Social Research Research Articles

Towards an understanding of landslide risk assessment and its economic losses: a scientometric analysis

AbstractThis scientometric analysis significantly advances the understanding of landslide risk assessment and economic losses, focusing on scientometric insights. This study aims at analyzing the global trends and structures of landslide risk and economic loss research from 2002 to 2023 using scientometric techniques such as co-authorship, co-word, co-citation, cluster analysis, and trend topics, among others. Thus, analysis of 92 studies gathered from Scopus and Web of Science databases reveals a continuous growth in environmental, social, and quantitative research topics. Predominant contributions hail mainly from China and Italy. The research identifies critical themes, including risk analysis, vulnerability, fragility, and economic losses. The current identified research combines advanced statistical methods, including logistic regression, with climate change scenarios and susceptibility assessments to reveal intricate connections between climatic shifts, hydrogeological hazards, and their economic and environmental impacts. This study provides researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of the status quo and research trends of ontology research landslide risk and its economic losses. It also promotes further studies in this domain.

‘Is it worth doing this or is it better to commit suicide?’: On ethical clearance at a university

The article examines the formal process of ‘ethical clearance’ for social science research at a large university and illuminates how it functions to undermine its stated purpose. We find that rather than promoting ethical standards, the bureaucratic process creates negative and cynical attitudes and game playing. For almost all participants, the entire procedure is counterproductive and experienced as absurd, creating a boomerang effect. The findings reveal how a specific rationalization effort leads to widespread experiences of irrationality, where detailed and strict organization merges with experiences of the bizarre. The article develops concepts capturing the experience and resulting organizational type: ‘orbizzarization’ and ‘absurdocracy’. These concepts enrich our understanding of toxic/irrational organizations, including Kafkaesque organizations.

The ‘Implicit Intelligence’ of artificial intelligence. Investigating the potential of large language models in social science research

ABSTRACT Researchers in ‘hard' science disciplines are exploring the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for advancing research in their fields. Their colleagues in ‘soft' science, however, have produced thus far a limited number of articles on this subject. This paper addresses this gap. Our main hypothesis is that existing Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models (LLMs) can closely align with human expert assessments in specialized social science surveys. To test this, we compare data from a multi-country expert survey with those collected from the two powerful LLMs created by OpenAI and Google. The statistical difference between the two sets of data is minimal in most cases, supporting our hypothesis, albeit with certain limitations and within specific parameters. The tested language models demonstrate domain-agnostic algorithmic accuracy, indicating an inherent ability to incorporate human knowledge and independently replicate human judgment across various subfields without specific training. We refer to this property as the ‘implicit intelligence' of Artificial Intelligence, representing a highly promising advancement for social science research.

Islam dan Gerakan Sosial: Studi atas Resistensi Guru Tarekat Menghadapi Pemerintah Hindia Belanda di Jawa Timur pada Akhir Abad XIX-Awal Abad XX

This article proves several findings related to the crisis period involving the lives of teachers and religious practitioners in Java from the 19th to early 20th centuries. Even though their perspective on life is usually not concerned with world affairs, it is known that several Tariqa or Sufi teachers led social movements against the Dutch East Indies government. Of course, this was an anomaly, considering that usually the Company's enemies or people who the Company suspected from among Muslim religious leaders were kiai or hajjis. Tariqa teachers have a different identity from the two. Through social history research, by looking back at several records and reports left by the Dutch East Indies government, new information can be obtained about the involvement of this esoteric group in the arena of resistance against colonialists. Using historical research methods, several findings were obtained regarding the role of tariqa teachers in that period, especially in their efforts to build anti-colonial networks in East Java.

Can Generative AI improve social science?

Generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, and other human-like outputs is currently transforming many different industries. Yet it is not yet known how such tools might influence social science research. I argue Generative AI has the potential to improve survey research, online experiments, automated content analyses, agent-based models, and other techniques commonly used to study human behavior. In the second section of this article, I discuss the many limitations of Generative. I examine how bias in the data used to train these tools can negatively impact social science research—as well as a range of other challenges related to ethics, replication, environmental impact, and the proliferation of low-quality research. I conclude by arguing that social scientists can address many of these limitations by creating open-source infrastructure for research on human behavior. Such infrastructure is not only necessary to ensure broad access to high-quality research tools, I argue, but also because the progress of AI will require deeper understanding of the social forces that guide human behavior.

Correction: Conflicting ‘mother-scientist’ roles. An innovative application of basket analysis in social research

Correction: Conflicting ‘mother-scientist’ roles. An innovative application of basket analysis in social research

Rights in China: Myths, Abuses, and Politics

This article presents a sociological perspective on understanding rights in China, examining the interplay between multiple myths of rights, rights abuses, and the politics of rights within various social and physical spaces. It highlights competing myths of rights held by the state, ordinary citizens, rights activists, and legal professionals. The article examines how rights abuses contribute to rights consciousness and mobilization across different human rights domains in a repressive political context. By analyzing the politics of rights in interconnected spaces, such as the street, the legal system, the global arena, and cyberspace, it emphasizes the importance of continuous engagement between domestic and overseas actors in shaping China's human rights future. The article encourages social science researchers to thoroughly examine the myths, abuses, and politics of rights before making normative judgments about China's human rights conditions.

