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"This book looks to set out best practice for conducing online experiments for all social science disciplines. Some basic content on designing experiments and the advantages and challenges will be included as a foundation and then the main body of the book will provide practical advice on how to design an online experiment. The end of the book will be real world experiments broken down into easy to follow steps"--

Abstract
Similarly to other domains of the social sciences, behavioural science has grappled with a crisis concerning the effect sizes of research findings. Different solutions have been provided to answer this challenge. This paper will discuss analytical strategies developed in the context of computational social science, namely causal tree and forest, that will benefit behavioural scientists in harnessing heterogeneity of treatment effects in RCTs. As a mixture of theoretical and data-driven approaches, these techniques are well suited to exploit the rich information provided by large studies conducted using RCTs. We discuss the characteristics of these methods and their methodological rationale and provide simulations to illustrate their use. We simulate two scenarios of RCTs-generated data and explore the heterogeneity of treatment effects using causal tree and causal forest methods. Furthermore, we outlined a potential theoretical use of these techniques to enrich behavioural science ecological validity by introducing the notion of behavioural niche.

Ziel meines Beitrages ist es, einige Grundgedanken über politische Philosophie vorauszuschicken und dann zwei Standpunkte zum politischen Denken vorzustellen, die wesentlich mit den Persönlichkeiten des sefardischen Staatsmannes und Philosophen Isaak Abravanel und des venezianischen Rabbiners und Philosophen Simone Luzzatto zu identifizieren sind.

This study analyzes nanotechnology's anchoring and codification in the Spanish national press to determine the thematic contexts in which this technology has been discussed. Latent semantic analysis was applied to identify themes based on semantic clusters and their longitudinal evolution. This analysis was carried out on a corpus of more than 600 articles from the most prominent Spanish national newspapers and includes articles from 1997 to 2009. Findings indicate an overall positive coverage and dominant thematic clusters related to national policies, economic development, and business opportunities. Surprisingly, controversies surrounding nanotechnology are present in the early years of coverage but have become marginal over time, in contradiction to a general trend that emerged from previous studies on media representations of new technologies.

The contribution of Big Data to social science is not limited to data availability but includes the introduction of analytical approaches that have been developed in computer science, and in particular in machine learning. This brings about a new 'culture' of statistical modelling that bears considerable potential for the social scientist. This argument is illustrated with a brief discussion of model-based recursive partitioning which can bridge the theory and data-driven approach. Such a method is an example of how this new approach can help revise models that work for the full dataset: it can be used for evaluating different models, a traditional weakness of the 'traditional' statistical approach used in social science.

Combining citations and network analysis, this study examines information flows between 10 European elite newspapers from 2000 to 2009 and identifies this network's most central actors, sub-groups and structural features. At the same time, the article contributes to the literature with an alternative and network approach to the study of the European public sphere. Results indicate that The Times and The Guardian are the most quoted by other foreign newspapers, while the top monitors of information are The Guardian and El País. A longitudinal analysis of structural network metrics indicates a less dense but more inclusive information exchange that can be interpreted as sign of a qualitative transformation of the European communication space in the direction of a horizontal integration.

Offers an analyses of contemporary Italy. This book contains essays that aim to highlight the 'crisis' of the country.

AbstractFollowing the outbreak of COVID‐19, scientists rushed to develop vaccines to protect individuals and ferry the world out of the pandemic. Unfortunately, vaccine hesitancy is a major threat to the success of vaccination campaigns. Research on previous pandemics highlighted the centrality of perceived risk and confidence as core determinants of vaccine acceptance. Research on COVID‐19 is less conclusive, and frequently it relies on one‐country, cross‐sectional data, thus making it hard to generalize results across contexts and observe these relationships over time. To bridge these gaps, in this article, we analyzed the association between perceived risk, confidence, and vaccine acceptance cross‐sectionally at individual and country levels. Then, we longitudinally explored whether a within‐country variation in perceived risk and confidence was correlated with a variation in vaccine acceptance. We used data from a large‐scale survey of individuals in 23 countries and 19 time‐points between June 2020 and March 2021 and comparative longitudinal multilevel models to estimate the associations at different levels of analysis simultaneously. Results show the existence of cross‐sectional relationships at the individual and country levels but no significant associations within countries over time. This article contributes to our understanding of the roles of risk perception and confidence in COVID‐19 vaccines' acceptance by underlining that these relationships might differ at diverse levels of analysis. To foster vaccine uptake, it might be important to address individual concerns and persisting contextual characteristics, but increasing levels of perceived risk and confidence might not be a sufficient strategy to increase vaccine acceptance rates.

This volume develops a theoretical framework for the modelling of meaning-making and cultural processes as crucial to the scientific study of contemporary complex societies. It focuses on the methodological and empirical aspects of the analysis of culture and its dynamics that could be applied to policymaking and to the understanding of social phenomena. It covers culture-based segmentation, ad hoc survey instruments like the VOC and PROSERV questionnaires, discourse flow analysis, the Homogenization of Classification Functions Measurement, and others. It also presents a detailed discussion of the methodology of cultural analysis in contexts of health and education. The volume showcases a top-down approach by including quantitative methods and/or automatized or semi-automatized procedures, and at the same time supports a hermeneutic, bottom-up, abductive approach, focused on the situated dynamics of meaning-making. It provides insights from cultural studies, social statistics, social policy, and research methodology in the social sciences. This is a useful resource for academics involved in studying cultural dynamics and for policy-oriented researchers and decision-makers who are interested in cultural dimensions of the design, implementation and reception of public policies.

Introduction -- Part I: The identity-otherness dynamics -- Chapter 1. Identity, otherness, and sociocultural dynamics (Sergio Salvatore) -- Chapter 2. Theories and methods (Alessia Rochira) -- Part II: Maps of Otherness -- Chapter 3. Immigration (Giuseppe A. Veltri) -- Chapter 4. Islam (Gordon Sammuta) -- Chapter 5. LGBT (Alina Pop) -- Part III: Symbolic resources for the representation of otherness -- Chapter 6. The semiotic construction of Otherness (Sergio Salvatore) -- Chapter 7. An interpretative model: Semiotic fields and semiotic forces (Sergio Salvatore) -- Chapter 8. Implications for policy-making and further developments (Giuseppe Veltri).