Search

The Quality & Quantity was established in 1967 and in 2017 it completed its half century. The journal is interdisciplinary in nature and it mainly discusses methodological application of mathematics and statistics in the social sciences, particularly sociology, economics, and social psychology. It was created with the idea of advancing methodology of the various social studies. This study looks back journey of the journal from 1967 to 2017 aims to develop a bibliometric analysis of all the publications of the journal. Web of Science Core Collection database is used to collect data. The present study discovered the significant contributions of the journal in terms of impact, topics, authors, universities and countries. Utrecht University of Netherlands is the most productive university. Asian Universities are emerging and growing quickly in the recent years. Although USA leads among the countries but Europe leads among the six supranational regions. Finally, the visualization of similarities viewer software is used to present network visualization of the bibliographic coupling, co-citation, citation, co-authorship and co-occurrence of keywords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Future-focus' is one of eight principles in the New Zealand Curriculum, and the 'Social Sciences Learning' area is an obvious starting point for curriculum design. However, any discussion of 'futures' raises questions about possible, preferred and alternative futures, and whose vision of 'the future' becomes dominant. This paper argues that the curriculum's future-focus should be understood as emerging from broader debates about New Zealand's future which originated in the 1970s and early 1980s, and that a particular version of New Zealand's future has come to dominate discussions. The paper stresses the need for teachers to critically examine the vision of New Zealand's future that circulates in discussions of education and to draw upon the full potential of the social sciences so as to allow students to explore a wider range of futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical social science research increasingly involves working collaboratively with organisations beyond the university. This paper contributes to the growing international literature on doctoral collaboration by exploring how UK doctoral students in the social sciences negotiate organisational collaborations. We draw on narrative interviews and administrative data to create a series of case-study vignettes. We juxtapose these with a theorisation of disciplinary knowledge practices to show how such collaborations are at once demanding and unpredictable, but also generative of new understanding and insights. We suggest that Burawoy's (American Sociological Review, 70(1), 4–28, 2005) model of the 'antagonistic interdependence' of public, critical, professional and policy sociologies is helpful as a heuristic for conceptualising doctoral student experiences of a range of different (and often contradictory) forms of social scientific knowledge. Our analysis demonstrates that both instrumental and critical forms of social knowledge can emerge from organisational partnerships and placements. We call for further attention to the 'generative paradoxes' (Bartunek and Rynes Journal of Management, 40(5), 1181–1201, 2014) and 'reflective entanglements' (Jagoda 2016) that result from doctoral collaborations, and for doctoral pedagogies that help students use these experiences to develop criticality and see it as a key skill in social research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychologists indicate that a feeling of inadequacy may be so completely sublimated that the affected individual is unaware of its presence. This type of reaction is apparently not uncommon among individuals. The clearest available evidence in support of the conclusion that sociologists possess sublimated inadequacy feelings is found in an interesting and salient projective-type test: the manner in which the introductory course in sociology is taught throughout the country. If it is assumed that the opening chapters of introductory texts influence professorial coverage in the classroom and if it is assumed that the basic course is usually populated by first year students, it becomes evident that sociologists are in the process of defending their raison d'etre before freshman students. The data suggests that sociology stands out in its lengthy attempt to defend its place in the world of science. Psychologists and economists come closest to the sociological pattern with almost one-half of the examined texts in each of these disciplines following the same pattern.

