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Statistical Methods for Human Rights

by Jana Asher David Banks Fritz J. Scheuren

Human rights issues are shaping the modern world. They define the expectations by which nations are judged and affect the policy of governments, corporations, and foundations. Statistics is central to the modern perspective on human rights. It allows researchers to measure the effect of health care policies, the penetration of educational opportunity, and progress towards gender equality. This book describes the statistics that underlie the social science research in human rights. It includes case studies, methodology, and research papers that discuss the fundamental measurement issues.

Statistical Modelling for Social Researchers: Principles and Practice

by Roger Tarling

This book explains the principles and theory of statistical modelling in an intelligible way for the non-mathematical social scientist looking to apply statistical modelling techniques in research. The book also serves as an introduction for those wishing to develop more detailed knowledge and skills in statistical modelling. Rather than present a limited number of statistical models in great depth, the aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of the statistical models currently adopted in social research, in order that the researcher can make appropriate choices and select the most suitable model for the research question to be addressed. To facilitate application, the book also offers practical guidance and instruction in fitting models using SPSS and Stata, the most popular statistical computer software which is available to most social researchers. Instruction in using MLwiN is also given. Models covered in the book include; multiple regression, binary, multinomial and ordered logistic regression, log-linear models, multilevel models, latent variable models (factor analysis), path analysis and simultaneous equation models and models for longitudinal data and event histories. An accompanying website hosts the datasets and further exercises in order that the reader may practice developing statistical models. An ideal tool for postgraduate social science students, research students and practicing social researchers in universities, market research, government social research and the voluntary sector.

Statistical Modelling for Social Researchers: Principles and Practice

by Roger Tarling

This book explains the principles and theory of statistical modelling in an intelligible way for the non-mathematical social scientist looking to apply statistical modelling techniques in research. The book also serves as an introduction for those wishing to develop more detailed knowledge and skills in statistical modelling. Rather than present a limited number of statistical models in great depth, the aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of the statistical models currently adopted in social research, in order that the researcher can make appropriate choices and select the most suitable model for the research question to be addressed. To facilitate application, the book also offers practical guidance and instruction in fitting models using SPSS and Stata, the most popular statistical computer software which is available to most social researchers. Instruction in using MLwiN is also given. Models covered in the book include; multiple regression, binary, multinomial and ordered logistic regression, log-linear models, multilevel models, latent variable models (factor analysis), path analysis and simultaneous equation models and models for longitudinal data and event histories. An accompanying website hosts the datasets and further exercises in order that the reader may practice developing statistical models. An ideal tool for postgraduate social science students, research students and practicing social researchers in universities, market research, government social research and the voluntary sector.

Status Signals: A Sociological Study of Market Competition

by Joel M. Podolny

Why are elite jewelers reluctant to sell turquoise, despite strong demand? Why did leading investment bankers shun junk bonds for years, despite potential profits? Status Signals is the first major sociological examination of how concerns about status affect market competition. Starting from the basic premise that status pervades the ties producers form in the marketplace, Joel Podolny shows how anxieties about status influence whom a producer does (or does not) accept as a partner, the price a producer can charge, the ease with which a producer enters a market, how the producer's inventions are received, and, ultimately, the market segments the producer can (and should) enter. To achieve desired status, firms must offer more than strong past performance and product quality--they must also send out and manage social and cultural signals. Through detailed analyses of market competition across a broad array of industries--including investment banking, wine, semiconductors, shipping, and venture capital--Podolny demonstrates the pervasive impact of status. Along the way, he shows how corporate strategists, tempted by the profits of a market that would negatively affect their status, consider not only whether to enter the market but also whether they can alter the public's perception of the market. Podolny also examines the different ways in which a firm can have status. Wal-Mart, for example, has low status among the rich as a place to shop, but high status among the rich as a place to invest. Status Signals provides a systematic understanding of market dynamics that have--until now--not been fully appreciated.

Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate (PDF)

by Kenan Malik

Debates about race are back and they’re only getting bigger. The US government has licensed a heart drug to be used only on African Americans. A pharmaceutical company is trialling a white-only anti-hepatitis drug. A genetic study claims that Jews are more intelligent because of their history of money lending. There has recently been a massive upsurge in scientific racial research, and in STRANGE FRUIT, Malik reveals this rise is paradoxically due to the efforts of liberal anti-racism; a movement that celebrates human difference over human commonalities. Navigating readers through the historical and scientific thinking on the subject, Malik shows that races are a social construct – they do not actually exist. Stressing that scientists should be allowed to study population differences without the distortions of political race debates, Malik provides a gripping and essential guide to understanding difference in a multicultural world.

