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Author: Alexander L. George
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262262894
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
The use of case studies to build and test theories in political science and the other social sciences has increased in recent years. Many scholars have argued that the social sciences rely too heavily on quantitative research and formal models and have attempted to develop and refine rigorous methods for using case studies. This text presents a comprehensive analysis of research methods using case studies and examines the place of case studies in social science methodology. It argues that case studies, statistical methods, and formal models are complementary rather than competitive. The book explains how to design case study research that will produce results useful to policymakers and emphasizes the importance of developing policy-relevant theories. It offers three major contributions to case study methodology: an emphasis on the importance of within-case analysis, a detailed discussion of process tracing, and development of the concept of typological theories. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences will be particularly useful to graduate students and scholars in social science methodology and the philosophy of science, as well as to those designing new research projects, and will contribute greatly to the broader debate about scientific methods.
Author: Alexander L. George
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262262894
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347
Get Book
Book Description
The use of case studies to build and test theories in political science and the other social sciences has increased in recent years. Many scholars have argued that the social sciences rely too heavily on quantitative research and formal models and have attempted to develop and refine rigorous methods for using case studies. This text presents a comprehensive analysis of research methods using case studies and examines the place of case studies in social science methodology. It argues that case studies, statistical methods, and formal models are complementary rather than competitive. The book explains how to design case study research that will produce results useful to policymakers and emphasizes the importance of developing policy-relevant theories. It offers three major contributions to case study methodology: an emphasis on the importance of within-case analysis, a detailed discussion of process tracing, and development of the concept of typological theories. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences will be particularly useful to graduate students and scholars in social science methodology and the philosophy of science, as well as to those designing new research projects, and will contribute greatly to the broader debate about scientific methods.
Author: Vernon W. Ruttan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472113552
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
"The central premise of this book is that the demand for social science knowledge is derived from the demand for institutional change." --pref.
Author: Frederick Cooper
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520209572
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
"This superb collection assembles a number of stimulating and theoretically current contributions by outstanding scholars."—Angelique Haugerud, author of The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya
Author: Mark Solovey
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262358751
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
How the NSF became an important yet controversial patron for the social sciences, influencing debates over their scientific status and social relevance. In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to "other sciences." Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major--albeit controversial--source of public funding for them.
Author: Hunter Heyck
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417103
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
In the years after World War II, a new generation of scholars redefined the central concepts and practices of social science in America. Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, “high modern” social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behavior—and to remake the world in the image of their new model man. In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social scientists—shaped by encounters with the ongoing “organizational revolution” and its revolutionary technologies of communication and control—embraced a new and extremely influential perspective on science and nature, one that conceived of all things in terms of system, structure, function, organization, and process. He also explores how this emerging unified theory of human behavior implied a troubling similarity between humans and machines, with freighted implications for individual liberty and self-direction. These social scientists trained a generation of decision-makers in schools of business and public administration, wrote the basic textbooks from which millions learned how the economy, society, polity, culture, and even the mind worked, and drafted the position papers, books, and articles that helped set the terms of public discourse in a new era of mass media, think tanks, and issue networks. Drawing on close readings of key texts and a broad survey of more than 1,800 journal articles, Heyck follows the dollars—and the dreams—of a generation of scholars that believed in “the system.” He maps the broad landscape of changes in the social sciences, focusing especially intently on the ideas and practices associated with modernization theory, rational choice theory, and modeling. A highly accomplished historian, Heyck relays this complicated story with unusual clarity.
Author: Simon Bastow
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446293254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
The impact agenda is set to shape the way in which social scientists prioritise the work they choose to pursue, the research methods they use and how they publish their findings over the coming decade, but how much is currently known about how social science research has made a mark on society? Based on a three year research project studying the impact of 360 UK-based academics on business, government and civil society sectors, this groundbreaking new book undertakes the most thorough analysis yet of how academic research in the social sciences achieves public policy impacts, contributes to economic prosperity, and informs public understanding of policy issues as well as economic and social changes. The Impact of the Social Sciences addresses and engages with key issues, including: identifying ways to conceptualise and model impact in the social sciences developing more sophisticated ways to measure academic and external impacts of social science research explaining how impacts from individual academics, research units and universities can be improved. This book is essential reading for researchers, academics and anyone involved in discussions about how to improve the value and impact of funded research. You can read a snapshot of the results, Visualising the Data, free online. To download a PDF click here, or to browse a flipbook, click here.
