Positivist Social Science Research Articles

PENINGKATAN PEMAHAMAN PENELITI MENGENAI ASUMSI FILOSOFIS “POSITIVIST SOCIAL SCIENCE” DALAM PEMILIHAN DESAIN PENELITIAN KUANTITATIF

Understanding the philosophical assumptions in social research, whether “positivist” or “interpretive,” is crucial as these foundations shape the way researchers approach, design, and conduct their studies, impacting every aspect from the selection of research design to the interpretation of findings. This community service activity (PKM) focused on enhancing young researchers' understanding of “positivist social science” (PSS) assumptions in selecting quantitative research designs at PTN XYZ, a public university in Riau Province. Discussions with a faculty leader revealed difficulties in publishing quantitative research in reputable international journals, primarily due to a lack of understanding of these philosophical assumptions. To address this, the PKM team organized online training for 18 researchers, covering key topics such as the philosophical foundations of science, PSS approaches in social science, reasons for the acceptance or rejection of research reports by the scientific community, and the research process in quantitative design. The effectiveness of the training was evaluated using a pretest-posttest approach, with initial findings showing only 5% of participants correctly understood the reasons for using a quantitative design. However, post-training results indicated a significant improvement in participants’ knowledge, ensuring the research contributes meaningfully and relevantly to the field. Keywords: Philosophical assumptions, positivist social science approach, quantitative

Temporal validity as meta-science

The “credibility revolution” has forced quantitative social scientists to confront the limits of our methods for creating general knowledge. As a result, many practitioners aim to generate valid but local knowledge and then synthesize and apply that knowledge to predict what will happen in a target context. Positivist social science has until recently been hamstrung with other, more immediate threats to validity and inference, but I argue that recent advances in statistical approaches to the problem of external validity reveal limits of the current paradigm. This article and the term “temporal validity” illustrate the intrinsic limits of agnostic (i.e., assumption-free) external validity when the target setting is in the future. These limits, I argue, suggest a re-orientation of social science methodology. We should acknowledge that no research design, no empirical knowledge, is perfectible; instead, we should explicitly aim to increase the amount and quality of knowledge we produce. I believe it is useful to characterize this perspective as part of “Meta-Science,” an emerging paradigm within the social sciences. “Temporal validity” and the implied “knowledge decay” thus represent a meta-scientific intervention aimed at increasing the usefulness of the knowledge we produce. Among other structural reforms, I argue that the binary reality of academic scholarship (a paper is published or not) reifies the perfectibility of empirical knowledge and is thus an impediment to recognizing the continuous nature of all forms of scientific validity.

The Grounded Model of Communication Savoring: Theory Development and Age Cohort Study

<i>Savoring contributes to human flourishing by enabling individuals to optimize, enhance, and prolong pleasurable moments. One unique dimension of savoring, communication savoring, refers to the practice of mindfully attending to and elevating pleasurable or meaningful moments that are experienced in language and social interaction. The grounded model of communication savoring identified the types and phenomenological experiences of communication savoring. The purpose of this study is to continue grounded theoretical development of the communication savoring model by adding new cases to build and refine the model and by applying the model to a novel setting. Using a priori and emergent coding, we analyzed 268 communication savoring narratives from 107 emerging adults and 161 mature/older adults. Our findings demonstrate high fidelity across groups and suggest a refinement to one communication savoring type (i.e., extraordinary communication). Our novel application of the model also revealed generational similarities within the contexts for communication savoring (e.g., people and events) and generational differences regarding the valence (i.e., savoring the bittersweet) and target of communication savoring (i.e., giving vs. receiving). Our paper advances qualitative theory-building in positive social science and offers new insight into age differences in communication savoring. </i>

What Good is Qualitative Literacy Without Data Transparency?

Ethnographic and interview research have made significant contributions to cumulative social science and influenced the public conversation around important social issues. However, debates rage over whether the standards of positivistic social science can or should be used to judge the rigor of interpretive methods. I begin this essay by briefly delineating the problem of developing evaluative criteria for qualitative research. I then explore the extent to which Small and Calarco's Qualitative Literacy helps advance a set of standards attuned to the distinct epistemology of interview and ethnographic methods. I argue that “qualitative literacy” is necessary but not sufficient to help readers decide whether a particular study is high quality. The reader also needs access to enough information about the researcher's data, field site, or subjects that she can independently reanalyze the researcher's interpretations and consider alternative explanations. I also touch on some important differences between ethnography and interviewing that matter for how we evaluate them.