Strategieorientierte Planung im kooperativen Staat

by Alexander Hamedinger Oliver Frey Jens S. Dangschat Andrea Breitfuss

Strategieorientierte Planung erlebt seit den 1990er Jahren eine Wiedergeburt. Die Entwicklung und Umsetzung umfassender strategischer Planungsdokumente und Leitbilder ist vor dem Hintergrund des gegenwärtigen sozialen und ökonomischen Wandels sowie im Zusammenhang mit dem Wandel von Staatlichkeit zu sehen, welcher sich im Konzept des "kooperativen Staates" ausdrückt. Das Buch widmet sich zwei zentralen Fragestellungen: einerseits wird nach der Einbettung der verschiedenen Ansätze strategieorientierter Planung in den planungstheoretischen Diskurs, andererseits nach der Rolle strategieorientierter Planung im Wandel des Steuerungsverständnisses auf lokaler und regionaler Ebene gefraft. Das der strategieorientierten Planung zugrundeliegende Planungsverständnis beinhaltet die Vorstellung von Planung als sozialem Prozess sowie als Instrument zur Aushandlung und Vermittlung zwischen widersprüchlichen Interessen.

Stress Processes across the Life Course (ISSN #Volume 13)

by Heather A. Turner Scott Schieman

Stress researchers have become increasing aware of the ways in which structural and psychosocial variations in the life course shape exposure and vulnerability to social stress. This volume of Advances in Life Course Research explores, theoretically and empirically, stress processes both within and across specific life stages. Chapters within this volume incorporate several areas of research, including:• How physical and mental health trajectories are shaped by life course variations in stressors and resources• Stress associated with social role transitions and the significance of different role trajectories for stress exposure and outcomes • Life course variations in the quality and content of institutional contexts (such as school, work and family) and their significance for stress processes• Differences in types, levels, and effects of different stress-moderating resources within and across life course stages• Ways in which race, gender, and social class influence or condition stress processes over the life course• The relevance of “linked lives" within families and across generations for stress exposure and vulnerability• Historical variations in stress-related conditions and cohort differences in stress experiences• Methodological and theoretical advances in studying stress processes across the life course

Struggles Before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today

by Jean Van Delinder

There were many little-known challenges to racial segregation before the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The author's oral history interviews highlight civil rights protests seldom considered significant, but that help us understand the beginnings of the civil rights struggle before it became a mass movement. She brings to light many important but largely forgotten events, such as the often overlooked 1950s Oklahoma sit-in protests that provided a model for the better-known Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins. This book's significance lies in its challenge to perspectives that dominate scholarship on the civil rights movement. The broader concepts illustrated-including agency, culture, social structure, and situations-throughout this book open up substantially more of the complexity of the civil rights struggle. This book employs a methodology for analyzing not just the civil rights movement but other social movements and, indeed, social change in general.

Struggles Before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today

by Jean Van Delinder

There were many little-known challenges to racial segregation before the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The author's oral history interviews highlight civil rights protests seldom considered significant, but that help us understand the beginnings of the civil rights struggle before it became a mass movement. She brings to light many important but largely forgotten events, such as the often overlooked 1950s Oklahoma sit-in protests that provided a model for the better-known Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins. This book's significance lies in its challenge to perspectives that dominate scholarship on the civil rights movement. The broader concepts illustrated-including agency, culture, social structure, and situations-throughout this book open up substantially more of the complexity of the civil rights struggle. This book employs a methodology for analyzing not just the civil rights movement but other social movements and, indeed, social change in general.

Struggles for an Alternative Globalization: An Ethnography of Counterpower in Southern France

by Gwyn Williams

Through an anthropological study of a highly influential movement of French 'alterglobalization' activists, this book offers an ethnographic window onto the global movement against corporate capitalism and the neoliberal policies of the WTO. Based on extensive fieldwork on the Larzac plateau in rural southern France, it explores the politics of protest in which activists engage. It examines their resistance to various forms of power, their organization of struggle, their attempts to live out their ideals in daily life, and their challenges to conventional understandings of politics, democracy, economics, morality and globalization. By subjecting power and resistance to ethnographic study rather than adopting them as abstract categories of analysis, this volume makes an important contribution to theoretical debates on globalization, domination and resistance. It will be of interest not only to anthropologists and scholars of social movements, but also to sociologists and political scientists, as well as to activists themselves.

