Form Of Social Inquiry Research Articles

Meaning of life and death during COVID-19 pandemic: A cultural and religious narratives

The sudden arrival of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in South Africa drastically changed the normal way of life in all sectors. It compelled everyone to look at the meaning of life and death differently and more painfully than before. This article investigates the cultural theories and religious narratives on the meaning of life and death, associated with the pervasiveness of the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus affected individuals, families and communities, some directly or indirectly, no one is or was immune to the virus. The article argues that due to COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns, culture, religious practices and protocols have been upended. The COVID-19 pandemic challenged inkcubeko nenkolo yabantu [culture, people’s religious belief systems and practices]. This article consists of in-depth qualitative interviews with four religious leaders from the Christian and Muslim faiths. Because of the interviews with persons, oral historians conduct open-ended interviews, as a form of social inquiry. Oral history narratives thus connect the individual and the social, drawing on cultural and religious expressions to tell one’s story.Contribution: The scholarly contribution of this article adds value and significance to oral history research, as a way of collecting and interpreting human memories and experiences on the meaning of life and death during the COVID-19 crisis. It discusses the dreadfulness of the COVID-19 scourge concerning religious and cultural effects, social sciences and people’s narrative reflections.

HEROISM IN RUDYARD KIPLING’S NOVEL THE JUNGLE BOOK

Abstract This study is about heroism in the novel The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. There are three points of discussion under this title: giving protection, defending rights and gratitude. Defending rights is associated with heroic deeds. A hero is a random citizen that rises to an occasion and performs an action of superhero proportions. Gratitude implies thankfulness or an appreciation of benefits conferred together with a desire, when practicable, to return those benefits. Defending rights is tied to human rights which are universally applicable to one and all. These are the significant components of heroism. One of the relevant and outstanding modern theories of heroism applied here is proposed by Gibbon (2009) stating that hero is just an average man who fights to solve a common problem in today’s society. The study is conducted with Descriptive Qualitative Method proposed by Haughman (2009) in which he states that Qualitative research is a form of social inquiry that focuses on the way people interpret and make sense of their experiences and the world in which they live. Kipling leads children down the jungle path into adventures beyond their day to day imagining and along the way he shows the value of ‘doing for yourself', of 'learning who to trust'. The result shows that heroism is highlighted through the major characters and the conclusive points are some of the significant characters such as Mowgli, Father Wolf, Mother Wolf, Hathi, and Bagheera have done heroic deeds. Their heroism is presented in the forms of giving protection, defending rights and gratitude. Keywords: heroism, human rights, gratitude

“This Is Just Like Those Projects from Last Semester!”: Student Empowerment and Praxis at an Urban Title I Middle School

Action research, particularly done by teachers, has had a contentious, decades-long history. As a form of social inquiry, action research has been designed to make it easier for members of social g...

Qualitative research in health design.

Just as all facility designs are not the same, research designs also differ depending on the purpose of the study, availability of previous evidence on a topic, and the desired outcome of the data. Unfortunately, qualitative research is frequently misunderstood, because those not familiar with the research method believe it to be of a lesser quality than quantitative study design, considering that sample size, data analysis methods, and even goals for generalizability are different than quantitative research. Qualitative research is a very robust and important research method to be used when little information exists about a subject, there are few instruments to measure the phenomena of interest, or when the research really aims to understand the participants' perspective.Qualitative research can be defined as a form of social inquiry that aims to understand how people interpret the environment in which they live, work, or receive care (Atkinson, Coffey, & Delamont, 2001). A variety of approaches exist in qualitative research and many share the same purpose-to comprehend, describe, and interpret different phenomena as perceived by individuals, groups, and cultures. Researchers in different fields, including ethnography, sociology, education, nursing, and marketing, regularly use qualitative approaches to explore how people understand and interact with the social world. Qualitative approaches are useful in the exploration of change or conflict and because of its versatility, individuals from various professions can collaborate on conducting qualitative research (Creswell, 2009). Although different types of qualitative research share common characteristics, the process by which it is approached can depend on a variety of contextual factors. In health design, qualitative research can serve as a valuable method to explore how healthcare environments can be enhanced to improve outcomes in those receiving and providing care and to generate new knowledge about evidence-based healthcare design. This article will focus on the main features of qualitative research, usefulness in health design, research considerations, data collection, research approaches/methods in health design, qualitative data analysis, and methods to establish trustworthiness in qualitative research.Main Features of Qualitative ResearchThere are several unifying features of qualitative research studies focusing on data collection and data analysis. Most qualitative research has the following characteristics:* The theoretical framework for qualitative research is not predetermined, but is deduced from the qualitative data.* Researchers must be sensitive to the context of the research, because the data and findings are context-specific and may or may not have any generalizability to other settings or context.* Qualitative researchers often immerse themselves in the environment and with individuals whose perspectives and ideas they wish to explore.* Researchers narrow in on the emic perspective the viewpoint of the participants involved their meaning, and interpretations.* Qualitative researchers describe, analyze, and interpret using thick description to further explore the participants' perspectives.* The researcher is the main instrument in the research where reflexivity provides the researcher's explicit stance of the research.These unifying features will be described in more detail in the following sections in order to enhance the reader's understanding of qualitative research design, methods, and outcomes.The Primacy of DataQualitative researchers' and participants' interactions lead to an understanding of experiences and generation of data. The data itself has primacy and can uncover new theoretical ideas, help alter existing theories, or reveal the importance of a certain phenomenon. Consequently the research methods cannot be predetermined before beginning qualitative research, as with other types or research where ideas or assumptions can lead to hypothesis testing. …

On the task of making social inquiry aligned to caregiving: an invitation to debate

This paper is designed as an invitation to debate the value of research and writing on social suffering in relation to practices of caregiving. It offers a brief account of the origins and development of ‘social suffering’ as a concern for social inquiry. Henry Mayhew and Jane Addams are profiled in terms of their pioneering roles as social researchers heavily preoccupied with problems of social suffering. The contrast between Henry Mayhew's frustrated attempts at caregiving and Jane Addams’ success in instituting the pedagogy of caregiving in the work of Hull House is set up for analysis. These examples are used to issue an invitation to readers to question the cultural and institutional circumstances that make possible forms of social inquiry that recognise caregiving both as a means to social understanding and as an aim for social research in practice.

