European Perceptions of China and Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative is a collection of fourteen essays on the way China is perceived in Europe today. These perceptions - and they are multiple - are particularly important to the People's Republic of China as the country grapples with its increasingly prominent role on the international stage, and equally important to Europe as it attempts to come to terms with the technological, social and economic advances of the Belt and Road Initiative. The authors are, on the whole, senior academics specializing in such topics as International Relations and Security, Public Diplomacy, Media and Cultural Studies, and Philosophy and Religion from more than a dozen different European countries and are involved in various international projects focussed on Europe-China relations.

Regardless of the discipline or country, creating quality education is multifaceted. At the center of any schooling practice are the educators, their schools, and the teacher education programs that license them. As the schools and faculties of education strive to provide the best practices to pre-service or in-service teachers, it becomes more critical to increase the quality of teacher education via various means to keep up with the demands of schooling in the 21st century. Interdisciplinary Approaches Toward Enhancing Teacher Education provides an overview of how innovation and research experience can enhance teacher education programs with a focus on competencies, skills, and strategies future teachers will need to cope with while teaching students' learning with diversity and facing linguistic, social, and environmental challenges. The book particularly investigates the potentiality of educational technology, innovative techniques, and digital storytelling to enhance education and bilingualism in intercultural contexts and multilingual settings. Covering topics that include performance assessment, teacher training, and professional development, and including many practical and diverse examples, this book is intended for TESOL, second or foreign language learning, and CUL programs and teacher-training institutions, as well as teachers, researchers, academicians, and students in interdisciplinary areas that include science, history, geography, language learning, bilingualism, intercultural competencies, classroom interaction, gamification, and educational technology.

While there are many English books available on academic research methods and philosophy, many complain that they are difficult for budding, non-native English-speaking researchers to use and understand. Rather than hiding behind jargon, writers should describe and define the concepts for the benefit of non-native English speakers. Social Research Methodology and Publishing Results: A Guide to Non-Native English Speakers explains methods commonly used in the field of academic research, provides stimulus to non-native English-speaking researchers for successful implementation of academic research, and meets the need for an appropriate course framework and materials for teaching research methodology. Covering topics such as pragmatism, research design, and empirical modeling, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for educators and administrators of higher education, pre-service teachers, librarians, teacher educators, non-native English-speaking researchers, and academicians.

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.

Given the recent re-evaluation of research funding policy as an issue central to national governments and the EU, it is imperative that underlying rationales and channels for investment in research and development are examined. A pioneering analysis of the complexity, allocation and management of public funding of research, this Handbook explores the strategies whereby research can be successfully targeted and supported to resolve problems of broad public concern. Used effectively, the Handbook finds, research has the potential to support economic growth, create jobs, enhance social welfare, protect the environment and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Taking a multi-level approach, chapters strategise ways to address various funding objectives through analysis of policy design, policy instruments, research organisations, and researchers, while remedying disparities resulting from the distribution of research funds. The Handbook's expansive scope, which covers variation in goals and instrument management over time and across countries, facilitates an approach that not only scrutinises existing paradigms of public research funding but also looks to the future. With authoritative analysis and theoretical frameworks by leading scholars, the Handbook employs an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociology of sciences, political sciences and economics. It will prove a useful resource for scholars and researchers in science policy studies, alongside policy analysts in ministries and research funding organisations seeking to better understand their working environment.

This thoroughly revised, extended and updated second edition of Silvia Gherardi's classic book gives the reader a must-read orientation through the myriad of methods and styles involved in practice-based research. Practice-based approaches to knowing, learning, innovating, and managing have thrived in recent years. Calling upon numerous narratives from a range of research fields, the author offers insight into the many possibilities of practice research, highlighting the inextricable links between humans and technology as the key emergent trend in management studies. Developing an innovative posthumanist approach, this novel book offers a useful and insightful compass for the navigation of practice-based studies through the lens of exemplar vignettes from internationally acclaimed researchers. A valuable and instructive work, this book is critical to any scholars of practice theories, as well as management and organizational studies and those with a keen interest in research methods. Masters students seeking insight into the development of practice-based studies, and PhD researchers developing their own methodologies will also find the guidance of this book indispensable in their studies.