Author: Anol Bhattacherjee
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781475146127
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.
Author: Walter Leal Filho
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331926866X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
This volume is the first of its kind to present contemporary, state-of-the-art examples of how social science theories, models, and findings can advance all aspects of campus sustainability, an area that has so far been largely neglected. The individual chapters reflect the broad diversity of research on sustainable campus development conducted within and across basic and applied social science disciplines, drawing on a range of methods and case studies from around the world. Institutions of higher education have been among the leading promoters of sustainable development. However, efforts to transition to sustainability have been largely dominated by technological “solutions” and universities and colleges are increasingly recognizing that this transition cannot be achieved without attention to the human dimension. Administrators, campus sustainability officers and other university staff, faculty members and students, as well as alumni and external constituents all help to shape which sustainability innovations and initiatives are considered and pursued, and their participation determines the ultimate success of sustainability efforts. The book’s individual contributions illustrate how the social sciences can broaden visions of what may be possible, identify the advantages and disadvantages of different instrumental and emancipator approaches, evaluate interventions’ effectiveness, and offer processes for learning from mistakes and successes in ways that support continuous advances toward sustainability. Given that the majority of social science research stems from universities, the level of trust in these institutions, and their mission to develop societal leaders, higher education institutions are ideally suited for testing, assessing and modeling the social innovations needed to achieve sustainability on campuses and beyond.
Author: James Mahoney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214956
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
"Mahoney's starting point is the problem of essentialism in social science. Essentialism--the belief that the members of a category possess hidden properties ("essences") that make them members of the category and that endow them with a certain nature--is appropriate for scientific categories ("atoms", for instance) but not for human ones ("revolutions," for instance). Despite this, much social science research takes place from within an essentialist orientation; those who reject this assumption goes so far in the other direction as to reject the idea of an external reality, independent of human beings, altogether. Mahoney proposes an alternative approach that aspires to bridge this enduring rift in the social sciences between those who take a scientific approach and assume that social science categories correspond to external reality (and thus believe that the methods used in the natural sciences are generally appropriate for the social sciences) and those who take a constructivist approach and believe that because the categories used to understand the social world are humanly-constructed, they cannot possibly follow the science of the natural world. As the name suggests, scientific constructivism brings in aspects of both views and attempts to unite them. Drawing from cognitive science, it focuses on using the rational parts of our brain machinery to overcome the limitations and deeply seated biases (such as essentialism) of our evolved minds. Specifically, Mahoney puts forth a "set-theoretic analysis" that focuses on "sets" of categories as they exist in the mind that are also subject to the mathematical logic of set-theory. He spends the first four chapters of the book establishing the foundations and methods for set-theoretic analysis, the next four chapters looking and how this analysis fits with the existing tools of social science, and the final four chapters focusing on how this approach can be used to study and understand cases"--
Author: Jaan Valsiner
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030330990
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
This is an international and interdisciplinary volume that provides a new look at the general background of the social sciences from a philosophical perspective and provides directions for methodology. It seeks to overcome the limitations of the traditional treatises of a philosophy of science rooted in the physical sciences, as well as extend the coverage of basic science to intentional and socially normative features of the social sciences. The discussions included in this book are divided into four thematic sections: Social and cognitive roots for reflexivity upon the research process Philosophies of explanation in the social sciences Social normativity in social sciences Social processes in particular sciences Social Philosophy of Science for the Social Sciences will find an interested audience in students of the philosophy of science and social sciences. It is also relevant for researchers and students in the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, education, and political science.