The field of political science has undergone significant change since the 1960s. The major shift was toward far greater quantification in the scholarly analyses. That movement sparked enduring controversies. These include disputes pitting scientific detachment against political relevance; specialization against accessibility; and quantitative against qualitative analysis. This article traces the contours of these controversies and offers some reflections on the discipline's possible future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Preference aggregation is used in a variety of multiagent applications, and as a result, voting theory has become an important topic in multiagent system research. However, power indices (which reflect how much “real power” a voter has in a weighted voting system) have received relatively little attention, although they have long been studied in political science and economics. We consider a particular multiagent domain, a threshold network flow game. Agents control the edges of a graph; a coalition wins if it can send a flow that exceeds a given threshold from a source vertex to a target vertex. The relative power of each edge/agent reflects its significance in enabling such a flow, and in real-world networks could be used, for example, to allocate resources for maintaining parts of the network. We examine the computational complexity of calculating two prominent power indices, the Banzhaf index and the Shapley-Shubik index, in this network flow domain. We also consider the complexity of calculating the core in this domain. The core can be used to allocate, in a stable manner, the gains of the coalition that is established. We show that calculating the Shapley-Shubik index in this network flow domain is NP-hard, and that calculating the Banzhaf index is #P-complete. Despite these negative results, we show that for some restricted network flow domains there exists a polynomial algorithm for calculating agents’ Banzhaf power indices. We also show that computing the core in this game can be performed in polynomial time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To review the literature on retention strategies in follow-up studies and their relevance to critical care and to comment on the Toronto experience with the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) follow-up studies.Design and Setting: Literature review and two cohort studies in a tertiary care hospital in Toronto, Canada.Patients and Participants: ARDS and SARS patients.Measurements and Results: Review articles from the social sciences and medicine are summarized and our own experience with two longitudinal studies is drawn upon to elucidate strategies that can be successfully used to attenuate participant drop-out from longitudinal studies. Three key areas for retention of subjects are identified from the literature: (a) respect for patients: respect for their ideas and their time commitment to the research project; (b) tracking: collect information on many patient contacts at the initiation of the study and outline tracking procedures for subjects lost to follow-up; and (c) study personnel: interpersonal skills must be reinforced, flexible working hours mandated, and support offered. Our 5-year ARDS and 1-year SARS study retention rates were 86% and 91%, respectively, using these methods.Conclusions: Strategies to reduce patient attrition are time consuming but necessary to preserve internal and external validity. When the follow-up system is working effectively, researchers can acquire the necessary data to advance knowledge in their field and patients are satisfied that they have an important role to play in the research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have studied epistemological development – or how one understands knowledge and knowing – of college students for many years. Research in this domain has included benchmarking studies of epistemological development, examinations of how curricular innovations impact epistemology, and some studies of differences in epistemological development based on disciplinary areas. The latter group of studies has generally focused on differences in epistemological beliefs for students who are studying in two different domains (e.g., nursing students versus physics students). In this study, we qualitatively investigate whether the epistemological perspectives of 60 science/engineering college students differs across the disciplinary areas of the sciences and the humanities. Our results indicate that such differences do exist and include a proposed grounded theory that describes how students' epistemologies may vary across knowledge domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Smallest-Space Analysis-I (SSA-I) which is increasingly used in social science studies. The article begins by very briefly discussing the SSA-I technique. Then, moves to the questions involved in comparing SSA-I solutions. A particular technique for comparison, PINDIS, is then explained in some detail. Finally, the results of an empirical study utilizing four SSA-I solutions are analyzed by PINDIS and by other approaches. SSA is mainly aimed at testing hypotheses about the structure of interrelationships and is not intended as a cluster analysis. Such hypotheses are tested in terms of the partitioning of the space into separate regions having specific geometric shapes. The comparison between any two SSA-I solutions has often been performed by identifying a certain pattern in the structure of the interrelationships, such as a RADEX, and comparing visually the degree to which the geometric representations of the two solutions are similar. Such a method has the advantage of relating the two solutions to a theoretical framework and a set of hypotheses, since the hypothesis of similarity of the two solutions is expressed in terms of the similar geometric representation.

The article presents a biography of sociologist Helmut R. Wagner, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Hobart and William Smith College in South Dennis, Massachusetts, who died on April 22, 1989. Wagner was born in Dresden, Germany in 1904 where he received his education culminating in graduation from a four year technical college which included studies in the social sciences. From 1925 till 1932, Wagner was an adult education teacher in Thuringia. An outspoken critic of Nazi tyranny. Wagner was declared an enemy of the state, deprived of his citizenship, and forced to leave Germany, in 1934. The first place of exile was in Switzerland, where Wagner engaged in studies in the social sciences and also was employed in a technical capacity by the Swiss armed forces. Wagner's interest in sociology was awakened by his reading of the work of Max Weber. While impressed by Weber's large scale socio-historical studies about the rise of capitalism, Wagner was influenced by Weber's insistence on the importance of interpreting social action from a subjective standpoint. Later he accepted Alfred Schutz's reinterpretation and deepening of Weber's micro-sociology and joined him in efforts to give sociology a consistently subjective foundation. During the past twenty eight years, Wagner dedicated his great talent and energy to the comprehension of Schutz' thinking. Wagner was a consummate researcher, a meticulously careful writer, and a person dedicated to the scholarly life. His knowledge of phenomenology and his background in the German intellectual tradition made him uniquely qualified to become the premiere custodian of the Alfred Schutz legacy.

Background: Research in engineering education has pointed to the need for new engineers to develop a broader skill-set with an emphasis on "softer" social skills. However, there remains strong tensions in the identity work that engineers must engage in to balance the technical demands of the discipline with the new emphasis on heterogeneous skills (Faulkner, Social Studies of Science 37:331–356, 2007). This study explores how three unconventional students experience these tensions in the final year of their construction engineering program, and as they move in and out of workplace field experiences. Results: Using a figured worlds framework (Holland et al., Identity and agency in cultural worlds, 1998), we explore the dominant subject positions for students in construction engineering classroom and workplaces in a 3-year Swedish engineering program. Results demonstrate that dominant subject positions for construction engineers can trouble students' identity work as they move across classroom and workplace settings. Conclusions: This study expands our knowledge of the complexity of students' identity work across classroom and workplace settings. The emergence of classroom and workplace masculinities that shape the dominant subject positions available to students are shown to trouble the identity work that students engage in as they move across these learning spaces. We examine students' identity strategies that contribute to their persistence through the field. Finally, we discuss implications for teaching and research in light of students' movements across these educational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent study of curricular innovation in the Ohio Valley by the author and Anne Diemer indicates that some departments are dealing imaginatively with their educational problems. This article describes examples of curricular innovation and suggests ways the Association can stimulate educational planning, innovation and evaluative research. A few colleges have developed distinctive approaches to the teaching of introductory sociology. Better articulation of undergraduate and graduate studies can help students discover as undergraduates whether or not they have the interests and capacities for achievement in social research. If the profession is to develop its educational resources and programs, it needs its own development program. This study indicates that departments are ready for a program of this kind. They have indicated an interest in working together to deal with common problems of recruitment and training. Small departments are particularly concerned about staff recruitment. Collaborative training and research projects might be organized by graduate departments.