Mapping the Travel Behavior Genome covers the latest research on the biological, motivational, cognitive, situational, and dispositional factors that drive activity-travel behavior. Organized into three sections, Retrospective and Prospective Survey of Travel Behavior Research, New Research Methods and Findings, and Future Research, the chapters of this book provide evidence of progress made in the most recent years in four dimensions of the travel behavior genome. These dimensions are Substantive Problems, Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks, Behavioral Measurement, and Behavioral Analysis. Including the movement of goods as well as the movement of people, the book shows how traveler values, norms, attitudes, perceptions, emotions, feelings, and constraints lead to observed behavior; how to design efficient infrastructure and services to meet tomorrow's needs for accessibility and mobility; how to assess equity and distributional justice; and how to assess and implement policies for improving sustainability and quality of life. Mapping the Travel Behavior Genome examines the paradigm shift toward more dynamic, user-centric, demand-responsive transport services, including the "sharing economy," mobility as a service, automation, and robotics. This volume provides research directions to answer behavioral questions emerging from these upheavals.

Many resources exist to help new doctoral investigators to understand and engage with the tenets and philosophies that underpin doctoral-level research to allow for a sample of self-as-subject research. Every day, new forms of researcher-participant data collection and analysis protocols and contributions to the respective discipline in the use of these methods are designed by doctoral researchers and other scholars for heuristic inquiry and autoethnography. Autoethnography and Heuristic Inquiry for Doctoral-Level Researchers: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential research publication that explores the conventions of autoethnography or heuristic research within the specific context of doctoral-level research. In contrast to similar resources, this book presents various and unique systematic methods and procedures used within current research for data collection, analysis, interpretation and representations of data, and study contributions to illustrate the varied nuances and many choices doctoral-level researchers have when their research design is founded on the principles and tenets of autoethnography or heuristic inquiry. Thus, this book is ideal for doctoral research supervisors, doctoral students, independent researchers, and academicians.

Updates the premier textbook for students and librarians needing to know the landscape of current databases and how to search them. Librarians need to know of existing databases, and they must be able to teach search capabilities and strategies to library users. This practical guide introduces librarians to a broad spectrum of fee-based and freely available databases and explains how to teach them. The updated 6th edition of this well-regarded text covers new databases on the market as well as updates to older databases. It also explains underlying information structures and demonstrates how to search most effectively. It introduces readers to several recent changes, such as the move away from metadata-based indexing to full text indexing by vendors covering newspaper content. Business databases receive greater emphasis. As in the previous edition, this book takes a real-world approach, covering topics from basic and advanced search tools to online subject databases. Each chapter includes a thorough discussion, a recap, concrete examples, exercises, and points to consider, making it an ideal text for courses in database searching as well as a trustworthy professional resource. Helps librarians and students understand the latest developments in library databases Looks not only at textual databases but also numerical, image, video, and social media resources Includes changes and trends in database functionality since the 5th edition

