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Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) or local ecological knowledge (LEK) has only recently gained traction as "legitimate" science in Western academic discourse. Such approaches to inclusivity continue to face institutional, sociocultural, and equity barriers to being fully accepted in academic discourse in comparison to Western-based frameworks. Postcolonial studies have attempted to rectify this Western-domination in characterizing diverse forms of bird--human relationships. However, the integration of multiple cosmologies (worldviews) and ontologies (realities) in research or management creates challenges that we discuss. We elucidate commonalities and antithetical positions between Western-derived bird knowledge and management with that of TEK or LEK in both local and global contexts. We combine ecological/ornithological studies with key terms, theories, and methods from the social sciences to integrate the approaches and facilitate understanding. For example, we follow a "theory synthesis" approach in this conceptual paper to question epistemological and ontological assumptions of bird knowledge and how we acquire it to question, "how do we move from a decolonial approach (discussions and acknowledgement) to decolonization (action)?" This paper is a product of ongoing discourse among global researchers of an academic ethno-ornithology research lab based in the United Kingdom, who partner with global collaborators. The 3 case studies draw from ongoing research in Southeast Asia, South America, and decolonializing policy efforts in New Zealand. We analyzed these case studies using a postcolonial theoretical lens to provide insights into how Western scientists can embrace TEK and LEK and actively work to decolonize ethno-ornithology and ornithology in theory and practice. Further, we discuss perceived core tenets to equity and inclusion in community-based TEK and LEK conservation projects from the Global South. Diversity, equity, inclusivity, and justice in bird--human relations and knowledge were identified as targets for systemic change within the academic institutions of Western scientists. By recognizing, discussing, and embracing non-Western cosmologies and ontologies, non-Indigenous scientists can help influence the decolonization of ethno-ornithology, ornithology, and bird--human relations through respectful, participatory, equitable, culturally considerate, and "non-extractive" community-based initiatives in partnership with local groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the most highly cited in the "Journals of Gerontology Series," from 2000 to 2002. Improvement in the impact factor of the periodical; Most cited articles in 2001; Most cited articles in other gerontology journals.

Community work and empowerment are contested concepts that have been co-opted for political purposes. With the rising focus in welfare provision for older adults in light of the ageing population worldwide, there is a need to understand the current forms of empowerment in community work with older adults. This review plugs the research gap by reviewing studies of community work with older adults in the social work field. An electronic search of studies published between 2009 and 2019 on three major databases for social science research was conducted. Eleven papers were included in the review and compared through a coding frame. The conceptualization of empowerment, the theoretical framework, approach to community intervention and the nature of the intervention was examined. Most of the reviewed interventions involved social planning where the participation of older adults was enlisted to address a problem identified by professionals, but there was little theoretical overlap in the studies. The findings underscore gaps present in the theoretical understanding of empowerment and how the well-being of older adults is advanced through community work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Various dimensions of healthcare service quality were used and discussed in literature across the globe. This study presents an updated meaningful review of the extensive research that has been conducted on measuring dimensions of healthcare service quality.Data Sources: Systematic review method in current study is based on PRISMA guidelines. We searched for literature using databases such as Google, Google Scholar, PubMed and Social Science, Citation Index.Study Selection: In this study, we screened 1921 identified papers using search terms/phrases. Snowball strategies were adopted to extract published articles from January 1997 till December 2016.Data Extraction: Two-hundred and fourteen papers were identified as relevant for data extraction; completed by two researchers, double checked by the other two to develop agreement in discrepancies. In total, 74 studies fulfilled our pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria for data analysis.Data Synthesis: Service quality is mainly measured as technical and functional, incorporating many sub-dimensions. We synthesized the information about dimensions of healthcare service quality with reference to developed and developing countries. 'Tangibility' is found to be the most common contributing factor whereas 'SERVQUAL' as the most commonly used model to measure healthcare service quality.Conclusion: There are core dimensions of healthcare service quality that are commonly found in all models used in current reviewed studies. We found a little difference in these core dimensions while focusing dimensions in both developed and developing countries, as mostly SERVQUAL is being used as the basic model to either generate a new one or to add further contextual dimensions. The current study ranked the contributing factors based on their frequency in literature. Based on these priorities, if factors are addressed irrespective of any context, may lead to contribute to improve healthcare quality and may provide an important information for evidence-informed decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a precise understanding of the thesis of moral encroachment, which states that the epistemic status of an opinion can depend on its moral features. In addition, I raise objections to existing accounts of moral encroachment. For instance, many accounts fail to give sufficient attention to moral encroachment on credences. Also, many accounts focus on moral features that fail to support standard analogies between pragmatic and moral encroachment. Throughout the paper, I discuss racial profiling as a case study, arguing that moral encroachment can help us identify one respect in which racial profiling is epistemically problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual criminology has established itself as a site of criminological innovation. Its ascendance, though, highlights ways in which the 'ocularcentrism' of the social sciences is reproduced in criminology. We