Social Science Graduate Research Articles

Os 10 anos da Sociologia no ensino médio no Brasil: considerações sobre a formação de professores de Ciências Sociais na UFSM

O artigo objetiva efetuar um balanço da formação de professores de Ciências Sociais no Brasil, inicia- do com a promulgação de lei da Lei no 11.684/ 2008 (que tornou obrigatório o ensino de Sociologia e da Filosofia no ensino médio), que se finaliza com a reforma do ensino médio e a Base Nacional delineada na Lei no 13.415/2017. Para tanto pretendo focalizar a experiência de trabalho com as dis- ciplinas de Ciências Sociais para o Ensino Médio e Antropologia da Educação, a partir das transforma- ções ocorridas no Departamento de Ciências Sociais da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM), que levaram à criação dos cursos de Licenciatura em Sociologia e Ciências Sociais nas modalidades presencial e EAD. Em um segundo momento, pretendo propor algumas ações reflexivas para os tempos que se anunciam, efetuando uma recuperação do conceito antropológico de educação, para colocá-lo em ação e, a serviço da formação de licenciados em Ciências Sociais no Brasil, para, como conclusão, expressar novas vias de acesso às Ciências Sociais na escola.

Stories of moving on HASS PhD graduates’ motivations and career trajectories inside and beyond academia

It is widely accepted that the academic job market is very limited and unlikely to expand any time soon, yet enrolments in PhDs continue to rise. If the PhD is no longer preparation for academia, where do these graduates go on completing their degrees? This study of Australian PhD graduates in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) explores motivations to undertake a research degree, their experiences of academia, and their current employment. These personalised narratives reveal the impact and value of doctoral education on the employment trajectories of HASS PhD graduates in non-academic careers. These stories uncover both the ‘cruel optimism’ and positive employment outcomes experienced by HASS doctorate holders. It is argued that commencing PhD candidates should be encouraged from the outset to seriously consider their doctorate as preparation for careers beyond academia; rather than being ‘failed academics,’ these graduates succeed as high-level knowledge workers.

Leadership Attributes Among Women Bankers

Women make up a disproportionately small percentage of executive boards at banks and financial oversight organizations. Less than 20% of board positions in banks and financial oversight organizations are held by women across the world. In contrast, there is a sizable pool of qualified female graduates. In the United States and the United Kingdom, women accounted for half of all business and social science graduates in 2010-2011, but just 30% of all economics graduates. A "glass ceiling" in finance is becoming more evident, yet it may not have much of an effect on financial outcomes like stability. Existing research is patchy, with studies focused on either narrow characteristics of risk-taking or narrow geographical regions. This paper compiles a large dataset on the banking industry, including its features and performance, and also on the proportion of women on the boards of trustees from various sources, covering 72 nations over 13 years, in order to investigate the correlation between gender and financial security. The study also introduces a new dataset on the percentage of women serving on banking supervisory agency boards in 113 countries to investigate whether or not the presence of women on such boards correlates with certain banking outcomes like stability. Our research adds to the scholarly conversation in two ways. In the first place, we provide extensive data that enables us to give fresh stylized statistics on the proportion of women serving on bank boards and in managerial positions across different banking sectors and geographies. Women make up fewer than 2% of CEOs in the banking industry, as shown by the sample, which also confirms the low representation of women on boards. When comparing savings banks to investment banks, holding companies for banks, and insurance companies, the former has a larger percentage of women working there. Our data challenges conventional wisdom by revealing that women make up a disproportionately large proportion of bank board members and banking supervisory agency board members in several low- and middle-income nations. Second, the article discovers fresh data indicating that the presence of women on boards of banks may have an impact on bank stability, through larger capital buffers, while other important characteristics are held constant. There seems to be a correlation between the number of women on banking oversight boards and the health of financial institutions.

Talking, reading, and writing like an educational psychologist: The role of discourse practices in graduate students' professional identity development

Abstract This study explored the role played by the development of discourse practices specific to a discipline in the professional identity development of graduate students. Qualitative methods were used to track 34 students at different stages of their doctoral programs, marked by important signposts of progress in their graduate studies in educational psychology. Grounded theory methods led to two themes: (a) students recognizing to varying degrees the need to change their ways of talking, reading, and writing, grounded in experiences with coursework, research activities, practicum sites, and various writing projects; and (b) formal and informal learning communities acting as sites to encourage students' development of disciplinary communication skills, including oral and written forms, as well as their professional identity. Findings highlighted how social science graduate students, throughout their program, developed their professional identity even as they acquired disciplinary discourse practices relevant to various professional situations they encounter.

