THIS BOOK is about research in the social sciences. Our goal is practical: designing research that will produce valid inferences about social and political life We focus on political science, but our argument applies to other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, history, economics, and psychology and to nondisciplinary areas of study such as legal evidence, education research, and clini…
Realism – or at least the ‘critical realism’ that I want to defend – is not what many people think it is. Many suppose that realism claims a privileged access to the Truth and thus involves a kind of ‘foundationalism’. But such claims are incon- sistent with realism, for if the de W ning feature of realism is the belief that there is a world existing independently of our knowledge …
Research studies use a variety of methods, are of variable quality and may appear to have contradictory findings ... Research information can seem to users like small jigsaw pieces in a box where there may be several pictures, several duplicates and several missing pieces. Under these circumstances it can be difficult for the researcher, research funder or user to make sense of the research or …
Quantitative social science is not only about regression analysis or, in general, data in- ference. Computer simulations of social mechanisms have an over 60 years long his- tory. They have been used for many different purposes—to test scenarios, to test the consistency of descriptive theories (proof-of-concept models), to explore emergent phe- nomena, for forecasting, etc. In this essay, we …
It is 25 years since modern evolutionary ideas were first applied extensively to human behavior,jump-starting a field of study once known as ‘sociobiology’. Over the years,distinct styles of evolutionary analysis have emerged within the social sciences.Although there is considerable complementarity between approaches that emphasize the study of psychological mechanisms and those that focus …
The Occasional Papers of the School of Social Science are versions of talks given at the School’s weekly Thursday Seminar. At these seminars, Members present work-in-progress and then take questions. There is often lively conversation and debate, some of which will be included with the papers. We have chosen papers we thought would be of interest to a broad audience. Our aim is to capture…
Social science is the study of human society and activity; its member disciplines include economics, political science, and sociology. These social sciences expanded rapidly after 1945, using scientific methods to analyse problems and suggest how they may be solved. Before the 1970s few human geographers identified their discipline as a social science, but many now do. This shift was initially …
Across many disciplines, interest is increasing in the use of computational text analysis in the service of social science questions. We survey the spectrum of current methods, which lie on two dimensions: (1) computational and statistical model complexity; and (2) domain assumptions. This comparative perspective suggests directions of research to better align new methods with the goals of soci…
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The narratives of the world are numberless.Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth…
Methods in social research are now a common feature of many undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and there is much ongoing discussion and debate across the social science disciplines which feeds into the development of new approaches to social research. This bibliography is intended as an introductory guide to some of the main qualitative approaches to social research. The focus is on practic…
A TWOFOLD PROCESS CAN BE SEEK in the growth of science: the fragmentation of formal disciplines and a recombination of the specialties resulting from this fragmentation. The division of disciplines into specialized subfields has led to the development of hybrid specialties. The process of hybrid- ization consists, first of all, of borrowing and lending concepts, methods, theories, and praxes. T…
Sue A. Dodd was active professionally in efforts to define and describe social science data files for library catalogs. Her two books on guidelines for cataloging data files and software were important contributions to our understanding of the core elements used for this purpose. Numerous reports and documents were produced through her work with IASSIST as part of the Classification Action Gro…
This study focuses on how Internet technology influences and contributes to the information-seeking process in the social sciences and humanities. The study examines the information-seeking behavior of faculty and doctoral students in these fields and observes and extends Ellis’s model of information-seeking behavior for social scientists, which includes six characteristics: starting,…
Steve Heims presents to us a historical account of the series of conferences, supported by the Macy foundation and held between 1946 and 1953, that dealt with what would eventually be called cybernetics. He approached the topic as an outsider –as a physicist–, with an interest awakened during the Vietnam War era, to "gain a broader perspective on the practice of the sciences and the direct…
When writing a piece of work, you need to refer in your text to material written or produced by others. This procedure is called citing or quoting references. Failure to do so implies that what you have written is all your own work, when it isn’t. This amounts to plagiarism, which is against University Regulations and is regarded as a serious offence. It is also an offence to self-plagiarise …
The aims of the pracce book are to familiarise students with the main features of academic vocabulary, to enrich students’ academic vocabulary, to enable students to use diconaries and other reference books efficiently and to equip students with metalanguage and learning strategies needed for independent acquisi on of academic vocabulary. Apart from broadening students’ academic vocabulary,…
A leader is a person who guides others, leading the way by example, creating an environment in which his or her subordinates or other team members feel actively involved in the entire process. A leader does not act as the boss of the team, but is committed to carrying out the mission and goals of the venture. Anybody can be a good leader, because leaders are not actually born – they are made.…
Students sometimes find the general process of writing an empirical research paper to be daunting. Yet, when the process is approached in a systematic way, students can become more comfortable with the writing and standard formatting used in an empirical article. Accordingly, the current paper serves as a template for the budding social scientist. In it, I describe the various sections of a …
A revolutionary new textbook introducing masters and doctoral students to the major research approaches and methodologies in the social sciences. Written by an out- standing set of scholars, and derived from successful course teaching, this volume will empower students to choose their own approach to research, to justify this approach and to situate it within the discipline. It addresses questi…
Two works of lasting influence on the theory and practice of the social sciences were Emile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) and G. Yule’s An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (1911). Both advanced the thesis that statistical data can be used to identify the causes of socially distributed phenomena. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, several philosophers began to question what…
The purpose of this volume is to provide a capsule view of the relationship of the behavioral and social sciences to pubIic health as we enter the 2 1st century. Historically, the genealogical tree of Western medicine often is traced to Hippucrates, who held a holistic concept of health and disease: “Health depends upon a state of equilibrium among the various internal factors which govern th…
Generally, “Bayesian analysis” refers to the statistical analysis of data that relies on Bayes’ Theorem, presented below. Bayes’ Theorem tells us how to update prior beliefs about parameters or hypotheses in light of data, to yield posterior beliefs. Or, even more simply, Bayes’ Theorem tells us how to learn rationally about parameters from data. As we shall see, Bayesian analysis…
South-driven initiatives on endogenous knowledge production owe a great debt to Claude Ake. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews the strengths and weaknesses of Ake’s account of the social sciences and knowledge production in Africa. It discusses his legacy and presents him as one of the most fertile and influential voices within the social science community in the continent. Being a pol…
Length, presentation. Most professors are less concerned with length than with the quality of an essay. I assure you that length is not an important criterion of my grading scheme. Longer is not necessarily better. Pascal once apologized to a correspondent: “The present letter is long, as I had no time to make it shorter.” Writing concisely often requires more care and attention than writi…
The current level of specialization of knowledge in a variety of fields of inquiry may make it quite challenging for a researcher to be at the same time a “developer” and a “tester” of a theory. Although a theory can exist without a necessary clear and obvious practical end goal, the ultimate test of the validity of a theory (whether it is situated in the exact or social sciences) will…
Narratives in Social Science Research reflects the long and deep research experience of Barbara Czarniawska. In the book we can appreciate her personal contributions, her expertise in dealing with the subjects, the large number of theories that are presented and the extensive selection of examples on collecting, interpreting and using narratives. As narrative methods emerged in, were legitimat…
Formal social science is relatively new. Nevertheless, a vast amount of information has been accumulated concerning the social life of human beings. This information has been used in building a system of knowledge about the nature, growth, and functioning of human societies. Social science is the name given to that system of knowledge. All knowledge is (1) knowledge of human beings, including t…