respond, arguing for attention to the totality of sensorial modalities. Outlining the possible contours of a criminology concerned with smell, taste, sound and touch—along with the visual—the paper describes moments in which the sensory intersects with various phenomena of crime, harm, justice and power. Noting the primacy of the sensorial in understanding environmental harm, we describe an explicitly sensory green criminology while also suggesting the ways that heightened criminological attention to the non-visual senses might uncover new sites and modes of knowledge and a more richly affective criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is strong, and growing, evidence documenting health inequities across the world. However, most governments do not prioritize policies to encourage action on the social determinants of health and health equity. Furthermore, despite evidence concerning the benefits of joined-up, intersectoral policy to promote health and health equity, it is rare for such policy approaches to be applied systematically. To examine the usefulness of political and social science theory in understanding the reasons for this disjuncture between evidence and practice, researchers and public servants gathered in Adelaide for an Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) Workshop. This paper draws together the learnings that emerged from the Workshop, including key messages about the usefulness of various theories as well as insights drawn from policy practice. Discussions during the Workshop highlighted that applying multiple theories is particularly helpful in directing attention to, and understanding, the influence of all stages of the policy process; from the construction and framing of policy problems, to the implementation of policy and evaluation of outcomes, including those outcomes that may be unintended. In addition, the Workshop emphasized the value of collaborations among public health researchers, political and social scientists and public servants to open up critical discussion about the intersections between theory, research evidence and practice. Such critique is vital to render visible the processes through which particular sources of knowledge may be privileged over others and to examine how political and bureaucratic environments shape policy proposals and implementation action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analytical point of departure in this paper is the ongoing debate, initiated by Ulrich Beck, on methodological nationalism within the social sciences. Based on a comprehensive study of research collaboration and mobility of researchers this paper discusses possible traces of methodological nationalism in comparative studies of research performance. These studies are often carried out as country comparisons with no or little focus on the growing transnationality of what is measured. However, research is a transnational activity and must be understood as such. Researchers increasingly collaborate with researchers in other countries. The national research institutions are increasingly transnationalised due to the growing mobility of researchers. Based on an examination of all the papers registered in the Thompson Reuter's Web of Science database we follow the development in research collaboration in the period 1980-2014 for 17 leading research countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of evidence and expertise in policy-making has been of interest to public health professionals and political scientists alike. The public health community often sees its efforts as part of a linear knowledge transfer process and tends to blame itself for inadequate communication or translation of its arguments to policy-makers' language when its efforts fail. Political science, especially theories of the policy process, offer alternative perspectives to explain the success or failure of experts' preferred policy goals. This paper focuses on the concept of epistemic communities (groups of experts with a common policy goal derived from their shared knowledge) in policy-making, drawing on examples from the field of health technology assessment in Europe. By combining the parsimony and the central focus on experts of the linear knowledge transfer model with the recognition of complexity of political science, the epistemic communities concept provides a useful structure for the public health community to analyze its efforts to influence policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance is, in part, reliant on the complex challenge of changing human behaviour-in terms of reducing inappropriate antibiotic use and preventing infection. Whilst there is no 'one size fits all' recommended behavioural solution for improving antimicrobial stewardship, the behavioural and social sciences offer a range of theories, frameworks, methods and evidence-based principles that can help inform the design of behaviour change interventions that are context-specific and thus more likely to be effective. However, the state-of-the-art in antimicrobial stewardship research and practice suggests that behavioural and social influences are often not given due consideration in the design and evaluation of interventions to improve antimicrobial prescribing. In this paper, we discuss four potential areas where the behavioural and social sciences can help drive more effective and sustained behaviour change in antimicrobial stewardship: (i) defining the problem in behavioural terms and understanding current behaviour in context; (ii) adopting a theory-driven, systematic approach to intervention design; (iii) investigating implementation and sustainability of interventions in practice; and (iv) maximizing learning through evidence synthesis and detailed intervention reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating a population mean from a sample obtained with unknown selection probabilities is important in the biomedical and social sciences. Using a ratio estimator, Aronow & Lee (2013) proposed a method for partial identification of the mean by allowing the unknown selection probabilities to vary arbitrarily between two fixed values. In this paper, we show how to use auxiliary shape constraints on the population outcome distribution, such as symmetry or logconcavity, to obtain tighter bounds on the population mean. We use this method to estimate the performance ofAymara students, an ethnic minority in the north of Chile, in a national educational standardized test.We implement this method in the R package scbounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publishing in top-ranking journals in the social sciences and international relations requires writing with clarity. Accurately described and transparent methods sections ensure high-quality academic writing. The methodology section of empirical papers should explain the exact steps taken by the authors when operationalizing concepts and testing hypotheses to facilitate