A feeling for history

AbstractThomas Piketty argues that economists need to more seriously engage with history to understand inequality. In his two books on capitalism, Piketty does just that. But what type of history? This essay argues that Piketty, following the example of the Annales School and Braudel's The Mediterranean, has produced a powerful “descriptive” history, a still underappreciated form of work that is often incorrectly contrasted with analytical history. Piketty's insights stem from the power of description in telling us “what was the case,” as Allan Megill argues, and thus precedes causal explanation. When it comes to change over time, Piketty follows the model of eventful temporality that William Sewell has proposed. In contrast to positivist social science, which is built around deep constants over time, Piketty understands that the forces of history subject even seemingly stable structures to change. For this reason, he also believes it is possible to overcome the deep inequalities that have long existed in capitalism.

The Structure of Children's Subjective Well-being.

Research on children’s quality of life and subjective well-being has advanced over the past decade largely as a result of developments in childhood theory, children’s rights legislation, and the shift toward positive social science. However, in line with the uncertainty regarding the conceptualization of subjective well-being, the structural configuration of children’s subjective well-being has not been considered in the literature. In the current study, we present and test a model of children’s subjective well-being, which includes global (context-free items assessing overall and general well-being, without reference to a specific aspect of life) and specific (domain-based items assessing a specific aspect of life) cognitive components, and positive and negative affect. We further test the fit structure of a hierarchical structural (second-order) model of children’s subjective well-being. Finally, we test the measurement invariance of the hierarchical model across age and gender. We use data from the third Wave of the Children’s Worlds Survey. The data source includes a sample of 92,782 participants selected from 35 countries (girls = 49.7%) in two age groups (10- and 12-years-old). We found a good fit for the four-factor confirmatory factor model of children’s subjective well-being. Correlations between the various latent factors were as anticipated—with positive correlations between the life satisfaction components and positive affect, and negative correlations with negative affect. We further found a good fit for the hierarchical structural model of children’s subjective well-being. Finally, we found the tenability of measurement invariance across age and gender. The study extends the generalizability of the hierarchical structural configuration of the subjective well-being to child samples, and provides a viable model to explore correlates and predictors of children’s subjective well-being using the full conceptual model. Finally, we propound the tenability of a quadripartite hierarchical conceptual model of children’s subjective well-being.

The Social Foundations of Positivism: The Case of Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy

AbstractWhat social conditions produce positivism? One position, common to both positivists and some of their major critics, suggests that positivism is an “ideology” or “worldview” of industrial capitalism. Positivism therefore resonates with the basic experience of capitalism for all social groups. Intellectuals draw on this experience in formulating positivist social science. A second position suggests that positivism is a strategy of distinction by which intellectuals attempt to accumulate symbolic capital against their rivals. This position suggests that positivism is a resource for establishing a social science that imitates the methodology of natural science. Our article argues for a third view focused on the internal structure of the intelligentsia as a social group. Positivism could emerge in both industrial capitalist and preindustrial contexts; however, the types of positivism differ in these two cases because the structure of the intelligentsia differs. In preindustrial contexts, such as nineteenth-century Italy, which is the focus of our analysis, positivists claim an ontological continuity between natural and social sciences. In industrial contexts, on the basis of which most theories of positivism rest, positivists claim a methodological similarity between natural and social sciences. We conclude our analysis by reflecting on the implications of our study for work on positivism and social ontology in the social sciences.

