Many policies in several Western European countries and the U.S. aim to counter spatial concentrations of deprivation and create more socio-economically mixed residential areas. Such policies are founded on the belief that neighbourhoods have a strong and independent effect upon the well-being and life-chances of individuals. The adequacy of the evidence base to support this position has been the subject of spirited debate on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to this policy-relevant discussion by presenting new scholarship from many countries that rigorously quantifies various sorts of neighbourhood effects through the use of cutting-edge social scientific techniques. The secondary purpose of this book is to introduce these techniques to a wider array of housing and planning researchers and to show how a variety of disciplines have offered insightful, synergistic perspectives. Research on neighbourhood effects has over the last 15 years led to a body of knowledge extending far beyond the sociological urban research where it originated. The problem of quantifying neighbourhood effects and the use of associated methodologies (like multi-level analysis, instrumental variables) has attracted scholars from criminology, sociology, social geography, economics and health science, and thus serves as a critical locus for interdisciplinary scholarship. This book was previously published as a special issue of Housing Studies.

Visualization and Verbalization of Data shows how correspondence analysis and related techniques enable the display of data in graphical form, which results in the verbalization of the structures in data. Renowned researchers in the field trace the history of these techniques and cover their current applications. The first part of the book explains the historical origins of correspondence analysis and associated methods. The second part concentrates on the contributions made by the school of Jean-Paul Benzecri and related movements, such as social space and geometric data analysis. Although these topics are viewed from a French perspective, the book makes them understandable to an international audience. Throughout the text, well-known experts illustrate the use of the methods in practice. Examples include the spatial visualization of multivariate data, cluster analysis in computer science, the transformation of a textual data set into numerical data, the use of quantitative and qualitative variables in multiple factor analysis, different possibilities of recoding data prior to visualization, and the application of duality diagram theory to the analysis of a contingency table.

Many policies in several Western European countries and the U.S. aim to counter spatial concentrations of deprivation and create more socio-economically mixed residential areas. Such policies are founded on the belief that neighbourhoods have a strong and independent effect upon the well-being and life-chances of individuals. The adequacy of the evidence base to support this position has been the subject of spirited debate on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to this policy-relevant discussion by presenting new scholarship from many countries that rigorously quantifies various sorts of neighbourhood effects through the use of cutting-edge social scientific techniques.

The secondary purpose of this book is to introduce these techniques to a wider array of housing and planning researchers and to show how a variety of disciplines have offered insightful, synergistic perspectives. Research on neighbourhood effects has over the last 15 years led to a body of knowledge extending far beyond the sociological urban research where it originated. The problem of quantifying neighbourhood effects and the use of associated methodologies (like multi-level analysis, instrumental variables) has attracted scholars from criminology, sociology, social geography, economics and health science, and thus serves as a critical locus for interdisciplinary scholarship.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Housing Studies.

In 2004, the ISA Research Committee on Logic and Methodology (RC33) jointly with the Department of Methodology and Statistics of Utrecht University, the Netherlands Institute for the Social Sciences (SISWO), and the Netherlands Association for Methodological Research in the Social Sciences (NOSMO) organized, in Amsterdam, the Sixth International Conference on Social Science Methodology. The theme of the conference was Recent Developments and Applications in Social Research Methodology. Scientists from all over the world presented state of the art methods of qualitative research, as well in methods of quantitative research. This CD-ROM contains a rich variety of advanced papers concerning those methods.