Suchergebnisse

"This book is a proposed supplementary text that guides social scientists and their students to fully characterize and assess the properties of research designs before they implement them. The book leads readers to answer questions like: - What questions is my study honestly well-equipped to answer? - How do I choose between gathering less data on more units versus more data on fewer units? - If I'm right, how likely is it that my study will change the mind of a committed skeptic? - How sensitive are my findings to my assumptions? These questions are surprisingly tricky to answer even for the most seasoned researchers. A major part of the trouble is that most scholars lack a definition of what constitutes a complete research design. The book will help researchers and students to decide on a method of assessment and then to measure the strength of that research design. The book applies this framework for common social science research designs. The book has four parts: (1) an introduction to the general framework to conceptualize design; (2) a design library of standard design types for researchers to draw from; (3) a set of research principles to guide readers with data gathering, question formation, and analysis; and (4) an extension of the broader use of the approach and framework for researchers, critiques and peer reviewers, and also for research funders. Each chapter is anchored by a narrative theoretical section that are enhanced by interactive R modules to illustrate design tradeoffs. In addition, each chapter includes a "lab," demonstrating how to implement and learn about each design; and exercises that extend the lab using interactive assessment tools. The book can be used independently as a supplemental course book for graduate and advanced graduate students, but is also supported by an online set of R repositories that could be used in conjunction with the book, as well as a piece of web software that allows researchers to assess designs without using the statistical packages"--

Volume 1. Foundations of social science methods -- Volume 2. Social science methods in basic biomedical research -- Volume 3. Social science methods in clinical research -- Volume 4. Social science methods in health organizations research -- Volume 5. Social science methods in health systems research -- Volume 6. Social science methods in public health research

AbstractTo the extent that intersectionality is becoming a common term in mainstream social science, it is as a methodological justification to separate out different racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other social groups for empirical analysis. One might call this the "intersectionality hypothesis," and in its best incarnation, it is about getting the facts right and finding the differences that matter. But an intersectional analysis in the social sciences often involves more than this. An intersectional approach also leads to potentially different interpretations of the same facts, or what we term a different social explanation. It is not only the intersection of categories that defines an intersectional project, then, but the theoretical framing that informs the analysis and interpretation of the subject under study. This framing often leads to an analysis of multiple and even conflicting social dynamics that enable certain kinds of social understanding that are otherwise invisible when scholars focus on a single set of social dynamics. Because the social theoretical aspects of research on intersectionality are rarely discussed, relative to the more methodological and ontological aspects of intersectionality, this is our main subject matter in this article. We focus on the process of developing social explanations rooted in the intersection of multiple social dynamics in several examples from our own research and across a variety of topics in social science research.

Views on government support; Great Britain, chiefly.

WHAT IS RESEARCH IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES FOR? SHOULD (much of) it be financed by the state? How should it be organized? Where should it take place? In the United Kingdom, these questions thud down each morning on the desk of the Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council, which now has a new home (in Swindon, with its big sister Research Councils) and a new Chairman, Professor Howard Newby. Six years, and more than one chairman, have come and gone since I sat at that desk; I have a short memory, and a full recognition of the duty of a retired bureaucrat — 'get out, and shut up'. I am not willing or able to bore readers with a description or a critique of recent policies. But my present function gives me a new standpoint; things look different from Strasbourg, and an international perspective helps; above all, my responsibilities now spread widely (although jolly thinly) over the whole range of learning, scholarship, and science. So these are home thoughts from abroad.

This paper identifies the different funding streams for social science research and the different purposes for which it is carried out. The issue of making research 'useful' and relevant and how this links to different modes of user involvement is discussed. For research users to be involved in research in a real, strong, way requires long‐term relationships to be built between users and researchers. A large proportion of research being carried out within the higher education sector is funded by external bodies of some kind, on short‐term contracts. The argument is put that little time and energy goes into the management of this contract research. The combination of high staff turnover, little management and the decline of the dual support system have made it increasingly difficult for long‐term relationships between researchers and research users to be built up. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role and effect of the Research Assessment Exercise. There are no incentives in the RAE for the creation of the kind of environment within which applied research can flourish—team working, a focus on problems rather than disciplinary issues, support, training and skill development for researchers, and good management.

Klappentext: This book is an essential guide to scientifically conducting contemporary ethnographic research at undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral levels in the social sciences, the humanities, and business studies. It addresses the methodological challenges of ethnographic research across the social sciences and highlights present time research areas, including digital ethnography, artificial intelligence, classroom pedagogy, hybrid organization, and many more.