'Any student undertaking a politics degree at graduate level will find this book an indispensible introduction to the subject they are approaching and it will also be useful for teachers seeking to orientate themselves within the discipline as a whole. This is particularly true because of the supporting detail the book provides and the way it links up technical exposition to fundamental philosophical questions. From a student point of view it does not shrink from providing useful practical tips on how to present and publish research results and how to check out established themes with new data. This is a book which political scientists at all levels will benefit from reading. It should also stimulate them to take a fresh look both at their own work and that of others - and - who knows? - perhaps forge some of that unity across the discipline which is the main subject of its discussion.' - Colin Hay, University of Sheffield, UK and L'Institut d'Etudes Politiques at Sciences Po, France 'This Handbook provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the current state of empirical-analytical political science. The contributions share a systemic and multi-layered approach combining political actors, organizations, and institutions. In addition, types of data and data collection as well as advanced types of data analysis are described and explained. Finally, much can be learned about the evaluation of research output and publication strategies. The editors have motivated a stellar set of 40 authors to contribute to the 33 chapters of the Handbook. The index makes it easy to navigate the vast ocean of results and ideas. The Handbook is a ''must have'' for scholars interested in what political science can contribute to reliably answer the most important questions facing the complex world of politics today.' - Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (Berlin Social Science Center), Germany This Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research methods and applications currently in use in political science. It combines theory and methodology (qualitative and quantitative), and offers insights into the major approaches and their roots in the philosophy of scientific knowledge. Including a comprehensive discussion of the relevance of a host of digital data sources, plus the dos and don'ts of data collection in general, the book also explains how to use diverse research tools and highlights when and how to apply these techniques. With wide-ranging coverage of general political science topics and systemic approaches to politics, the editors showcase research methods that can be used at the micro, meso and macro levels. Chapters explore applied and fundamental knowledge, approaches and their usefulness, meta-theoretical issues, and the art and practice of undertaking research. This highly accessible book provides hands-on information on research topics and methods, and offers the reader extensive bibliographies for in-depth exploration of cutting edge techniques. Finally, it discusses the relevance of political science research, as well as the art of publishing, reporting and submitting your research findings. An essential tool for researchers in political science, public administration and international relations, this book will be an important reference for academics and students employing research methods and techniques across the social sciences, including sociology, anthropology and communication studies.

The realm of higher education, much like everything else in a global and mobile world, has rapidly altered in the last few decades. More and more universities and seats of higher education are using strategies towards ' 'internationalization'; by increasing heterogeneity in rank, student composition, resource endowments, faculty profiles, and their social spaces. The essays in this volume take a critical look at universities across South Asia, more specifically, at the dynamics of student mobility and mobilizations existing in such localized social spaces, and compares these with their counterparts in universities across the world. While elite universities in South Asia, as elsewhere, have been caught in a stiff international competition and are aspiring for the highest ranks, students from the most excluded communities and remote parts of the country seek entry to badly endowed universities, facing obstacles during their courses, and upon seeking entry into employment. The volume evaluates such universities as spaces for mobility opportunity and mobilizations in a globally networked world. It combines local and international perspectives with thorough observations of the dynamics in localized university spaces while embedding them in transnational processes.

We are living in a digital era in which most of our daily activities take place online. This has created a big data phenomenon that has been subject to scientific research with increasingly available tools and processing power. As a result, a growing number of social science scholars are using computational methods for analyzing social behavior. To further the area, these evolving methods must be made known to sociological research scholars. Opportunities and Challenges for Computational Social Science Methods focuses on the implementation of social science methods and the opportunities and challenges of these methods. This book sheds light on the infrastructure that should be built to gain required skillsets, the tools used in computational social sciences, and the methods developed and applied into computational social sciences. Covering topics like computational communication, ecological cognition, and natural language processing, this book is an essential resource for researchers, data scientists, scholars, students, professors, sociologists, and academicians.

While some social scientists may argue that we have always been networked, the increased visibility of networks today across economic, political, and social domains can hardly be disputed. Social networks fundamentally shape our lives and social network analysis has become a vibrant, interdisciplinary field of research. In The Oxford Handbook of Social Networks, Ryan Light and James Moody have gathered forty leading scholars in sociology, archaeology, economics, statistics, and information science, among others, to provide an overview of the theory, methods, and contributions in the field of social networks. Each of the thirty-three chapters in this Handbook moves through the basics of social network analysis aimed at those seeking an introduction to advanced and novel approaches to modeling social networks statistically. They cover both a succinct background to, and future directions for, distinctive approaches to analyzing social networks. The first section of the volume consists of theoretical and methodological approaches to social networks, such as visualization and network analysis, statistical approaches to networks, and network dynamics. Chapters in the second section outline how network perspectives have contributed substantively across numerous fields, including public health, political analysis, and organizational studies. Despite the rapid spread of interest in social network analysis, few volumes capture the state-of-the-art theory, methods, and substantive contributions featured in this volume. This Handbook therefore offers a valuable resource for graduate students and faculty new to networks looking to learn new approaches, scholars interested in an overview of the field, and network analysts looking to expand their skills or substantive areas of research.