replication. This also allows for monitoring quality, challenging findings, and promoting good scientific practices. The quality of methodology sections is the result of the interaction between academic cultures of data sharing, effective application of rules, and good-quality research data management (RDM). This article evaluates the impact of standards on replicability. We present an empirical analysis of a set of sixty-six articles published during the period 1984-2013 that use data from all waves of the European Values Survey. We find differences demonstrating the impact of good RDM and data policies on good scientific practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the population of all university professors (N = 13,479) in the province of Quebec, Canada, this article analyses the concentration of funding, papers and citations at the level of individual researchers. It shows that each of these distributions is different, citations being the most concentrated followed by funding, papers published and, finally, number of funded projects. Concentration measures also vary between disciplines; social sciences and humanities generally being the most concentrated. The article also shows that the correspondence between the elites defined by each of these measures is limited. In fact, only 3.2% of the researchers are in the top 10% for all indicators, while about 20% are in the top 10% for at least one of the indicators. The article concludes with a discussion of the causes of these observed differences and formulates a few hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What considerations should inform the choice of methods in Refugee Studies? In a widely shared dictum of social science, the primary research question largely conditions the methods chosen to answer it. More problematic is whether the meta-purpose − the ultimate purpose and target audience of our research – conditions methodology. This paper analyses the methodological implications of different primary and meta purposes of research in Refugee Studies and shows how and where the two are linked. One prominent feature of forced migration is that it frequently takes place in a highly political environment. This has direct methodological consequences. For a number of reasons discussed here, forced migration research can be described as taking place in what sociologist would call situations of ‘heightened refl exivity’ where both findings and terrain are strongly infl uenced by the presence of the researcher. Drawing on Weber's ‘science as a vocation’ and Barbara Harrell-Bond's defence of ‘advocacy research’, the final section of the paper suggests some of the methodological and ethical consequences of this fact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper develops a thread of argument from previous contributions to this journal by Richard Smith and Ruth Cigman about the educational salience of self-esteem. It is argued—contra Smith and Cigman—that the social science conception of self-esteem does serve a useful educational function, most importantly in undermining the inflated self-help conception of self-esteem that has commonly been transposed to the educational arena. Recent findings about a lack of significant correlation between low global self-esteem and relevant educational variables help us to focus on the type of self-esteem that does matter in the classroom: justified domain-specific self-esteem, in which the chief domains in question are the school subjects and students' self-respect. Moreover, this paper suggests that low self-confidence—which is a real problem for many students—may often be mistaken for low self-esteem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper reinterprets practical approaches to masked performance to articulate design activities that make use of performances and embodied artefacts. In particular, the paper relies on examples from design research to explore the application of performance work based on ‘neutrality’, expressivity and ‘incompleteness’, which have been developed in theatre to devise performances with ‘neutral’, ‘characterised’ and ‘larval’ masks. A more general argument in the paper is that the project of applying the performing arts into interaction design can be usefully extended beyond the boundaries that have so far characterised such applications. These have been limited to the direct staging of the performances which are meant to provide the evidence for design inquiries. Instead, design activities can proceed by working in a more indirect way, by researching variations of the achieved performances, and by using multiple performance genres, including stylised performances and mask work. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Cross-national inequality trends have historically been a crucial field of inquiry across the social sciences, and new methodological techniques of statistical inference have recently improved the ability to analyze these trends over time. This paper applies Monte Carlo, bootstrap inference methods to the income surveys of the Luxembourg Income Study database to identify patterns of distributional change in the global North from 1980 to 2000. While it is now generally accepted that inequality has increased in the United States and United Kingdom during this period, the extent to which other wealthy nations have been able to avoid this trend (or not) has generated some debate. This paper presents new evidence to address this discussion, demonstrating along the way how the ability to conduct formal statistical inference with statistics such as the Gini index provides an effective and important new evaluative tool for comparative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing methods of predicting and mapping the future locations of crime are intrinsically retrospective. This paper explores the development of a mapping procedure that seeks to Produce `prospective' hot-spot maps. Recent research conducted by the authors demonstrates that the risk of burglary is communicable, with properties within 400 metres of a burgled household being at a significantly elevated risk of victimization for up to two months after an initial event. We discuss how, using this knowledge, recorded crime data can be analysed to generate an ever-changing prospective risk surface. One of the central elements of this paper examines the issue of how such a risk surface could be evaluated to determine its effectiveness and utility in comparison to existing methods. New methods of map evaluation are proposed, such as the production of search efficiency rates and area-to-perimeter ratios; standardized metrics that can be derived for maps produced using different techniques, thereby allowing meaningful comparisons to be made and techniques contrasted. The results suggest that the predictive mapping technique proposed here has considerable advantages over more traditional methods and might prove particularly useful in the