Suchergebnisse

Toen The SAGE handbook of the philosophy of the social sciences uitkwam, wist ik niet hoe snel ik een exemplaar te pakken moest krijgen. Omdat ik wel eens op dit gebied publiceer, was ik bang dat mijn kennis achterliep bij de internationale 'voorhoede'. Na lezing van het handboek kan ik gerust ademhalen. Dit is een conservatief handboek waarin weliswaar een aantal interessante ideeën staat, maar weinig nieuwe inzichten te vinden zijn. Daarnaast zijn er twee hoofdstukken die tot diepere inzichten kunnen leiden, zoals ik hieronder zal aangeven. Het handboek bestaat uit een inleiding, vier omvangrijke delen over respectievelijk de ontwikkeling van de wetenschapsfilosofie, sociale ontologie, paradigma's en methodologie, en een epiloog. In totaal bevat het handboek 39 hoofdstukken.

S. M. Lipset's thesis (see SA 8:1/607105) that the Wc, more so than other SCs, is predisposed to authoritarian & antidemocratic attitudes is criticized on the grounds that his conceptualization & measurement of SC is inaccurate & inappropriate. Investigation using an empirical class model (see Eric Olin Wright's Class, Crisis and the State, London: Verso [NLB 1978], 1979) fails to show the Wc as more authoritarian than other SCs; on the contrary, education seems to be the most important factor. It is concluded that the measurement of SC is crucial to empirical investigations of Wc authoritarianism; some theoretical implications are briefly discussed. 6 Tables, 2 Figures, 39 References. Modified HA

From 1980 to 1982 there were many conflicts between the youth movement & the authorities in Zurich, Switzerland. A study by H. Kriesi (Die Zuricher Bewegung. Bilder, Interaktionen, Zusammenhange [The Zurich Movement: Representations, Interactions, Correlations], Campus Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1984) revealed three different social images held by authorities, members of the youth movement, & others concerned. Here, a replication of this study is described in which Q-sort data were collected in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where there is a youth movement of squatters, & the social situation is comparable to that of Zurich in some respects. Rs, who included squatters, local authorities, & others, were found to hold the same social images as found in Zurich, although squatters in Amsterdam do not seem to isolate themselves as much as in Zurich, & the authorities seem to tolerate more. A subsequent exploratory factor analysis of the Q-sort data supports the findings. 4 Tables, 3 Figures, 7 References. Modified HA

Confronted with acute SE problems, the Socialist & the Christian Democratic trade unions in 1976 strengthened their "Common Trade Unions" Front' (with about 2 million members out of a total of 2,300,000 wage- & salary-earners in Belgium) in view of negotiating with employers & with the government, for which the trade unions have submitted a common platform. This common front has antecedents on the local, regional, & professional levels, but has never been & never will be of a permanent nature. This is due as much to historical, as to ideological causes. The principle of class struggle is basic to the socialist union, & christian doctrine is basic to the Christian Democrat concept. The two unions are imbalanced in their linguistic division. Socialists dominate the French-speaking South, while the Christians dominate the Flemish-speaking North. Each confederation wants to maintain its identity. From the employer's view (& to some extent completely independent from the trade union's common front) representatives of employer's organizations have launched the idea that a new & comprehensive "social contract" should be negotiated. The Christian Democratic Union favors such a pact, but since the socialist trade union rejects this idea--which would lead to a further integration in the capitalist system--the probability for such a pact to be realized at present is rather low. Modified HA.

'Polarization' has become a catchword in Dutch politics, denoting the emphasis on conflicting rather than mutual interests. It is assumed that the efforts made to 'polarize' the voter population are aimed at reducing the large reservoir of middle-of-the-roaders. In its weekly opinion survey, the Netherlands Institute of Public Opinion (NIPO) consistently finds about 30% of the Rs choosing the center of a left/right semantic differential scale with almost an equal number of Rs going to right & left positions. The almost Gaussian overall distribution is shown to be highly correlated with party choice & voting behavior. The frequency distributions along the left/right Osgood scale are highly skewed inside each separate political preference group. The results of a new additional question are reported. The question reads: "If you were not allowed or could not choose this position would you then go for the one adjoining to the right or to the left?" A very large proportion of Rs move over to the left or right even beyond the extremes of the seven-point scale, effectively extending it to a nine-point scale. The popular center position is then reduced to about 12%. Even more interesting are larger variations over time that are shown for an interesting period extending from late Sept to the end of Nov 1977, during which efforts to form a new socialist-dominated government failed. The extended scale is shown to be a more sensitive instrument than the seven-point semantic differential alone. 6 Tables. Modified HA.

Changes in computer science, information gathering, and the possibilities of the internet continue to vastly influence the way social sciences and humanities are dealing with data collection and analysis. The next KWALON Conference on Qualitative Data Analysis Software aims to organize the reflection on the implications of the recent innovations and trends. Developers and users of software have been invited to reflect on the developments of the past years, and to take them as a starting point for a discussion of the requirements for the future versions of QDA tools. We aim for a fruitful debate between developers and users. Apart from practitioners, trainers, and other end users, participants will include representatives from (in alphabetical order): ATLAS.ti, Cassandre, Dedoose, Feldpartitur, F4 analyse, MAXQDA, NVivo, DiscoverText, QDA Miner and Quirkos.