis on competition as a driver of innovation and, thus, of economic growth. It is true that economic growth has accelerated in recent centuries, and it is true that billions of people have been lifted from poverty. But it is not necessarily true that intense "winner take all" competition in the marketplace is the explanation for growth. Neoclassical economic theory posits that self-interest is the primary motive for all economic decisions, leaving little room for cooperation and even less for altruism. The theory applies to an unrealistic "model" of human behavior, known as Homo economicus or "economic man", whose characteristic activity is buying or selling. The reason for using the adjective word "social" - as in socialism" or "social service" or "social democracy" -- is, essentially, to deny those postulates of standard economic theory. Real humans are not rational utility maximizers (whatever that is) and very often do things that are not in their own personal best interests. This can happen because other interests, such as family loyalty, professional, religious, or patriotic duty, may take precedence. Real people rarely behave like Homo economicus, who has rivals but no friends. He (or she) does not trust anyone, hence cannot cooperate with others, and can never create, or live in, a viable social system (or marriage). Yet social systems, ranging from families and tribes to firms, cities, and nations do (and must) exist or civilization cannot exist. A viable social system must not allow "winner takes all". It must reallocate some of the societal wealth being created by competitive activities to support the young, the old and the weak, because all of those people have equal rights, if not the same luck or the same skills. Both competition and cooperation have important roles to play. A hybrid capitalism involving both is the only viable solution. The book ends with a specific suggestion, namely Universal Basic Income, or UBI.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Much of humanity's basis for existence is becoming subordinate to software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations that comprise what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data collection threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with software processes in order to allow a profound upgrade of our own ontological understanding. By mediating with a higher intelligence, we may be able to rediscover the inner logic of the age of intelligent machines. In The End of the Future, Stephanie Polsky conceives an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonization, navigational warfare, mercantilism, and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over the past five centuries, the era during which the world became "modern." The book animates the twenty-first century as an era in which the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, allowing an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of atomized political power, whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and in which digital media now serves to legitimize and promote a customized micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, humanity may be able to shape a new world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This volume travels a course from Elizabethan England, to North American slavery, through cybernetic Social Engineering, Cold War counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where an organizing intelligence that started from an ambition to resourcefully manipulate physical bodies has ended with their profound neutralization.

This book discusses the application of various statistical methods to texts, rather than numbers, in various fields in behavioral science. It proposes an approach where quantitative methods are applied to data whereas previously such data were analyzed only by qualitative research methods. To emphasize the quantitative aspects of semantics, and the possibilities of conducting scientific interferences, the book introduces the concept of statistical semantics and presents the reader with a subset of techniques found in that domain. More specifically, the book focuses on methods that allow the investigation of semantic relationships between words, based on empirical corpus data. It shows the reader how to apply various statistical methods on texts, for example statistical tests to ascertain whether two sets of text are statistically different, ways to predict variables from text, as well as how to summarize and graphically illustrate texts. Thus, the book presents an accessible hands-on introduction to a selection of techniques, indispensable for cognitive psychologists, linguists, and social psychologists.

This book provides a general discussion beneficial to librarians and library school students, and demonstrates the steps of the research process, decisions made in the selection of a statistical technique, how to program a computer to perform number crunching, how to compute those statistical techniques appearing most frequently in the literature of library and information science, and examples from the literature of the uses of different statistical techniques. The book accomplishes the following objectives: to provide an overview of the research process and to show where statistics fit in; to identify journals in library and information science most likely to publish research articles; to identify reference tools that provide access to the research literature; to show how microcomputers can be programmed to engage in number crunching; to introduce basic statistical concepts and terminology; to present basic statistical procedures that appear most frequently in the literature of library and information science and that have application to library decision making; to discuss library decision support systems and show the types of statistical techniques they can perform; and to summarize the major decisions that researchers must address in deciding which statistical techniques to employ.