Struggles for an Alternative Globalization: An Ethnography of Counterpower in Southern France

by Gwyn Williams

Through an anthropological study of a highly influential movement of French 'alterglobalization' activists, this book offers an ethnographic window onto the global movement against corporate capitalism and the neoliberal policies of the WTO. Based on extensive fieldwork on the Larzac plateau in rural southern France, it explores the politics of protest in which activists engage. It examines their resistance to various forms of power, their organization of struggle, their attempts to live out their ideals in daily life, and their challenges to conventional understandings of politics, democracy, economics, morality and globalization. By subjecting power and resistance to ethnographic study rather than adopting them as abstract categories of analysis, this volume makes an important contribution to theoretical debates on globalization, domination and resistance. It will be of interest not only to anthropologists and scholars of social movements, but also to sociologists and political scientists, as well as to activists themselves.

A Study of Personal and Cultural Values: American, Japanese, and Vietnamese (Culture, Mind, and Society)

by R. D'Andrade

This study analyzes American, Vietnamese and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small, almost trivial differences in personal values between cultures.

Study, Power and the University (UK Higher Education OUP Humanities & Social Sciences Higher Education OUP)

by Sarah Mann

This book highlights the effects of power within the higher educational process, and argues that in order to understand the student experience we have to take seriously the institution as a context for learning.It considers key questions such as: Why is the student experience of higher education sometimes negative or restricted? How does power operate within the institution? What are the forces that limit or enable student agency? How can institutions of higher education create conditions which best support more enabling forces?Higher Education has its own particular culture, social relations and practices, governed by social and discursive norms. It is always implicated in relations of power through its function in society and its effects on individuals. This book considers how, for the student, these effects can be enabling and engaging, or limiting and diminishing.In exploring the effects of the institutionalization of learning and the workings of power implicated within this, it sets out to add to more cognitive and pedagogic ways of understanding student experience in higher education. Study, Power and the University provides key reading for educational researchers and developers, academics and higher education managers.

Studying Societies and Cultures: Marvin Harris's Cultural Materialism and its Legacy

by Lawrence A. Kuznar Stephen K. Sanderson

"A thought-provoking, stimulating volume on the past, present and future of cultural materialism that is both laudatory of Harris' research strategy and critical of it." Paul Shankman, University of Colorado One of the most important anthropologists of all time, Marvin Harris was influential worldwide as the founder of cultural materialism. This book accessibly analyzes Harris's theories and their important legacies today. The chapters explore cultural materialism's epistemology and its relation to rational choice theory, Darwinian social science, and population pressures. The authors assess recent attempts to extend and reformulate cultural materialism and highlight cross-cultural, archaeological, and ethnographic applications of cultural materialism today.

Studying Societies and Cultures: Marvin Harris's Cultural Materialism and its Legacy

by Lawrence A. Kuznar Stephen K. Sanderson

"A thought-provoking, stimulating volume on the past, present and future of cultural materialism that is both laudatory of Harris' research strategy and critical of it." Paul Shankman, University of Colorado One of the most important anthropologists of all time, Marvin Harris was influential worldwide as the founder of cultural materialism. This book accessibly analyzes Harris's theories and their important legacies today. The chapters explore cultural materialism's epistemology and its relation to rational choice theory, Darwinian social science, and population pressures. The authors assess recent attempts to extend and reformulate cultural materialism and highlight cross-cultural, archaeological, and ethnographic applications of cultural materialism today.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

The Stuff of Thought is an exhilarating work of non-fiction. Surprising, thought-provoking and incredibly enjoyable, there is no other book like it - Steven Pinker will revolutionise the way you think about language. He analyses what words actually mean and how we use them, and he reveals what this can tell us about ourselves. He shows how we use space and motion as metaphors for more abstract ideas, and uncovers the deeper structures of human thought that have been shaped by evolutionary history. He also explores the emotional impact of language, from names to swear words, and shows us the full power that it can have over us. And, with this book, he also shows just how stimulating and entertaining language can be.

Sublime Communication Technologies

by Rod Giblett

This lively new study is a critical cultural history of communication technologies, from railways and telegraphy to computers and the Internet, in which Rod Giblett argues that these technologies play a pivotal role in the cultural history of modernity and its project of the sublime.