shift-by-shift deployment of police personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to show that the appropriation of ICTs is determined by a field's specific cultural identity. Knowledge is not a homogeneous whole, but a patchwork of heterogeneous fields. These fields are most visible as embodied in academic disciplines, which have distinct cultural identities shaped by intellectual and social considerations. Scholarly communication systems evolve over time within the context of these cultural identities. The paper discusses the cultural shaping of ICTs by drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study within corpus-based linguistics. The findings suggest that cultural elements such as 'task-uncertainty', 'mutual-dependency', heterogeneity, and institutional configurations will influence the appropriateness of a specific ICT infrastructure for a particular intellectual community. For example, fields that have a highly politicized and tightly controlled research culture will develop a coherent field-based strategy for the uptake and use of ICTs, whereas domains that are pluralistic and have a loosely organized research culture will appropriate ICTs in an ad-hoc localized manner. These findings demonstrate that overlooking cultural diversity in the development and implementation of ICT infrastructures and policies could prove detrimental for fields that do not map onto 'big science' conceptualizations of knowledge production. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that effective understanding similarity and difference in patterns of scholarly communication needs to take the fine-grain of specialist fields as the unit of analysis, rather than the course-grain of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended to begin a discussion about the need for a future text analysis software tool to model a number of aspects of text analysis as it is practised by critics who are not computing humanists, and that have been barely considered by most developers. It begins by putting this analysis in the context of Douglas Englebart's famous model of computer-human interaction expressed originally by his Augment system. It continues by examining a number of examples of how technology (ranging from 3 × 5 cards to topic maps) is currently used to support critical analyses, and points out that an important aspect of the critical process, which is recognized at least in part by the 3 × 5 card model but not by mainstream humanities computing methods, is the sense of critical analysis as a process rather than merely the presentation of a finished product. The paper finishes by examining some of the underlying concepts present in text-analysis tools used within the social sciences that attempt to deal with this temporal aspect of analysis, and proposes a need to examine the real practices of critics in the light of these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of scholarly papers in professional journals certifies new contributions to knowledge, as well as the skills of the authors who have subjected their work to a process of critical review. The peer review process, designed to attract quality research with the use of objective practices, cannot avoid the infusion of particularistic judgments. This study examines how more than 600 manuscripts submitted to Social Problems were processed by its editor and associate editor. It traces the influences of manuscript, author, and reviewer characteristics as papers are judged, initially by the editor, subsequently by expert reviewers, and, once again, by the editor. The reviewers' recommendations, although often reflecting disagreement, outweigh all the other measured factors that may affect the editor's decisions. The editors, however, remain obligated to formulate credible accounts of the decision process, especially when a final disposition departs from the recommendation made by expert reviewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report on the application of Google Scholar (GS)-based metrics in the formal assessment of research programs. Involved were programs in the fields of Education, Pedagogical Sciences, and Anthropology in The Netherlands. Also, a comparative analysis has been conducted of the results based on GS and Web of Science (WoS). Studies critical of GS point at its reliability of data. We show how the reliability of the GS data for the bibliometric analysis of the assessment can be improved by excluding non-verifiable citing sources from the full secondorder GS citing data. The study of the background of these second-order sources demonstrates a broadening of the citing sources. The comparison of GS with WoS citations for the publications of the programs shows that it is promising to use GS for fields with lower degrees of coverage in WoS, in particular for fields that produce more diverse types of output than just research articles. Restrictions to the use of GS are the intensive manual data handling and cleaning, necessary for a feasible and proper data collection. We discuss wider implications of the findings for bibliometric analysis and for the practices and policies in research evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main public health advantages of examining gene by environment interactions (i.e., GE) in externalizing behavior lie in the realm of personalized interventions. Nevertheless, the incorporation of genetic data in randomized controlled trials is fraught with difficulties and raises ethical questions. This paper has been written from the perspective of developmental psychologists who, as researchers, see themselves confronted with important and in part new kinds of ethical questions arising from GE research in social sciences. The aim is to explicate and discuss ethical questions, based on the conviction that what is ethically salient in a research setting will also be relevant in that area of public healthcare incorporating research findings. The ethical questions discussed include: whether it is ethically responsible to withhold an effective treatment; to what extent genetic results should be disclosed; whether researchers should be allowed to collect genetic data of both child and parent; and what are costs and benefits of personalized interventions based on (genetic) screening. We made an attempt to address these questions, but it is up to researchers to determine whether the solutions are suitable for their GE research in social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes my experiences teaching a 28-hour course on the bacterial world for undergraduate students in the humanities and the social sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This course was offered in the framework of a program in which students must obtain credit points for courses offered by other faculties to broaden their education. Most students had little biology in high school and had never been exposed to the basics of chemistry. Using a historical