Honoring (Recollecting) Our Memory of Peter McHugh as Social Theorist

The recent death of Peter McHugh becomes an occasion for the remembrance and recollection of the distinctive form of reflexive or analytic social inquiry, which framed his work and that of his longtime friend and collaborator, Alan Blum. Following dual appointments at York University, Toronto, Canada in 1972, Blum and McHugh’s partnership formed the basis for a community of scholars and students throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. A brief review of McHugh and Blum’s works shows theoretical roots in social constructivism and a deep appreciation of the linguistic turn, which in turn lead to the development of a form of social analysis that meets the stringent requirements of a reflexive sociology by repudiating any claim to a privileged exemption of theoretical speech (practice) from the hermeneutical circle of speech and language. Blum and McHugh are shown to embrace and not to evade the hermeneutical circle by a form of social inquiry that subverts the inherent possibilities available within speech and social convention to make available an encounter with the (moral) authority or form of life for that self-same speech. With each example of everyday life or conventional usage, McHugh (and Blum) move from theorizing which formulates the complexity of a particular instance of social interaction through its rules, to the question of the form of life that make that particular instance of the rules possible. It is the pursuit of transparency between speech and its roots in language that informed and continues to inform the distinctive style of social theory fostered at York-Toronto under the orchestration of McHugh and Blum.

At Last: A Useful Overview of the Social SciencesTheodore M. Porter;, Dorothy Ross (Editors). The Modern Social Sciences. (Cambridge History of Science, 7.) xxvii + 734 pp., notes, index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. $125 (cloth).

Here comes the seventh volume of the Cambridge History of Science, assembled by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross, on that most unwieldy group of the sciences, the social sciences. Of the forty contributors (including the two editors), twenty-one hail from the United States, seven from the United Kingdom, three from France, and one each from Austria, Argentina, Canada, the Czech Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, India, the Netherlands, the Russian Federation, and the Union of South Africa. I mention this because the editors apparently have the ambitious aim of covering the globe in modern times—or, at the minimum, of making more than mere gestures in that direction. There are forty-three chapters, including the introductory ones by the editors. In such a massive work, it would be difficult, not to say tedious, to attempt to review or to “cover” everything. Suffice it to say that students and scholars with an interest in the social sciences will usually find material here of interest. Because the chapters, designed for a work of reference, are necessarily short, there are ideas aplenty for further research, although the bibliographical leads are sometimes quite modest. Of course a volume of this sort can only be an introduction to its subject. It cannot do all that various constituencies might desire. Fair enough: there is plenty here. So what is here? The editors have arranged the volume into four major sections, two that have few surprises and two that have more. Parts 1 and 2 present twenty-one essays whose authors address relatively familiar topics, to and since the later nineteenth century, and somewhat slanted toward Europe and America, respectively. In Part 1 we have chapters on such problems as social thought and natural science, utopian socialism and social science, social surveys before 1900, history, psychology, Continental political economy, British economic theory, and Marx and Marxism. The section begins with Theodore Porter’s helpful orientation to the various genres and forms of social inquiry, broadly defined, from the Enlightenment to 1890, in which we learn about the sciences of man, the Enlightenment sciences of population, economy, and the state, and social science in a revolutionary age

A Deweyan Perspective on Democracy and Inquiry in the Field of Special Education

On what basis do special educators working in the area of severe disabilities make decisions? This article provides an exploration of the practice of social inquiry in professional work that draws from the democratic ethics of John Dewey. Dewey emphasizes the need for knowledge to contribute to the daily challenge of fostering equality in human interactions and relationships. His philosophy supports the free development of many forms of social inquiry and the cultivation of a pluralistic dialogue valuing diverse perspectives. This article concludes with a description of advisory work within the self-advocacy movement as an example of Deweyan democracy in action.

Social Enquiries in the People's Republic of China

After a period of vigorous growth in the 1930S and 1940s, sociology as an academic discipline in China ceased to exist soon after the establishment of the People's Republic. During a brief period of free expression in 1957, some of the former sociologists sought a place for sociology within the framework of socialism. Their attempt failed as they tried to link the revival of sociology with the political vision of creating an effective opposition party of intellectuals. Though professional and institutional sociology does not exist, other forms of social inquiry are carried out in contemporary China. The first area of research involves some former sociologists and anthropologists in the study of national minorities and emigrant Chinese communities. The second area includes social and historical studies of four institutions—the family, the factory, the village, and the communes-which have been conducted as part of a popular campaign to instil revolutionary consciousness among the masses. The third area consists of the survey research carried out mainly by party cadres to formulate, implement, and evaluate policies. These forms of social inquiry are mainly shaped by the political pre-occupations in contemporary Chinese society, namely, the `contradictions' of `rightist conservatism and leftist adventurism', `democracy and centralism', and `redness and expertness'. The demise of professional sociology also testifies to the shaky institutional roots that the group of western-trained intellectuals had in modem China.