Shows how Deleuze's philosophy is shaking up research in the humanities and social sciences
Deleuzian thinking is having a significant impact on research practices in the Social Sciences not least ...because one of its key implications is the demand to break down the false divide between theory and practice. This book brings together international academics from a range of Social Science and Humanities disciplines to reflect on how Deleuze's philosophy is opening up and shaping methodologies and practices of empirical research.
Key featuresContributors from fields throughout the social sciences demonstrate how engaging with Deleuze's work is reshaping their research process Questions the relationship between theory and methodologyExplores the conditions under which empirical research is conductedConsiders the effects/affects of researchContributors
Alecia Youngblood Jackson • Anna Hickey-Moody • Carol Taylor • David Mellor • David R. Cole • Emma Renold • Jamie Lorimer • Jessica Ringrose • Lisa A. Mazzei • Maggie MacLure • Mindy Blaise • Rebecca Coleman • Sarah Dyke • Silvia M. Grinberg
Designing Effective Web Surveys is a practical guide to designing web surveys, based on empirical evidence and grounded in scientific research and theory. It is designed to guide survey practitioners ...in the art and science of developing and deploying successful web surveys. The author guides the researcher through the steps involved, from the basic building blocks and suggests ways to increase visual impact and interactivity. Throughout, he considers the importance of layout and design, and attention is also given to the way questions are put together. The book is intended for academic, government, and market researchers who design and conduct web surveys.
A tale of two cultures Goertz, Gary; Mahoney, James
2012., 20120909, 2012, 2012-09-09, 20120101
eBook
Some in the social sciences argue that the same logic applies to both qualitative and quantitative methods. InA Tale of Two Cultures, Gary Goertz and James Mahoney demonstrate that these two ...paradigms constitute different cultures, each internally coherent yet marked by contrasting norms, practices, and toolkits. They identify and discuss major differences between these two traditions that touch nearly every aspect of social science research, including design, goals, causal effects and models, concepts and measurement, data analysis, and case selection. Although focused on the differences between qualitative and quantitative research, Goertz and Mahoney also seek to promote toleration, exchange, and learning by enabling scholars to think beyond their own culture and see an alternative scientific worldview. This book is written in an easily accessible style and features a host of real-world examples to illustrate methodological points.
InEthnography in Today's World, Roger Sanjek examines the genre and practice of ethnography from a historical perspective, from its nineteenth-century beginnings and early twentieth-century ...consolidation, through political reorientations during the 1960s and the impact of feminism and postmodernism in later decades, to its current outlook in an increasingly urban world. Drawing on a career of ethnographic research across Brazil, Ghana, New York City, and with the Gray Panthers, Sanjek probes politics and rituals in multiethnic New York, the dynamics of activist meetings, human migration through the ages, and shifting conceptions of race in the United States. He interrogates well-known works from Boas, Whyte, Fabian, Geertz, Marcus, and Clifford, as well as less celebrated researchers, addressing methodological concerns from ethnographers' reliance on assistants in the formative days of the discipline to contemporary comparative issues and fieldwork and writing strategies.
Ethnography in Today's Worldcontributes to our understanding of culture and society in an age of globalization. These provocative examinations of the value of ethnographic research challenge conventional views as to how ethnographic fieldwork is and can be conceived, conducted, contextualized, and communicated to academic audiences and the twenty-first-century public.
Representation in Scientific Practice, published by the MIT Press in 1990, helped coalesce a long-standing interest in scientific visualization among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of ...science and remains a touchstone for current investigations in science and technology studies. This volume revisits the topic, taking into account both the changing conceptual landscape of STS and the emergence of new imaging technologies in scientific practice. It offers cutting-edge research on a broad array of fields that study information as well as short reflections on the evolution of the field by leading scholars, including some of the contributors to the 1990 volume. The essays consider the ways in which viewing experiences are crafted in the digital era; the embodied nature of work with digital technologies; the constitutive role of materials and technologies -- from chalkboards to brain scans -- in the production of new scientific knowledge; the metaphors and images mobilized by communities of practice; and the status and significance of scientific imagery in professional and popular culture.ContributorsMorana Alac, Michael Barany, Anne Beaulieu, Annamaria Carusi, Catelijne Coopmans, Lorraine Daston, Sarah de Rijcke, Joseph Dumit, Emma Frow, Yann Giraud, Aud Sissel Hoel, Martin Kemp, Bruno Latour, John Law, Michael Lynch, Donald MacKenzie, Cyrus Mody, Natasha Myers, Rachel Prentice, Arie Rip, Martin Ruivenkamp, Lucy Suchman, Janet Vertesi, Steve Woolgar
Population-based survey experiments have become an invaluable tool for social scientists struggling to generalize laboratory-based results, and for survey researchers besieged by uncertainties about ...causality. Thanks to technological advances in recent years, experiments can now be administered to random samples of the population to which a theory applies. Yet until now, there was no self-contained resource for social scientists seeking a concise and accessible overview of this methodology, its strengths and weaknesses, and the unique challenges it poses for implementation and analysis.
Quantitative Paleozoology describes and illustrates how the remains of long-dead animals recovered from archaeological and paleontological excavations can be studied and analyzed. The methods range ...from determining how many animals of each species are represented to determining whether one collection consists of more broken and more burned bones than another. All methods are described and illustrated with data from real collections, while numerous graphs illustrate various quantitative properties.
Participatory Action Research (PAR) approaches and methods have seen an explosion of recent interest in the social and environmental sciences. PAR involves collaborative research, education and ...action which is oriented towards social change, representing a major epistemological challenge to mainstream research traditions. It has recently been the subject of heated critique and debate and rapid theoretical and methodological development.
