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This paper examines the Chicago sociologist William F. Ogburn's (1886–1959) views about technological unemployment, which were intimately connected to his analysis of the social impacts of technological developments and resulting social problems due to cultural lag. We trace the development of his views as seen through his well‐known 1922 book, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, his important contributions to the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (1933), and his lesser‐known pamphlets designed for a broader audience—Living with Machines (1933), You and Machines (1934), and Machines and Tomorrow's World (1938). He used these pamphlets to educate the public about the dangers of new machines and technological unemployment. In doing so, he drew upon sociological analysis in his professional scholarly writings and his long‐standing personal interests in social betterment and social reform. Our analysis also calls into question the adequacy of existing scholarship on Ogburn that has emphasized his commitment to a statistical, dispassionate, and "objectivist" approach to social science research. We call for a revised, richer, and more complex view of Ogburn's work and legacy as one of the nation's leading social scientists during the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the interpretive synthesis of qualitative research in the sport and exercise sciences. The paper discusses the “meta-interpretation” approach which attempts to maintain an interpretive epistemology congruent with the majority of primary qualitative research. The paper reviews and evaluates eight research methods or approaches that include some form of synthesis and that are and have been widely used in sport, health and exercise research (literature review, systematic review, meta-analysis, meta-ethnography, grounded theory, cross-case comparison, secondary analysis of primary data, and interpretive phenomenological analysis). The key features of each approach are drawn out, and their implications for the meta-interpretation approach are discussed. The paper then outlines the procedure for meta-interpretation before concluding with some comments on the functions of synthesis in general and meta-interpretation in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present article we analyze a series of studies designed to detect the caries preventive effect of Duraphat by means of meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is a collection of statistical methods designed to investigate and to summarize a series of investigations. It may be a valuable tool to complement traditional narrative reviews. During the last years meta-analysis has attracted increasing interest in sociology, psychology and medicine. In order to find previous studies concerned with the clinical effects of Duraphat we applied a systematic literature search. Papers were included independent of results when they fulfilled a checklist of well defined methodological selection criteria. In order to aggregate the results of the Duraphat- studies we used different complementary statistical approaches: Firstly, the so-called file drawer problem is considered. This may help to get a better insight into the problem of underreporting non-significant results or publication bias. It was found to be very unlikely that underreporting of non-significant results could reverse the conclusion into an overall null-result. After that, the inhomogeneity between studies is investigated. The overall variation of caries reduction R is separated into two components: A between study component of variance and a variance pertaining to the individual studies (random effects model). It was found that the overall variation is dominated by the between studies variation and not by the sampling variation. Due to the pronounced variation between studies the confidence interval of the overall effect size IR =0.38) is quite large (95%-Cl: 0.19-0.57). The heterogeneity of our studies naturally suggested exploring possible sources thereof by investigating the dependence of caries reduction on variables characterizing the studies. It was found that caries reduction is negatively correlated with study duration. This finding provided a study-duration-adjusted effect of caries reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines statistical techniques for exploiting relevance information to weight search terms. These techniques are presented as a natural extension of weighting methods using information about the distribution of index terms in documents in general. A series of relevance weighting functions is derived and is justified by theoretical considerations. In particular, it is shown that specific weighted search methods are implied by a general probabilistic theory of retrieval. Different applications of relevance weighting are illustrated by experimental results for test collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There exist a variety of tests for attraction and repulsion effects between spatial point populations, most notably those involving either nearest-neighbor or cell-count statistics. Diggle and Cox (1981) showed that for the nearest-neighbor approach, a powerful test could be constructed using Kendall's rank correlation coefficient. In the present paper, this approach is extended to cell-count statistics in a manner paralleling the K-function approach of Lotwick and Silverman (1982). The advantage of the present test is that, unlike nearest-neighbors, one can identify the spatial scales at which repulsion or attraction are most significant. In addition, it avoids the torus-wrapping restrictions implicit in the Monte Carlo testing procedure of Lotwick and Silverman. Examples are developed to show that this testing procedure can in fact identify both attraction and repulsion between the same pair of point populations at different scales of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are some kinds of violent conflicts between factions in which one generation of belligerents trains a successive generation to continue and! or enlarge the scale of conflict in an arena where the hostilities are internecine A model is developed of the devolution of internecine conflict using the lexicon of game theory and the simple mathematics of probability Assumptions pertaining to the behavior and attitudes of factions are transcribed into mathematics to formulate a theory of conflict resolution The theory is general enough to be applied to the struggles in the Middle East as well as to warfare among youth gangs The chief proposition to emerge from the analysis demonstrates how the statistical incidence of aggressive and peaceable factions varies over time The time path has the characteristics of a stochastic process with estimable parameters [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overwhelming emphasis in social research on collecting positive data has had the dangerous effect of minimizing the worth of negative evidence, which is defined in this paper as either (1) the nonoccurrence of events, (2) an occurrence that is not reacted to or not reported (because it is outside the frame of reference of the population or of the researcher), or (3) although noted in its raw form, distorted in its interpretation or withheld from analysis and report. A paradigm of seven types of negative evidence is developed: (1) Events Do Not Occur; (2) Population Is Not Aware of Events; (3) Population Wishes to Hide Events; (4) Commonplace Events Are Overlooked; (5) Effects of the Researcher's Idea Set; (6) Unconscious Non-Reportage; and (7) Conscious Non-Reportage. Each type is discussed, and examples are presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the place of negative evidence in both inductively and deductively based social research, and a caution against ignoring such data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolph Lowe and his mentor Franz Oppenheimer were founding members of the Editorial Board of the The American Journal of Economics and Sociology in 1941. Both this journal’s name and its mission were inspired by Lowe’s greatly underappreciated 1935 book, Economics and Sociology. There, Lowe issued his “plea for cooperation” and “constructive synthesis” in the social sciences. Lowe was committed to interdisciplinary teaching and research for the entirety of his long and interesting career. When celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Journal, it is worthwhile to recall Lowe’s enduring contributions. His expression “constructive synthesis” still remains part of the mission of the AJES as inscribed on the back cover of the journal itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By associating mobility with the unpredicatability of social states, new measures of social mobility may be constructed. We propose a family of three state-by-state and aggregate (scalar) predictability measures. The first set of measures is based on the transition matrix. The second uses a sampling approach and permits statistical testing of the hypothesis of perfect mobility, providing a new justification for the use of X² statistic. The third satisfies the demanding criterion of 'period consistency'. An empirical example demonstrates the usefulness of the new measures to complement existing ones in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]