Educating American Lawyers: The New Haven School’s Jurisprudence of Personal Character

Abstract Using previously unexploited archival sources and unpublished teaching materials, this article rereads Harold Lasswell and Myres McDougal’s earliest 1943 statement of policy-oriented jurisprudence – what would become known as the ‘New Haven School’ – and examines their wartime careers in government and academia. It breaks with widely held current understandings of the New Haven School. First, Lasswell and McDougal’s work is re-periodized. Instead of a reactionary answer lawyers offered to international relations realists in the 1940s, I argue that policy-oriented jurisprudence was a product of interwar insecurities and the rising culture of American modernism from the 1920s. Second, notwithstanding frequent associations of the jurisprudence with interventionist, anti-communist American foreign policy during the Cold War, the article emphasizes Lasswell and McDougal’s engagement with progressive politics of the early 20th century – New Deal social planning and redistribution; psychoanalytically inspired social critique; Marxism and socialism. Third, I argue that the school’s primary intellectual origins are to be found not in American legal realism or positivist social science, but in philosophical pragmatism and psychoanalysis.

Pedeutology of the XXIas a positive social science

The popular in the modern timespragmatic approach, creates in teaching instrumental attitude to professional tasks execution. It means that reaching goals, on utilitarian level,leads to more effective actions. The positive social sciencestake another approach, basing on the usual human inner drive to be happy. Such being takes place when a person realizes well-being for others and for oneself, following hope, which direction is pointed out by freedom, dignity and human responsibility. The main purpose of the article is to reveal the evidence that create pedeutology of the XXI century as a science of strong teaching profession: its values, meaningfulness and beauty. It has been pointed out to agathological and arthrological aspect of pedeutology. The first one refers to doing good deeds. It is represented by optimal pupil development, which therefore should become a priority in teacher’s professional actions. In reference to the above, the instrumental and vocational teaching context has been characterized. The second aspect refers to the teacher’s moral capabilities, called the virtues. A virtue is a central knowledgeable category of positive social sciences. According to this issue, the utility of the virtue theory has been presented in for the pedeutological thought. The extraordinary attention has been put upon the virtue of hope, reasoning its inevitability in the process of upbringing in the XXI century.

The calling of the virtuous manager: Politics shepherded by practical wisdom

AbstractThis paper extends an ongoing discussion about establishing a sharper way to conduct ethical investigations into managerial virtue. It does so by relying on Alasdair MacIntyre's moral philosophy in place of those more dominant approaches taken by scholars who make up the field of positive social science. A connection is drawn herein between a MacIntyrean “narrative approach” to investigating managerial virtue and the idea of “work as a calling.” Specifically, it will be argued that the MacIntyrean‐influenced idea of “work as a calling” provides a substantive moral vision that supports an understanding of how virtuous managers ought to narrate their primary workplace motivations. Ultimately, virtuous managers fulfill a “political calling” to support and sustain (a) good work, (b) the good of individual lives, and (c) the common good of communities that their organization reaches. To do this, they must rely on the “shepherd virtue” of practical wisdom (phronesis). Practical wisdom aids virtuous managers’ thinking about achieving the ends of their “calling” as well as any necessary course‐corrections that ought to be made toward the better achievement of those good and worthy ends.

Epilogue: The Language Opportunities for the 21st Century.

This epilogue to the Special Issue on Language Challenges in the 21st Century offers commentary on the current state of social scientific inquiry in the field of language and social psychology. Inspired by the seven articles that make up this Special Issue, I became curious about what we would find if we sought language opportunities instead of language challenges in the 21st century. I recommend future scholarship at the intersections of global and linguistic diversity include a positive social science approach in order to consider the full spectrum of challenges and assets. I conclude with a note about the direction of future research related to COVID-19.

Strengthening the ethical expertise of evaluators

In today’s turbulent world the ethical contribution of evaluators needs to be strengthened. Evaluators have been constrained making judgments that take account of values and morality by the fact/value dichotomy and other positivist social science precepts. Too often evaluation confines itself to assessing whether objectives set by program designers are achieved. In evaluation, valuing has to support improvement and learning that encourages societal development and equips citizens and stakeholders with knowledge that supports autonomy. This Platform essay argues that past efforts have over-emphasized the ethical conduct of the evaluator. There has been some extension to include broader societal concerns, e.g. the public good and democratic accountability; and more recently considerations of the evaluators’ ethical and moral expertise. However, there has been less attention to judging what constitutes good public policy including relevant criteria and their use. Evaluator judgments must of course include facts as well as values – they are intertwined. This opens up the question of how others have understood the pre-requisites of a “moral social science.”