A Mixed Method Investigation of Social Science Graduate Students’ Statistics Anxiety Conditions Before and After the Introductory Statistics Course

Research frequently uses quantitative approach to explore undergraduates’ statistics anxiety conditions. However, few studies of adults’ statistics anxiety use qualitative method or focus solely on graduate students. Moreover, even less studies focus on comparing adults’ anxiety levels before and after the introductory statistics course. This line of study is important to pursue since the introductory statistics course should play the very important roles of both preparing students’ the foundation knowledge of higher level statistics course, and inspiring students’ interests for higher level course. In addition, graduate students tend to have different backgrounds, learning motivations, and learning habits compared to their undergraduate counterparts. Overall, limited mixed research method is available on social sciences graduate students’ (1) statistics anxiety before and after the introductory statistics course and (2) actions taken to decrease the anxiety. This study seeks to fill this gap by incorporating a mixed research method to explore social sciences graduate students’ statistics learning processes. Findings suggest that the social sciences graduate students’ anxiety levels diminished after the introductory statistics course, even though they also experienced severe statistics anxiety at the very beginning. These findings became essential for institutions, higher education instructors, and social sciences statistics learners to consider.

Undergraduate majors in public administration and competitor fields: How do student characteristics and career outcomes compare?

ABSTRACTWe know strikingly little about the people who earn undergraduate degrees in public administration/policy. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) for 2009–2014, this article expands our knowledge, examining the characteristics of people with bachelor’s degrees in public administration and public policy, the degrees they obtain, their unemployment rates, the jobs they take, and the amounts they earn. The news is generally good in terms of student diversity, graduate education, commitment to public service, and earnings, though unemployment rates tend to be higher than for other majors. People with bachelor’s degrees in public administration/policy have more gender and race diversity than graduates in most social sciences, business, English, history, and communications. They are among the most likely to choose public sector employment. Those who stop with bachelor’s degrees earn more than comparable graduates in most competitor fields; but nearly half obtain graduate degrees, more than most programs, and those who do also out-earn most competitors.

Information-seeking behavior of economics graduate students: If you buy it, will they come?

ABSTRACTThe information-seeking behavior of social science graduate students has been the subject of many studies, but none have concentrated only on the economics graduate student population and their unique needs. The purpose of this focus group study was to use group discussions to understand the actual online behavior of graduate economics students when conducting research. The results provide insight and information about the skills and characteristics of economics graduate students, their first steps in conducting research online, their use of publicly available and library resources, challenges to finding information, and resources used to overcome these challenges.

Career Choices of PhD Graduates in the Social Sciences and Humanities

How successful are PhD graduates in the Social Sciences and Humanities when stepping out beyond the academic setting, or else entering professional circles within the academic structures, namely research and lecturing positions? The aim of this article is to present partial results of a qualitative research undertaken in Slovakia as a part of the international POCARIM project, mapping career paths of PhD graduates in Social Sciences and Humanities. This article discusses various aspects shaping career paths of such graduates. The empirical sampling provides facts for our reflection regarding qualified researchers and their experience. Each respondent has his/her own life story and the analysis is accompanied with some of the actual examples. It shows how the decisionmaking process can develop and what directions a career path can take. Based on narrative accounts, basic factors affecting a postdoctoral course of life were identified and analised from three basic points of view, namely: gender, economic and individual.

The Second Transition of Political Elites in China: A Response to National Crisis

이 연구는 제18기 중국 공산당 중앙위원회의 특성을 분석하는 것을 그 목적으로 한다. 이를 통해 중국에서 1980년대 이루어진 혁명간부에서 기술관료로의 제1차 정치 엘리트 전환 이후, 이번 회기를 기점으로 기술관료에서 일반간부로의 제2차 정치 엘리트 전환이 진행되었다는 것을 주장한다. 제18기 중국 공산당 중앙위원회의 주된 엘리트 유형은 대학에서 인문 혹은 사회과학을 전공하고, 당정기관 혹은 군중 조직에서 주요 경력을 쌓은 이들로써, 혁명 간부 그리고 기술관료와 구분되는 일반간부라고 할 수 있다. 이 새로운 주도 엘리트 유형의 출현과 부상은 중국이 혁명과 산업화의 시대를 넘어섰다는 것을 의미한다. 즉 혁명의 시대에 ‘사자’와 같은 엘리트가 필요하고, 산업화의 시대에‘여우’가 필요했다면, 후 산업화 시대에는 일반간부가 필요하다는 것이다. 따라서 이 일반간부는 엘리트주의자라기 보다는 대중주의자이고, 주되게 국가적 차원의 불균형과 격차를 해소하기 위해 최적화된 이들이라고 할 수 있다.This study aims to characterize the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It argues that, after the first transition of Chinese political elites from revolutionary cadres to technocrats in the post-reform era, the second transition occurred in the 18th Central Committee of CCP with a shift from technocrats to ‘generalist cadres’. The latest leading elite types of generalist cadres in CCP tend to be college graduates in humanities and social sciences with work experience in the Party or government-related organizations. The emergence of this new leading elite type indicates that China has entered a new post-revolution and post-industrialization era. Unlike the ‘lions’ in the revolutionary era or the ‘foxes’ in the industrialization era, the new leaders tend to maintain more generalist characteristics than elitist or populist in order to resolve the crises of national disparity and imbalance.