approach, highlighting the work of pioneers such as van Leeuwenhoek, Koch, Fleming, Pasteur, Winogradsky and Woese, I covered a broad area of general, medical, environmental and evolutionary microbiology. The lectures included basic concepts of organic and inorganic chemistry necessary to understand the principles of fermentations and chemoautotrophy, and basic molecular biology to explain biotechnology using transgenic microorganisms and molecular phylogeny. Teaching the basics of microbiology to intelligent students lacking any background in the natural sciences was a rewarding experience. Some students complained that, in spite of my efforts, basic concepts of chemistry remained beyond their understanding. But overall the students' evaluation showed that the course had achieved its goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Basic research' is based on epistemological and intentional criteria. In terms of science policy, however, these criteria imply contradictory views on investment in 'basic research'. The former espouses the linear model of innovation and encourages policy-makers concerned with economic problems to expand investment on basic research. However, the latter can collide with the policy norm of policy-makers and discourage investment in 'basic research' in an institutional setting where the nation-state prevails over scientists, as in South Korea. Emphasizing policy ideas and policy learning, this paper empirically shows that changes in investment priority and the emergence of new concepts about 'basic research' are co-products of a policy paradigm of the linear model and a policy norm of industrial competitiveness in Korea. Specifically, emphasis was placed on the balance between pure and oriented basic research, but moved on to 'oriented basic research', 'basic engineering', and to 'basic research' coupled with 'woncheon-technology'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper criticizes the deskilling hypothesis for temporal change in occupations. Case studies of occupations alleged to support the deskilling hypothesis have typically been insensitive to the internal heterogeneity found within occupations, and to the fact that the boundary between adjacent occupations located on the same functional hierarchy can shift over time. When these factors are explicitly taken into account, it is found that apparently compelling evidence for the thesis of clerical downgrading better supports an alternative explanation, which might be called the process of status redefinition, an aspect of the process of professionalization. The case of clerical workers in the federal government is examined in some detail, Available evidence supports the argument that status redefinition occurred. Status redefinition and des killing are not mutually exclusive explanations for change, though they do conflict in important respects. This paper suggests that case studies of occupations should focus on functional hierarchies, rather than specific occupations, in order to avoid the comparability problems which arise when occupational boundaries change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suburban exploitation of the central city was once a hotly contested issue, but the exodus of people and jobs from the city and the involvement of the federal government in urban service provision have moved it from the forefront of scholarly attention. Those same developments, however argue for more rather than less attention to exploitation, and the purpose of this paper is to offer some of that. Using data collected for 188 relatively comparable American SMS As for 1960, 1970, and 1980, the paper begins with a replication of an earlier study by Kasarda of suburban demands for city service spending. It then extends that research to 1980 and expands it to asses suburban participation in city retail sales generation as well. The results indicate a substantive narrowing over time of suburban demands for city services, but a sizeable and growing gap nonetheless between expenditures demanded and retail revenues provided. The paper than turns to an analysis that attempts to test empirically th relative merits of ecological and politicoeconomic explanation for these changes. The results of that test are more supportive of the former then the latter; hence, the paper concludes with an interpretation of them that links to underlying ecological processes the changing social psychological perspective on the city and its role in social life held by surrounding suburban dwellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past half century, northern Europe has seen a striking decline of belief in God and the supernatural. Yet the churches there have not died, and in some cases they remain strong and active. Whence does the vitality of these churches derive, if belief has eroded? This paper examines one such church, an independent Lutheran congregation in northwestern Denmark. It suggests that the church's importance stems from its "span of ambiguity," the broad range of meanings which it expresses in its local context. Its ability to integrate meanings from a variety of social arenas gives it a powerful role in a rapidly changing society. The paper argues that religious systems generally have an unusual capacity for such expression and integration, It is the extent to which they can maintain their spans of ambiguity, rather than the extent to which they can maintain belief, which accounts for their persistence or decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a case study of parliamentary voting on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill and Act of 2008. It seeks to establish whether MPs with a scientific background voted differently from the wider population of MPs. Patterns of parliamentary voting on this issue providenostrong evidence to suggest thatMPs with a scientific background behaved any differently from MPs without any scientific training on any aspect of the legislation on Human Fertilisation and Embryology passed in 2008. Once controls for party allegiance are applied, scientific training appears to have no independent effect on voting behaviour. This applies even when the issue at stake is the restriction of research and clinical practice. There is also no strong evidence to suggest that MPs with scientific training are more likely to vote on scientific issues or that they are more likely to vote against the grain of their party when they do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we compare the reception of Spanish sociology by domestic and international audiences using citation counts as an indicator of audience interest. We compare papers highly cited in a national language database with those highly cited in the Web of Science. We find differences that might prove worrying within a national research evaluation system that emphasizes publishing in high impact factor, Web of Science indexed journals. We suggest that in the social sciences, such