KEMANUSIAAN BARU: SEBUAH WACANA PENEGUHAN GAGASAN DALAM SILA KEDUA PANCASILA

Our current crisis of humanity should have also been associated with the problematic conception of humanity within secular or positivist social science perspective, especially with regards the ethics. The paper makes further account of the discourse on humanity in order to give light to better philosophical basis for our changes of world politics. The view would also contribute to encouraging discourse on the ideological basis of Indonesia, Pancasila.

‘Wearing down of the self’: Embodiment, writing and disruptions of identity in transformational festival fieldwork

Immersive ethnographic research can be profoundly destabilising for researchers’ sense of identity, and the attempt to inhabit and reconcile dual identities as researcher and participant can take a severe emotional toll. Prior to the reflexive turn in qualitative sociology, this identity work remained largely unacknowledged. Feminist critiques of positivist social science, along with personal accounts portraying the messy, chaotic aspects of research, have helped to create a new climate in which researchers can openly examine their identity conflicts and even recognise them as an integral part of their research. However, advice on navigating these situations remains somewhat limited. This article is a reflexive account of issues encountered while researching the practice of psychedelic support – the provision of emergency care to people undergoing drug-related crises – within the transformational festival scene in the United Kingdom, the United States and Portugal. Transformational festival settings are engineered to disrupt everyday experiences of identity and selfhood and induce emotional vulnerability. Thus, they throw issues of researcher identity and its management into sharp relief. Physically and emotionally intense fieldwork settings can bring about non-ordinary mental states in the researcher which can put habitual working practices and capacities out of reach. This effect contributed to a painful disjunction between my researcher and participant identities, which centred on the struggle to create linear, written narratives of largely embodied and non-verbal experiences. However, I found that the effect was somewhat mitigated by developing fluid, non-linear, multisensory working practices and documentation methods which were more appropriate to the research setting and the mental states it induced. I conclude that ethnographers in intense or extreme field settings can benefit greatly from methods and tools which work even when we are out of our everyday minds.

Living well in light of science.

This article discusses some findings of the modern science of happiness in the context of historical understandings of happiness. Comparing teachings of the ancient wisdom traditions to those of modern positive psychology and social science, I argue that there is surprising correspondence between the two. The happy life, both ancients and modern agree, involves training and the development and mastery of particular character traits.

What IsGlobalin Global Security Studies?

The mission of the Journal of Global Security Studies is to solicit and publish a variety of methodological, epistemological, theoretical, normative, and empirical studies in the field of global security studies. The emphasis on, and commitment to, diversity of voices and approaches is a welcome addition to the international relations journal landscape and, in particular, to security studies. But, it is a broad and ambitious charge—a charge made all the more ambitious and potentially ambiguous by the identifier “global.” What exactly is global security studies and how is it distinguished from security studies? In this brief comment, I provide some suggested ways to think about, and conceptualize, the term global in global security studies. Before turning to the concept of global security studies, it is worth a quick review of security studies so that we can see the distinction. Twenty-five years ago, at the end of the Cold War, Stephen Walt wrote a thorough state-of-the-field essay on the evolution of security studies up until that point (Walt 1991). Walt championed the “renaissance” that had occurred throughout the 1970s and 1980s in security studies and noted that while the field had always been an “interdisciplinary enterprise,” it was easily definable because of its focus on the “phenomenon of war,” with a particular mission of increasing our collective understanding of the role of military force in international relations (IR). In addition, the “renaissance” of which he wrote was attributable to the surge in positivist social science theorizing (principally realism) of security issues. In the twenty-five years since, security studies has grown well beyond the traditional focus on guns, bombs, and rockets and beyond the issues of conventional warfare, nuclear weapons, and grand strategy. To be sure, the field still focuses on war and conflict, but the nature of war and conflict has …