‘I’m not a natural mathematician’

There is continuing concern about the paucity of social science graduates who have the quantitative skills required by academia and industry. Not only do students often lack the confidence to explore, and use, statistical techniques, the dominance of qualitative research in many disciplines has also often constrained programme-level integration of more quantitative material. However, whilst the topic of statistical literacy is relatively well researched within the more general educational literature, the evidence-base with respect to the effectiveness of teaching and learning of quantitative research methods in the social science remains somewhat limited. This paper describes the development, integration and evaluation of a series of student-led inquiry-based quantitative workbooks within a sociology/social policy undergraduate degree. It outlines how the workbooks were constructively aligned within a ‘methods spine’ and offers some insight into quantitative teaching and learning generally. The paper also discusses some of the opportunities and challenges of taking both an aligned and IBL approach to the teaching of quantitative methods. In doing so it adds to growing evidence that ‘problem-based pedagogies’ tend to increase educational gain over and above more didactic approaches to learning and teaching. It highlights three key findings: programme-level approaches to curriculum design can be crucial in improving quantitative skills, particularly where they are tailored to student needs; a general indifference to quantitative methods is likely to be due to a process of disenfranchisement that happens before and during students’ engagement with university; and, meaningfully engaging students as partners in the process of designing, integrating and evaluating curricula can help to overcome some of the barriers associated with the learning and teaching of quantitative skills.

FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE WORKPLACE: HOW SOCIAL SCIENCE STUDENTS ARE LEARNING TO DO DATA ANALYSIS FOR REAL

In British social science degree programmes, methods courses have a bad press, and statistics courses in particular are not well-liked by most students. A nationally-coordinated, strategic investment in quantitative skills training, Q-Step, is an attempt to address the issues affecting the shortage of quantitatively trained humanities and social science graduates. Pedagogic approaches to teaching statistics and data analysis to social science students are starting to indicate positive outcomes. This paper contributes to these debates by focusing on the perspective of the student experience in different learning environments: first, we explain the approach taken at the University of Manchester to teaching a core quantitative research methods module for second-year sociology students; and second, we introduce case studies of three undergraduates who took that training and went on to work as interns with social research organisations, as part of a Manchester Q-Step Centre initiative to take learning from the classroom into the workplace. 
 First published May 2017 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

The Active Skim: Efficient Reading as a Moral Challenge in Postgraduate Education

Faculty and students recognize that to succeed in graduate school, the ability to read efficiently and with comprehension is crucial. Students must be able to process information newly presented to them, even when that information seems overwhelming. Comprehending, discussing, and utilizing relevant texts are central to the production of scholars. But what constitutes appropriate techniques of reading, when does one employ various strategies, and for what purposes? In a world in which more is assigned than can reasonably be processed, what constitutes a legitimate practice? In this conversation essay, we discuss the role of skimming, building upon an interview study of 36 social science graduate students in history, economics, and sociology. We ask what students believe about the necessity and appropriateness of skimming, how they honed their skills, and what constitutes normative standards. We treat skimming as a form of “legitimate deviance,” necessary for occupational survival but a strategy that is potentially a challenge to an academic self-image. Students learn techniques that allow them to read rapidly and recall information for later use, but the appropriate use of these techniques is rarely discussed openly in graduate training.

Determinants of graduates' job opportunities and initial wages in China

AbstractBased on a sample of new graduates in the Beijing area, this study examines how college prestige, major and sex affect their job search prospects and initial wages. Using a parametric survival approach and a Heckman selection model, it shows that graduates find jobs faster if they come from prestigious universities, signalling ability and qualification. They also receive higher initial wages than graduates from other tertiary education institutions. Engineering and business graduates find jobs more easily than law and science graduates, but liberal arts and social science graduates receive higher wages. Female graduates find jobs faster than male graduates, but they earn less.