This book captures these developments, exploring the justification, theorisation, practice and implications of PAR. It offers a critical introduction to understanding and working with PAR in different social, spatial and institutional contexts. The authors engage with PAR’s radical potential, while maintaining a critical awareness of its challenges and dangers. The book is divided into three parts. The first part explores the intellectual, ethical and pragmatic contexts of PAR; the development and diversity of approaches to PAR; recent poststructuralist perspectives on PAR as a form of power; the ethic of participation; and issues of safety and well-being. Part two is a critical exploration of the politics, places and practices of PAR. Contributors draw on diverse research experiences with differently situated groups and issues including environmentally sustainable practices, family livelihoods, sexual health, gendered experiences of employment, and specific communities such as people with disabilities, migrant groups, and young people. The principles, dilemmas and strategies associated with participatory approaches and methods including diagramming, cartographies, art, theatre, photovoice, video and geographical information systems are also discussed. Part three reflects on how effective PAR is, including the analysis of its products and processes, participatory learning, representation and dissemination, institutional benefits and challenges, and working between research, action, activism and change.
The authors find that a spatial perspective and an attention to scale offer helpful means of negotiating the potentials and paradoxes of PAR. This approach responds to critiques of PAR by highlighting how the spatial politics of practising participation can be mobilised to create more effective and just research processes and outcomes. The book adds significant weight to the recent critical reappraisal of PAR, suggesting why, when, where and how we might take forward PAR’s commitment to enabling collaborative social transformation. It will be particularly useful to researchers and students of Human Geography, Development Studies and Sociology.
1. Introduction: Connecting People, Participation and Place Part 1: Reflection 2. Participatory Action Research: Origins, Approaches and Methods 3. Participation as a Form of Power: Retheorising Empowerment and Spatialising Participatory Action Research 4. Participatory Action Research: Making a Difference to Theory, Practice and Action 5. Toward a Participatory Ethics 6. Participatory Action Research and Researcher Safety Part 2: Action 7. Environment and Development: (Re)Connecting Community and Commons in New England Fisheries, USA 8. Working Towards and beyond Collaborative Resource Management: Parks, People and Participation in the Peruvian Amazon 9. Researching Sexual Health: Two Participatory Action Research Projects in Zimbabwe 10. Gender and Employment: Participatory Social Auditing in Kenya 11. Inclusive Methodologies: Including Disabled People in Participatory Action Research in Scotland and Canada 12. Working with Migrant Communities: Collaborating with the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, Canada 13. Peer Research with Youth: Negotiating (Sub)Cultural Capital, Place and Participation in Aotearoa/New Zealand 14. Participatory Diagramming: A Critical View from North East England 15. Participatory Cartographies: Reflections from Research Performances in Fiji and Tanzania 16. Participatory Art: Capturing Spatial Vocabularies in a Collaborative Visual Methodology 17. Participatory Theatre: ‘Creating a Source for Staging an Example’ in the USA 18. Photovoice: Insights into Marginalisation through a ‘Community Lens’ in Saskatchewan, Canada 19. Uniting People with Place Using Participatory Video in Aotearoa/New Zealand: A Ngati Hauiti Journey 20. Participatory GIS: The Humboldt/West Humboldt Park Community GIS Project, Chicago, USA Part 3: Reflection 21. Participatory Data Analysis 22. Participatory Learning: Opportunities and Challenges 23. Beyond the Journal Article: Representations, Audience and the Presentation of Participatory Action Research 24. Linking Participatory Research to Action: Institutional Challenges 25. Relating Action to Activism: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections. Conclusion 26. Conclusion: The Space(s) and Scale(s) of Participatory Action Research: Constructing Empowering Geographies?
Sara Kindon is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Development Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her research interests focus on participation, visuality and cross-cultural research. She has worked in Costa Rica, Indonesia and in rural and urban contexts in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Rachel Pain is a social geographer at Durham University in the UK. Her research interests include fear, well-being and social justice. She is currently conducting PAR with young asylum seekers, refugees and locally born young people in north east England.
Mike Kesby is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK. His research interests include participatory methods, HIV education programs, gender relations and children’s geographies. He works predominately in rural Zimbabwe.
Priority setting of health interventions is often ad-hoc and resources are not used to an optimal extent. Underlying problem is that multiple criteria play a role and decisions are complex. ...Interventions may be chosen to maximize general population health, to reduce health inequalities of disadvantaged or vulnerable groups, ad/or to respond to life-threatening situations, all with respect to practical and budgetary constraints. This is the type of problem that policy makers are typically bad at solving rationally, unaided. They tend to use heuristic or intuitive approaches to simplify complexity, and in the process, important information is ignored. Next, policy makers may select interventions for only political motives. This indicates the need for rational and transparent approaches to priority setting. Over the past decades, a number of approaches have been developed, including evidence-based medicine, burden of disease analyses, cost-effectiveness analyses, and equity analyses. However, these approaches concentrate on single criteria only, whereas in reality, policy makers need to make choices taking into account multiple criteria simultaneously. Moreover, they do not cover all criteria that are relevant to policy makers. Therefore, the development of a multi-criteria approach to priority setting is necessary, and this has indeed recently been identified as one of the most important issues in health system research. In other scientific disciplines, multi-criteria decision analysis is well developed, has gained widespread acceptance and is routinely used. This paper presents the main principles of multi-criteria decision analysis. There are only a very few applications to guide resource allocation decisions in health. We call for a shift away from present priority setting tools in health--that tend to focus on single criteria--towards transparent and systematic approaches that take into account all relevant criteria simultaneously.
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