Suchergebnisse

Log-linear methods provide a powerful framework and the statistical apparatus for rigorously analyzing categorical data. These methods were introduced and developed by Leo Goodman and others in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Goodman, Alan Agresti, Clifford Clogg, Otis Dudley Duncan, and others showed how these models could help us to estimate associations between discrete variables, including ordered and unordered polytomies. The last decade has witnessed a set of diverse extensions of these techniques. This paper reviews the basic log-linear strategy and illustrates key concepts. Citations are given to other articles on these topics, many of which are nontechnical and contain substantive sociological applications.

This article presents a nontechnical overview of the major data analysis techniques for modeling longitudinal processes, with an explicit focus on their advantages and disadvantages as tools for drawing inferences about different specific aspects of change over time. It is argued that traditional longitudinal analysis techniques offer limited ways of addressing many specific questions about change. Recent advances in latent variable techniques, when adequately driven by theory, design, and measurement, offer a unified and flexible framework for addressing such questions.

In this article the author reviews a segment from a report of a research project that she undertook in 1991. In this initial entry into the research world, the research process used aimed to make audible one part of the 'personal practical knowledge' of a group of music teachers. By critiquing one segment of the report and contrasting this with a re-analysis of the original data upon which this segment relies, an alternative view of the research process and the research findings may be gained. The research process used in the first report aimed to allow teachers' voices and knowledge to become explicit. In fact, it may be seen to gloss over underlying discourses and in doing so, romanticize those voices. Concomitantly, a re-analysis of the original data using methods drawn from conversation analysis reveals the ways in which the researcher's voice is indelibly inscribed in the research process. The critique presented here elucidates the ways in which 'theorizing as ideology' may be accomplished by a novice researcher in the writing of a research report. Further, the utilization of conversation analysis to investigate interview transcripts of teacher talk demonstrates an approach to data analysis which might be further explored by researchers employing interviews as a method of data generation.

A new approach, combining functional data analysis and principal components
decomposition in order to forecasting demographic rates, introduced recently
by Hyndman and his associates, is tested on official data series of Serbian
age-specific fertility rates available for period 1950-2009. The original
concept of the method with its extensions and improvements is applied to
region-specific data for the country (Central Serbia and Vojvodina). One of
the most important benefits of the method reflected in confirmation that is
essentially to model and forecast more than one principal component in order
to adequately address sources of variation in fertility. Similarly, modelling
and forecasting fertility rates with regards to age and not total fertility
rates shows how important it is for the recognized tendency of postponing
childbearing in Serbia to be included in coefficients of functional time
series. Besides, the method is based completely on evaluation of historical
data, without subjective views of forecasters having to be taken into
account. Coherent functional product ratio forecasts of two regions proved to
be highly convergent on the long-term not allowing for outliers to
contaminate the forecast.

In this paper we address a number of contemporary themes concerning the analysis of qualitative data and the ethnographic representation of social realities. A contrast is drawn. On the one hand, a diversity of representational modes and devices is currently celebrated, in response to various critiques of conventional ethnographic representation. On the other hand, the widespread influence of computer- assisted qualitative data analysis is promoting convergence on a uniform mode of data analysis and representation (often justified with reference to grounded theory). We note the ironic contrast between these two tendencies, the heterodox and the orthodox, in contemporary qualitative research. We go on to suggest that there exist alternatives that reflect both the diversity of representational approaches, and the broader possibilities of contemporary computing. We identify the technical and intellectual possibilities of hypertext software as offering just one such synthesis.