Conducting social science and education research studies that require involvement in fieldwork is not an easy task. Many graduate students and novice researchers face difficulties efficiently and effectively conducting the practical aspects of their research in fieldwork. One reason for this difficulty may be due to the lack of finding and/or accessing authentic and realistic descriptions of previously conducted fieldwork experiences and processes in a variety of fields. This could be the case whether the research is going to be on a virtual platform or in a real and actual context. Thus, it is critical to shed light on the successes and pitfalls of the personal experiences of fieldwork. Overcoming Fieldwork Challenges in Social Science and Higher Education Research is an essential reference book that draws on the experience of conducting fieldwork in different contexts and world regions that are relevant to social science and education studies. The diverse experiences in research processes and contexts that this book offers provide readers with an authentic and realistic description of how research data is collected, the tools needed to envision some of the challenges that they might face, and how to effectively solve them. Highlighting topics such as methodology, data collection, and fieldwork partnerships in fields that include counseling, psychology, language studies, and teacher education, this book is ideal for social science and education studies professors who have research as a mandatory part of their curriculum, administrators and policymakers, independent and novice researchers, and graduate students planning to conduct their research studies with humans in different contexts.

This book constitutes a valuable manual for young and seasoned business researchers alike, and provides a comprehensive summary for the whole research journey. It is a must-read for all researchers who need to understand the basics of business research, from identifying research topics, to planning and organizing the research process, and selecting the most appropriate methodology for the topic at hand. This book also provides insights on how to avoid common pitfalls in business research and outlines the research skills needed to write a fine piece of research. In order to capture the innovative element of research, the book also highlights methods for thinking outside the box. It also stresses the importance of respecting ethics while conducting business research. Lastly, it presents important cases and provides hands-on training for preparing survey tools. Readers looking to master business research won't want to miss out on this unique and insightful book.

This book demonstrates different statistical techniques for analyzing health-related data as well as providing new techniques for forecasting and/or projecting the incidence of diseases/disorders. It presents information on a variety of health related issues from the developed and developing world. Featuring cutting edge research from distinguished applied demographers and public health specialists, the book bridges the gap between theory and research. Each chapter provides methods and materials that can be used to conduct further research aimed at promoting public health issues. This book is intended for public health professionals, health policy makers, social epidemiologists, administrators, researchers, and students in the fields of applied demography and public health who are interested in exploring the potential of ground-breaking research or who want to further develop their existing research techniques. It complements another volume in the Applied Demography Series, Applied Demography and Public Health (Springer, 2013), which describes how applied demographic techniques can be used to help address public health issues.

This book is designed as a gentle introduction to the fascinating field of choice modeling and its practical implementation using the R language. Discrete choice analysis is a family of methods useful to study individual decision-making. With strong theoretical foundations in consumer behavior, discrete choice models are used in the analysis of health policy, transportation systems, marketing, economics, public policy, political science, urban planning, and criminology, to mention just a few fields of application. The book does not assume prior knowledge of discrete choice analysis or R, but instead strives to introduce both in an intuitive way, starting from simple concepts and progressing to more sophisticated ideas. Loaded with a wealth of examples and code, the book covers the fundamentals of data and analysis in a progressive way. Readers begin with simple data operations and the underlying theory of choice analysis and conclude by working with sophisticated models including latent class logit models, mixed logit models, and ordinal logit models with taste heterogeneity. Data visualization is emphasized to explore both the input data as well as the results of models. This book should be of interest to graduate students, faculty, and researchers conducting empirical work using individual level choice data who are approaching the field of discrete choice analysis for the first time. In addition, it should interest more advanced modelers wishing to learn about the potential of R for discrete choice analysis. By embedding the treatment of choice modeling within the R ecosystem, readers benefit from learning about the larger R family of packages for data exploration, analysis, and visualization.

In this co-edited volume, Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour and Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman have invited contributors of African descent from the United States and Brazil to reflect on their multidimensional experiences in the field as researchers, collaborators, and allies to communities of color. Contributors promote an interdisciplinary perspective, as they represent the fields of sociology, political science, anthropology, and the humanities. They engage W.E.B. Du Bois' notion of 'second-sight,' which suggests that the unique positionality of Black researchers might provide them with advantages in their empirical observations and knowledge production. They expose the complex and contradictory efforts, discourses, and performances that Black researchers must use to implement and develop their community-centered research agenda. They illustrate that 'second-sight' is not inevitable but must be worked at and is sometimes not achieved in certain research and cultural contexts.

Taking up a social constructionist position, this book illustrates the social and cultural construction of autism as made visible in everyday, educational, institutional and historical discourses, alongside a careful consideration of the bodily and material realities of embodied differences. The authors highlight the economic consequences of a disabling culture, and explore how autism fits within broader arguments related to normality, abnormality and stigma. To do this, they provide a theoretically and historically grounded discussion of autism-one designed to layer and complicate the discussions that surround autism and disability in schools, health clinics, and society writ large. In addition, they locate this discussion across two contexts - the US and the UK - and draw upon empirical examples to illustrate the key points. Located at the intersection of critical disability studies and discourse studies, the book offers a critical reframing of autism and childhood mental health disorders more generally.