an emphasis may induce not simply more research excellence, but also narrower research agendas with long-term consequences for the Spanish sociology community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of how research contributes to society typically focuses on the study of those transactions that are mediated through formal legal instruments (research contracts, patent licensing and the creation of companies). Research has shown, however, that informal means of technology transfer are also important. This paper explores the importance of informal collaborations and provides evidence of the extent to which informal collaborations between researchers and non-academic partners take place informally in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). Data is obtained from two studies on knowledge exchange involving researchers working in the SSH area of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research. We show that informal collaborations not officially recorded by the organisation are much more common than formal agreements and that many collaborations remain informal over time. We explore the causes of such prevalence of informality and discuss its policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We argue in this paper for a political economic approach to the study of global ecological crimes. Green criminological studies often employ case study approaches which help explain a particular green crime; however, these studies lack a coherent theoretical basis. Based on ecological Marxism and treadmill of production approaches, we outline a theoretical approach for green criminology that focuses on crimes of ecological disorganization—that is, green harms that are the result of organizing the productive forces of the economy in a manner that is consistent with capitalism. We conclude that, to truly understand and remedy green harms, a focus on political economy is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper begins with an argument that most measure development in the social sciences, with its reliance on correlational techniques as a tool, falls short of the requirements for constructing meaningful, unidimensional measures of human attributes. By demonstrating how rating scales are ordinal-level data, we argue the necessity of converting these to equal-interval units to develop a measure that is both qualitatively and quantitatively defensible. This requires that the empirical results and theoretical explanation are questioned and adjusted at each step of the process. In our response to the reviewers, we describe how this approach was used to develop the Game Engagement Questionnaire (GEQ), including its emphasis on examining a continuum of involvement in violent video games. The GEQ is an empirically sound measure focused on one player characteristic that may be important in determining game influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the case of a role-play simulation that recreates a recent negotiation of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Using a blended learning approach, our simulated negotiation integrates three educational delivery methods-preparatory learning, face-to-face learning, and online collaborative learning-to recreate the complexity of negotiating global environmental issues. Qualitative student feedback is used to analyze the benefits and challenges of this approach. Our results suggest that blending learning methods within a role-play simulation is an effective strategy to help students appreciate the challenge of achieving consensus among competing interests, understand the pervasive power dynamics that shape political outcomes within the realm of global environmental governance, and hone skills relevant to policy analysis, negotiation, and consensus building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses high- and low-impact citation indicators for the evaluation of the citation performance of research units at different aggregate levels using a dataset of about 3.6 million articles published in 1998-2002 in the natural and the social sciences with a 5-year citation window. The difficulty is that a large proportion of individual articles are assigned to multiple subfields. To control for wide differences in citation practices at the subfield level, we apply a novel normalization procedure in the multiplicative approach in which each paper is wholly counted as many times as necessary in the several categories to which it is assigned at each aggregation level. The methodology is applied to a partition of the world into three geographical areas: the USA, the European Union (EU), and the Rest of the World. The main findings are the following two. (1) Although normalization does not systematically bias the results against any area, it reduces the US/EU high-impact gap in the all-sciences case by a non-negligible 14.4%. (2) The dominance of the USA over the EU in the basic and applied research published in the periodical literature is almost universal at all aggregation levels. From the high-impact perspective, for example, the USA is ahead of the EU in 77 out of 80 disciplines, and all of 20 fields. For all sciences as a whole, the US high-impact indicator is 61% greater than that of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medicine is unique in being a combination of natural science and human science in which both are essential. Therefore, in order to make sense of medical practice, we need to begin by drawing a clear distinction between the natural and the human sciences. In this paper, I try to bring the old distinction between the Geistes and Naturwissenschaften up to date by defending the essential difference between a realist explanatory theoretical study of nature including the body in which the scientist discovers the causal properties of natural kinds and the interpretive understanding of human beings as embodied agents which, as Charles Taylor has convincingly argued, requires a hermeneutic account of self-interpreting human practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically examines an ongoing debate in International Relations (IR) as to why there is apparently no non-Western IR theory in Asia and what should be done to ‘mitigate’ that situation. Its central contention is that simply calling for greater incorporation of ideas from the non-West and contributions by non-Western scholars from local ‘vantage points’ does not make IR more global or democratic, for that would do little to transform the discipline's Eurocentric epistemological foundations. Re-envisioning IR in Asia is not about discovering or producing as many ‘indigenous’ national schools of IR as possible, but about reorienting IR itself towards a post-Western era that does not reinforce the hegemony of the West within (and without) the discipline. Otherwise, even if local scholars could succeed in crafting a ‘Chinese (or Indian, Japanese, Korean, etc.) School’, it would be no more than constructing a ‘derivative discourse’ of Western modernist social science. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this literature review is to understand where Graphical Information Systems (GIS) can be useful to address security issues and how it has been used until now. While the geographic drivers of territorial conflicts have been extensively described by a number of political studies, the quantitative analysis of these drivers is quite new. This study traces an evolution from conceptual research to quantitative development. It then discusses the advantages and challenges of applying new geographic techniques to analyze spatial drivers of conflict. We identify the main spatial components in conflict and security, the existing types of information/data and the quantitative methods used. We describe the spatial component of security by looking at: (i) the main sociopolitical concepts linked to territory, (ii) the kind of geographic concepts linked to territory, (iii) measures used to describe such geographic concepts; and (iv) the issues raised in any attempt to integrate geographic concepts into a GIS. We conclude that GIS tools can be useful in the analysis of civil disputes, particularly where subnational level data exists. This paper shows that spatial processing tools in GIS allow us to represent some spatial components and to address new issues such as the fuzzy complexity of border permeability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As constructivists and other advocates of constitutive theories have often noted, the natural world is very different from the social one. Our ideas about the social world not only reflect that world, but help shape and create it; we are part of the reality we try to describe and explain, and we therefore have the potential to alter the reality a theory is merely intended to describe or explain. Our theories about the social world may thus become self-fulfilling prophecies or autogenetic in character, or they may self-negate. And yet while social constructivists often make this point in epistemological debates, there have been relatively few attempts so far to address its empirical implications. With that objective in mind, this paper examines two prominent IR theories—the democratic peace and the commercial peace—arguing that each has a self-fulfilling character rather than being true or false in any objective or timeless sense, as well as the potential of a currently self-negating thesis—the clash of civilizations—to become self-fulfilling; each theory is, to paraphrase the now time-honored expression, what the relevant actors make of it. The article also probes the processes by which theories become self-generating or self-negating. It is suggested that a number of frameworks developed outside political science—especially diffusion theory, memetics, social contagion theories, George Lakoff’s metaphor-based model, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” approach and social network analysis—may in combination help us understand both how political ideas spread through academic and policy communities and why particular ideas “win out” over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many believe that agent-centred considerations, unlike agent-neutral reasons, cannot show that victims have the right to kill their attackers in self-defence, let alone establish that rescuers have the right to come to their help. In this paper, I argue that the right to kill in self- or other-defence is best supported by a hybrid set of reasons. In particular, agent-centred considerations account for the plausible intuition that victims have a special stake, which other parties lack, in being to thwart the attackers. That special stake plays an important part justifying victims' right to obtain help, and rescuers' right to give it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why probation emerged as an alternative to punishment throughout the world in a relatively short period of time at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. In doing so, it provides a detailed history of the process of its creation, an elucidation of its various forms, and a portrait of some of the key influential people and the part they played. In attempting an explanation for the proliferation of probation, it sets the history within a social, political, cultural and theoretical context, and, in particular, the context of the emergence of criminology as a social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating the role of preferences in causing persistent patterns of racial residential segregation in the United States has a long history. In this paper, we bring a new perspective -- and new data from the 2004 Detroit Area Study -- to the question of how best to characterize black and white preferences toward living in neighborhoods with people of different races. White and black residents of the Detroit metropolitan area (n = 734) were asked in an area probability sample survey about their evaluations of 33 actual communities throughout their metro area. These evaluations are used as an indirect measure of racial residential preferences by viewing how race -- both of the respondent and of the community -- shapes them. We find modest racial agreement about which communities would be "seriously considered" and "never considered" as a place to live, but by and large perceptions of the metropolis are racialized. Whites are influenced by the percentage white in a community (net of the community's social class characteristics) and very unlikely to consider communities where they are anything but the strong majority. African Americans are also influenced by race, but in different ways and less fundamentally: 1.) Communities with high percentages of African Americans are among those most likely to be "seriously considered," but so are communities with just a handful of African Americans; 2.) African Americans are less likely to "never consider" all communities, and more likely than whites to consider both communities where they are in the majority and in the minority; 3.) African Americans are unaffected by a community's percent white net of community social class characteristics. We place these results in the context of the debate about racial residential preferences, arguing for the importance of grounding our understanding -- and measures -- of racial residential preferences in the context of real urban landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying 'standard' publication and citation measures to the social sciences is fast becoming an outmoded practice, yet we have still to develop credible quantitative alternatives to inform research evaluation exercises. This paper reports the outcomes of a comparative pilot study of five Australian economics departments which tested data produced using novel bibliometric, esteem, and 'user engagement' measures. The results were presented to a group of expert peers drawn