The Analysis of Students’ Learning Outcomes Majoring in Natural Science and Social Science at Accounting Education Study Program

This research aims to determine the differences of students’ learning outcomes majoring in natural and social sciences at Accounting Education Department in the Faculty of Economics, Makassar State University. Population of research was students of Accounting Education Department in the year of 2011 to 2012. Samples were 50 undergraduate students who graduated from natural science and 50 undergraduate students who graduated from social science. It used purposive sampling with the certain criteria. Data were collected by using questionnaires and data on students’ study backgrounds was taken from simpadu . Then, data were analyzed by descriptive statistical analysis. Findings show that the averages of students’ learning outcomes on both Introduction to Accounting 1 and Introduction to Accounting 2 Subjects were 2.89 for students who graduated from natural science and 2.81 for students who graduated from social science. Then; students’ learning outcomes who graduated from natural science on Introduction to Accounting 1 subject was 2.80 and 2.98 for Introduction to Accounting 2. Whereas; students’ learning outcomes who graduated from social science for Introduction to Accounting 1 was 2.95 and Introduction to Accounting 2 was only 2.68. It can be concluded that students’ learning outcomes on Introduction to Accounting 1 and Introduction to Accounting 2 who graduated from Social science got the lower scores than students who graduated from natural science. It happened because the learning method which used by Natural science graduates more practical and the Social science graduates usually had discussions because they thought they already had the basic knowledge of accounting.

The Social Gradient in Cultural Consumption and the Information-Processing Hypothesis

Patterns of cultural consumption have a strong social gradient which is primarily driven by education, but what explains these educational differences in cultural preferences remains unclear. Explanations based on information processing capacity have gained widespread currency; the perceived cognitive ‘difficulty’ of both appreciating high culture, and of maintaining broad, omnivorous tastes. If, on average, high culture is more complex than low culture then a higher level of information processing capacity may be required to derive enjoyment from it. In contrast, socialization theories suggest that exposure to ‘high’ culture, may explain this gradient, particularly among university graduates with degrees in the Arts or Humanities. To test these two theories we use the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey ( n = 1,079) and estimate the association between degree type and measures of cultural preference and consumption, including: film directors, artists, and cultural participation. Compared to non-graduates, arts, humanities, and social science graduates are more likely to enjoy highbrow directors and artists, and are more likely to be cultural omnivores; while graduates from other subjects are not clearly distinct from non-graduates in their cultural preferences. These findings suggest that information processing plays a minor role in shaping the social gradient in cultural consumption.

Field-of-Study Homogamy

This paper reports evidence on the strong tendency of the college educated to match with partners who graduated in the same field of study – a dimension of assortative matching that has been overlooked thus far. We employ Labor Force Survey data covering most EU countries to measure the extent of field-of-study homogamy in prevailing married and cohabiting couples within several years of college graduation. We find that field-of-study homogamy increases almost immediately after graduation to reach very high levels, especially for spouses working in the same industry, and that it varies dramatically across countries. Graduates in Social Sciences display a particularly strong tendency towards homogamy and also have the highest matching theory-implied match gains from homogamous matches.

Field-of-Study Homogamy

This paper reports evidence on the strong tendency of the college educated to match with partners who graduated in the same field of study – a dimension of assortative matching that has been overlooked thus far. We employ Labor Force Survey data covering most EU countries to measure the extent of field-of-study homogamy in prevailing married and cohabiting couples within several years of college graduation. We find that field-of-study homogamy increases almost immediately after graduation to reach very high levels, especially for spouses working in the same industry, and that it varies dramatically across countries. Graduates in Social Sciences display a particularly strong tendency towards homogamy and also have the highest matching theory-implied match gains from homogamous matches.

Quantitative methods intervention: What do the students want?

The shortage of social science graduates with competent quantitative skills jeopardises the competitive UK economy, public policy making effectiveness and the status the UK has as a world leader in higher education and research (British Academy for Humanities and Social Sciences, 2012). There is a growing demand for quantitative skills across all sectors, including business, public sector and charities (Nuffield Foundation, 2013). This preliminary report explores the usefulness of the one minute paper (OMP) classroom assessment tool (Wilson, 1986), firstly as a useful pedagogical tool and secondly its effect on undergraduate students’ attitudes and anxiety while participating in a research methods course. Whilst results showed that there was no statistically significant difference in student anxiety or student attitude levels pre module and post module, qualitative analysis of the students’ written feedback identified that students were engaged with the topic and that they sought active learning techniques. Implications and further research are considered.

Epistemological Diversity in Social Science Graduate Curriculum: The Experience from an American College in Czech Republic

The insufficient coverage of philosophy of science and epistemological discussion in graduate curriculum has been a subject of criticism among several scholars. In this article, I examine the ways through which the MA curriculum in International Relations in an American college in Czech Republic was restructured toward a meaningful representation of different epistemological approaches. The restructuration of the program comes as a result of the university’s search for legitimacy in a post-communist society. Similar to its peers in Central and Eastern Europe, the university is enforced to increase its quality in teaching. It does so through introducing participatory curriculum committees where faculty members from different epistemological backgrounds gather. The experience shows that such participatory mechanisms in universities are essential to give space for philosophy of science debates in graduate curriculum.

Reflection & Possibilities of Expert Graduation of St. Elizabeth University of Health and Social Sciences Graduates in the Field of Social Work.

Reflection & Possibilities of Expert Graduation of St. Elizabeth University of Health and Social Sciences Graduates in the Field of Social Work.