Substance and Substitution: Methadone Subjects in Liberal Societies

by S. Fraser K. Valentine

Located between three powerful phenomena, public health, the law and social stigma, methadone maintenance treatment attracts loyal advocates, vociferous critics and innumerable engaged onlookers. This book aims to examine the controversial approach to addiction, providing in the process a unique approach to literature on illicit drugs

Successful Group Care: Explorations in the Powerful Environment

by Martin Wolins

Edited by one of the leading authorities in international child care, this sourcebook provides valuable insights from international experiments in group child care. The selections, written by distinguished international child care experts, explore a broad range of successful group care settings in Austria, Great Britain, Israel, Mexico, Poland, the Soviet Union, the United States and Yugoslavia. Much of the material was previously unknown to American professionals, at the time of the original publication, who, for the most part, held group care in disrepute. Today, there is a growing interest in group programs for children of various ages and in settings ranging from day care programs to institutions and schools of various types.Successful Group Care is divided into six major parts. The first of which is a general review of successful group care, drawing upon material that appears later in the book. Subsequent sections present historical and philosophical issues in group care, including boarding schools in the former Soviet Union and the Israeli Kibbutz. Research studies analyzing the negative and positive effects of group care for young children and several teenage group environments are discussed, particularly with regard to their peer effect on values and moral character. The project also deals with group care of disturbed children. The book ends with the most complete bibliography on the subject, including some of the most significant works in Polish, Russian, German, and Hebrew.This book will be invaluable to all those interested in and involved in group child care: social workers, particularly in child welfare; developmental child psychologists; early childhood educators; child psychiatrists; family sociologists; child care workers; day care personnel; and students in social work courses in childhood and adolescence, early childhood education, developmental psychology, and in training courses for day care personnel and child care work

Successful Group Care: Explorations in the Powerful Environment

by Martin Wolins

Edited by one of the leading authorities in international child care, this sourcebook provides valuable insights from international experiments in group child care. The selections, written by distinguished international child care experts, explore a broad range of successful group care settings in Austria, Great Britain, Israel, Mexico, Poland, the Soviet Union, the United States and Yugoslavia. Much of the material was previously unknown to American professionals, at the time of the original publication, who, for the most part, held group care in disrepute. Today, there is a growing interest in group programs for children of various ages and in settings ranging from day care programs to institutions and schools of various types.Successful Group Care is divided into six major parts. The first of which is a general review of successful group care, drawing upon material that appears later in the book. Subsequent sections present historical and philosophical issues in group care, including boarding schools in the former Soviet Union and the Israeli Kibbutz. Research studies analyzing the negative and positive effects of group care for young children and several teenage group environments are discussed, particularly with regard to their peer effect on values and moral character. The project also deals with group care of disturbed children. The book ends with the most complete bibliography on the subject, including some of the most significant works in Polish, Russian, German, and Hebrew.This book will be invaluable to all those interested in and involved in group child care: social workers, particularly in child welfare; developmental child psychologists; early childhood educators; child psychiatrists; family sociologists; child care workers; day care personnel; and students in social work courses in childhood and adolescence, early childhood education, developmental psychology, and in training courses for day care personnel and child care work

Supervision und Coaching: Praxisforschung und Beratung im Sozial- und Bildungsbereich

by Johannes Krall Erika Mikula Wolfgang Jansche

Supervision und Coaching sind wirksame Instrumente der Qualitätssicherung professioneller Arbeit im Sozial- und Bildungsbereich. Und mehr noch: Sie tragen als Praxisforschung zu Innovation und Entwicklung bei. SupervisorInnen und Coaches beforschen - unter Einbeziehung der professionell Handelnden - Praxis und schaffen Wissen: Situationsbeschreibungen, Veränderungsperspektiven und Handlungsstrategien - Innen(an)sichten von Arbeits- und Organisationszusammenhängen. WissenschaftlerInnen und BeraterInnen haben sich auf eine gemeinsame Spurensuche begeben und fragen, wie Wissen in und über Supervision und Coaching hervorgebracht wird und wie unterschiedliche Zugänge in Forschung und Beratung besser vernetzt werden können.

Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of Interpretation

by Norman K. Denzin

Symbolic interactionism is one of the most enduring - and certainly the most sociological - of all social psychologies. In this landmark work, Norman K. Denzin traces its tortured history from its roots in American pragmatism to its present-day encounter with poststructuralism and postmodernism. Arguing that if interactionism is to continue to thrive and grow it must incorporate elements of post structural and post-modern theory into its underlying views of history, culture and politics, the author develops a research agenda which merges the interactionist sociological imagination with the critical insights on contemporary feminism and cultural studies. Norman Denzin's programmatic analysis of symbolic interactionism, which develops a politics of interpretation merging theory and practice, will be welcomed by students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines, from sociology to cultural studies.

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Showing 20,176 through 20,200 of 75,005 results