Factors affecting scholarly performance by wildlife and fisheries faculty

Publication- and citation-based metrics are commonly used to summarize the productivity and impact of individuals, institutions, and journals. We examined factors hypothesized to explain variation in 5 author-based performance metrics among 437 fisheries and wildlife faculty from 33 research-extensive universities in the United States. Regression analyses revealed that the elapsed number of years since conferral of the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree (academic age) was a strong predictor of performance metrics, with non-linear age effects for Hirsch's h-index, Brown's hb-index, the annual rate of increase in h (i.e., m quotient), and number of publications. Greater performance was observed for faculty with greater research appointments. Performance did not vary between Wildlife and Fisheries disciplines but did vary across sub-disciplines; metrics indicated that genetics and disease-related sub-disciplines had the greatest positive effect sizes, social sciences and management-oriented sub-disciplines had the smallest effects, and ecology, conservation, quantitative methods, and aquatic science showed intermediate effect sizes. On average, male faculty published more articles than females, but no sex differences were evident for the other 4 performance metrics. Earlier publication relative to attainment of the Ph.D. degree (publication precocity) was associated with performance for all metrics. Regression models explained 28–54% of the deviance and may prove useful in placing reported values for performance in context of performance by peers. As an alternative point of reference, named (i.e., distinguished) faculty on average exhibited performance 31–96% greater than the performance predicted for otherwise comparable faculty. Our regression models allow for more meaningful comparison of publication and citation performance relative to peers, but they represent only one aspect of faculty performance and should not replace qualitative peer review of productivity and impact. © 2016 The Wildlife Society.

Operationalizing cultural political economy: towards critical grounded theory

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to take conceptual and methodological steps towards the elaboration of the critical grounded theory (CGT) method.Design/methodology/approach– Starting from conceptual issues with mapping everyday discourses and practices in their broader societal context in organisational ethnography, cultural political economy (CPE) is proposed as a suitable theoretical framework for integrating the cultural dimension of discourses and imaginaries into political-economic analyses of organisation and management. The CGT method is introduced for empirical operationalisation.Findings– Grounded theory tools for working with ethnographic data can be employed within critical approaches such as CPE although they originate from positivist social science. The need to combine ethnographic fieldwork with substantial theoretical work and/or critical discourse analysis may be met by CGT, which affords the ethnographic strengths of grounded theory without, however, bracketing the critical-theoretical insights of CPE.Research limitations/implications– The usefulness of CGT has been tentatively tested, but requires thorough meta-theoretical and methodological development, which is what is undertaken here.Social implications– CGT expects and takes account of the social implications of its employment in the field.Originality/value– First steps towards a new critical method for organisation and management studies are taken. Although originating from concern with CPE, the CGT method may appeal to a wider audience of critical scholars across the social sciences.

Introduction‐virtue and virtuousness: when will the twain ever meet?

This paper introduces ‘Virtue and Virtuousness: When will the twain ever meet?’ a special edition of Business Ethics: A European Review. The Call for Papers invited contributions that could inform the relationship between organisational virtuousness, as conceptualised by positive organisation studies, and the classical conception of virtues pertaining to individual women and men. While the resources of particular virtue traditions – Aristotelian, Catholic, Confucian, and the like – could inform their own debates as to whether virtue extends beyond individuals, the debate between virtue traditions and positive organisation studies has a different dimension. The question is whether the claims of positive social sciences as such are compatible with those of any virtue tradition. We argue that positive social science and virtue traditions are indeed rivals such that adherence to the claims of the one precludes adherence to the other. Resolution to such conflicts requires that one tradition is able to resolve questions that exhaust the resources of the other. This paper suggests that at least one area of incoherence in the findings of positive social sciences can be resolved by virtue traditions, and introduces the remaining papers in the special edition.

Unveiling White logic in criminological research: an intertextual analysis

Critical race scholars have called into question the objective neutrality upon which much positivist social science rests, arguing that it discursively masks how whiteness underpins the normative purview of research design and findings. As the scholarly securing of whiteness takes shape through explicit and discursive mechanisms, this article examines how it is manifest in criminological research through an intertextual analysis of contemporary peer-reviewed scholarship. Examining 558 articles in five recognized journals, this paper documents how blind spots towards race and racial stratification surface in criminological research, arguing that most of the articles analyzed do not simply ignore White privilege; they actively uphold it. Findings suggest that they do so through two means: first by whitewashing race, that is, disregarding how race and racism can differentially affect acts and trends of crime and deviance, and secondly, by narrowly representing race as merely explanatory variable without querying the broader power relations it marks. After discussing how these patterns reveal and uphold whiteness as a normative value, we conclude with a discussion of preliminary steps aimed at exposing and unpacking how White logic informs the field.