This book explores the fundamentals of multidimensional scaling (MDS) and how this analytic method can be used in applied setting for educational and psychological research. The book tries to make MDS more accessible to a wider audience in terms of the language and examples that are more relevant to educational and psychological research and less technical so that the readers are not overwhelmed by equations. The goal is for readers to learn the methods described in this book and immediately start using MDS via available software programs. The book also examines new applications that have previously not been discussed in MDS literature. It should be an ideal book for graduate students and researchers to better understand MDS. Fundamentals of Applied Multidimensional Scaling for Educational and Psychological Research is divided into three parts. Part I covers the basic and fundamental features of MDS models pertaining to applied research applications. Chapters in this section cover the essential features of data that are typically associated with MDS analysis such as preference ration or binary choice data, and also looking at metric and non-metric MDS models to build a foundation for later discussion and applications in later chapters. Part II examines specific MDS models and its applications for education and psychology. This includes spatial analysis methods that can be used in MDS to test clustering effect of items and individual differences MDS model (INDSCAL). Finally, Part III focuses on new applications of MDS analysis in these research fields. These new applications consist of profile analysis, longitudinal analysis, mean-level change, and pattern change. The book concludes with a historical review of MDS development as an analytical method and a look to future directions.

As academics in postcolonial Caribbean countries, we have been trained to believe that research should be objective: a measurable benefit to the public good and quantifiable in nature so as to generalize findings to develop knowledge societies for economic growth. What happens, however when the very word "research" connotes a derogatory term or semblance of distrust? Smith (1999) speaks towards the distrustful nature of the term as a legacy of European imperialism and colonialism. Against this backdrop, how do Caribbean researchers leverage recognized and valued (indigenous) methods of knowing and understanding for and by the Caribbean populace? How do we learn from indigenous research methods such as Kaupapa Maori (Smith, 1999) and develop an understanding of research that is emancipatory in nature? Decolonizing qualitative methods are rooted in critical theory and grounded in social justice, resistance, change and emancipatory research for and by the Other (Said, 1978). Rodney's (1969) legacy of "groundings" provides a Caribbean oriented ethnographic approach to collecting data about people and culture. It is an anti-imperialist method of data collection focused on the socioeconomic and political environment within the (post) colonial context. Similar to Rodney, other critical Caribbean scholars have moved the research discourse to center on the notions of resistance, struggle (Chevannes, 1995; Feraria, 2009) and decolonoizing methodologies. This proposed edited volume will provide a collective body of scholarship for innovative uses of decolonizing qualitative research. In order to theorize and conduct decolonizing research, one can argue that the researcher as self and as the Other needs to be interrogated. Borrowing from an autoethnographic ontology, the researcher or investigator recognizes the self as the unit of measure, and there is a concerted effort to continuously see the self, seeing the self through and as the other (Alexander, 2005; Ellis, 2004). This level of interrogation may require frameworks such as Reasonable Humanism in which there is a clear understanding of the role of the researcher and researched from a physiological and psychosocial standpoint. Thereafter, the researcher is better prepared to enter into a discourse about decolonizing methodologies. The origins of qualitative inquiry in the Caribbean can be traced to political and economic discourses - Marxism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, liberalism, postmodernism- which have challenged ways of knowing and the construction of knowledge. Evans (2009) traced the origins of qualitative inquiry to slave narratives, proprietor's journals, missionaries' reports and travelogues. Common to the Caribbean is an understanding of how colonial legacies of research have ridiculed oral traditions, language, and ways of knowing, often rendering them valueless and inconsequential. This proposed edited volume acknowledges the significance of decolonizing approaches to qualitative research in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean diaspora. It includes an audience of scholars, teacher/ researchers and students primarily in and across the humanities, social sciences and educational studies. This proposed volume would provide much needed knowledge and best practice strategies to the community of researchers engaged in decolonizing methodologies. Additionally, this volume will allow readers to think of new imaginings of research design that deconstruct power and privilege to benefit knowledge, communities and participants. It will spark key objectives, directions and frameworks for deeper discussions and interrogations of normative, westernized and hegemonic approaches to qualitative research. Lastly, the volume will welcome empirical studies of application of decolonizing methodologies and theoretical studies that frame critical discourse.