from the economics groups studied. There was support for developing some novel bibliometric indicators and 'user engagement' measures, but esteem indicators were roundly rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This framework for multi-level evaluation of scientific research is a bridge between social science theory and the provision of effective feedbacks to governments so they can overcome systemic blockages to innovation and successful outcomes of research policy. Starting with the idea of innovation network theory and organizational theory involved in the research environment survey, a small set of indicators is suggested at micro, meso, and macro levels. Data from this integrated set of indicators can identify the blockages and suggest corrections. This paper concentrates on the macro-level indicators. Three familiar kinds of government policy lever — capital, capabilities, and coordination modes — are discussed. However, the discussion of ways in which these interventions can correct blockages is far more complex than has previously been acknowledged in the evaluation literature. The proposed framework is an important step for evaluators and policy-makers to develop research, technology and development investment portfolios and strategies more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary claim of this paper is that sufficient consistencies can be shown in the cases studied here and in the related literature that gay sexual homicide constitutes a coherent object of study. That is, in itself a significant finding. Gay men are dying, and the circumstances under which that is taking place warrants analysis in its own right. The cases are of broader intellectual interest, however. The existing literature relating to sexual crime pre-supposes a male assailant and a female victim. This is true both of the sociology of masculinity and also the psychological literature. The cases in this study present sexual crime in a context in which women are absent, and, as such, raise questions about the scope, assumptions and findings of that literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health communication campaigns, as an outcome of and an input into the social process, can create unintended as well as intended effects. The present paper represents an initial conceptual treatment of the unintended effects, the less studied of the two. It suggests that unintended effects can manifest in multiple dimensions, including those of time lapse, levels of analysis, audience types, content specificity, and valence. On these dimensions, a typology organizes available evidence to offer an outlook on 11 types of unintended effects, including obfuscation, dissonance, boomerang, epidemic of apprehension, desensitization, culpability, opportunity cost, social reproduction, social norming, enabling, and system activation. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of criminology as an academic discipline was a post-war development in Australia as much as in Britain or the United States. Classical criminology had developed as a question about punishment—neo-classical criminology as a question about the criminal. Academic criminology pursued both questions and added others. Less systematic than pragmatic, less theoretical than eclectic, the criminology of post-war universities was both intellectually broader and politically more critical than once thought. This paper outlines the formation of the discipline in Australia during the war and post-war years, from the conditions of production of its first text, The ABC of Criminology (Melbourne University Press 1941), to its moment of governmental embrace around 1960. Who were the major players in this enterprise, what commitments, intellectual and political, did they bring to their work, and what did this local formation owe to its international affiliations? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I ask how educational researchers can believe the subjective perceptions of qualitative participant-observers given the concern for objectivity and generalisability of experimental research in the behavioural and social sciences. I critique the most common answer to this question within the educational research community, which posits the existence of two (or more) equally legitimate epistemological paradigms—positivism and constructivism—and offer an alternative that places a priority in educational research on understanding the purposes and meanings humans attribute to educational practices. Only within the context of what I call a transcendent view from somewhere—higher ideals that govern human activities—can we make sense of quantitative as well as qualitative research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I undertake a critical evaluation of the central claims of cultural criminology. In particular, I argue that the project is characterized by important confusions over what is meant by 'culture' in the analysis of deviant and criminal activity. These confusions are found both in cultural criminology `s key empirical works and in the emerging theoretical frameworks that seek to interpret crime through the lens of culture. I suggest that the absence of detailed engagement with classic debates in social anthropology serves to undermine cultural criminology `s assertion that the lens of culture provides a critical tool for understanding criminal acts and note that the project is characterized by a contradiction between its ethnographic imagination and its anthropological imagination. The absence of a detailed theoretical account of culture renders cultural criminology vulnerable to Gouldner's (1975) charge that its Practitioners represent contemporary 'zoo-keepers' of deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends provocative ideas from the emerging interdisciplinary field of childhood studies to the field of gerontology. These ideas constitute a framework for building new kinds of theories and research on old people and old age-gathered around rights and responsibilities of and for old people; focused on their agency and social participation; concerned with the social problems of old people, as well as how old people are constructed to be social problems; anchored in their perspectives and voices; dedicated to describing and explaining both commonness and difference in their experiences and statuses; devoted to understanding old people as beings and becomings; and attentive to the interdependence of generations within families and societies. These commitments will require gerontology to strengthen its treatment of sociocultural phenomena, prompt more genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship, and advocate a wider range of research methods and data. A "new social studies of old people and old age," nurtured around these ideas, will also raise the visibility of old people and old age in science, public policy, and social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]