Surveying the Landscape of Environmental Social Science: A Bibliometric and Network Analysis

Abstract Social science research on the environment has grown exponentially in the past four decades alongside increasing awareness that environmental risks, such as climate change, cannot be understood by natural science interventions alone. While prior research examines how specific disciplines, like sociology, have attended to the environment or how specific problems have been engaged across disciplines, less attention has been offered to the entire landscape of research on the environment in the social sciences. In this article, we ask: What is the landscape of environmental social science? Focusing on 124,906 social scientific articles from the Web of Science, we analyze the relationship between journals publishing research on the environment. Specifically, we construct journal citation networks and topic models on bibliographic records from 1990 to 2022. Results suggest that journals form coherent communities associated with both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research topics, indicating that journal communities may be a central organizing feature of ESS. Moreover, research topics prevalent in this field have changed over time, potentially in relation to the ongoing neoliberalization of climate change politics. As scholars want to influence policy and industrial practice, their research implicitly reflects values consistent with the current political economic order. We conclude by highlighting the implications of these findings for the field of environmental social science.

Harmonious learning: songs in English for ESP

Abstract The ubiquitous nature and diffusion of songs sung in English has meant that a great number of EFL and ESP students are listening to English and acquiring some notions about the language almost subconsciously. Such songs have also been incorporated into English as an L2 practice for, probably, almost as long as English has been taught as a foreign language. However, sometimes they are used as filler exercises or only as an exercise to keep the students happy. Slowly, songs have been gaining more acceptance as a valid didactic tool to be used in various moments of the general English L2 lesson and for various functions (Tegg 2018). This article reports on a project to use songs in English for Specific purposes lessons at an Italian university with students of two Master degree courses (Social Work and Social Policy; Sociology and Social Research). During the English modules, songs from various artists were specifically chosen and language-learning exercises devised around them to be used in almost every lesson for different learning objectives: these included introducing a new subject, presenting and revising grammar, learning individual words or short phrases including idiomatic expressions, as lead-ins to discussions. At the end of the course, the students completed a questionnaire aimed at eliciting their opinions about the use of songs in ESP lessons. The results indicate that the use of popular songs is an effective tool in an ESP lesson and that their inclusion can help motivate students as well as help them learn.

Streamlining social media information extraction for public health research with deep learning.

Social media-based public health research is crucial for epidemic surveillance, but most studies identify relevant corpora with keyword-matching. This study develops a system to streamline the process of curating colloquial medical dictionaries. We demonstrate the pipeline by curating a UMLS-colloquial symptom dictionary from COVID-19-related tweets as proof of concept. COVID-19-related tweets from February 1, 2020, to April 30, 2022 were used. The pipeline includes three modules: a named entity recognition module to detect symptoms in tweets; an entity normalization module to aggregate detected entities; and a mapping module that iteratively maps entities to Unified Medical Language System concepts. A random 500 entity sample were drawn from the final dictionary for accuracy validation. Additionally, we conducted a symptom frequency distribution analysis to compare our dictionary to a pre-defined lexicon from previous research. We identified 498,480 unique symptom entity expressions from the tweets. Pre-processing reduces the number to 18,226. The final dictionary contains 38,175 unique expressions of symptoms that can be mapped to 966 UMLS concepts (accuracy = 95%). Symptom distribution analysis found that our dictionary detects more symptoms and is effective at identifying psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression, often missed by pre-defined lexicons. This study advances public health research by implementing a novel, systematic pipeline for curating symptom lexicons from social media data. The final lexicon's high accuracy, validated by medical professionals, underscores the potential of this methodology to reliably interpret and categorize vast amounts of unstructured social media data into actionable medical insights across diverse linguistic and regional landscapes.

The sociopolitical turn in mathematics education and decolonial theory

This literature review examines how the theoretical perspectives aligned to the sociopolitical turn in mathematics inform social justice mathematics education. While existing literature has established the importance of social justice frameworks informed by critical theory, there has been limited exploration of critical race theory, poststructuralism and feminist theory, perspectives that offer a broader and more complex understanding of the social and political. After examining how these perspectives contribute to social justice mathematics, we explore the potential contributions of decolonial theory, particularly the way it unsettles accepted notions of social justice. By drawing and building on the sociopolitical turn in mathematics education, this article argues that decolonial thought can also assist in reimagining social justice mathematics education theoretically, methodologically and pedagogically. Ultimately, the article argues that there is no social justice without cognitive/epistemic and ontological justice, meaning that social justice loses ethical and political weight when modernity’s violent epistemic and ontological foundations are not questioned by social justice mathematics education research.

Digital Mental Health for Schizophrenia and Other Severe Mental Illnesses: An International Consensus on Current Challenges and Potential Solutions.

Digital approaches may be helpful in augmenting care to address unmet mental health needs, particularly for schizophrenia and severe mental illness (SMI). An international multidisciplinary group was convened to reach a consensus on the challenges and potential solutions regarding collecting data, delivering treatment, and the ethical challenges in digital mental health approaches for schizophrenia and SMI. The consensus development panel method was used, with an in-person meeting of 2 groups: the expert group and the panel. Membership was multidisciplinary including those with lived experience, with equal participation at all stages and coproduction of the consensus outputs and summary. Relevant literature was shared in advance of the meeting, and a systematic search of the recent literature on digital mental health interventions for schizophrenia and psychosis was completed to ensure that the panel was informed before the meeting with the expert group. Four broad areas of challenge and proposed solutions were identified: (1) user involvement for real coproduction; (2) new approaches to methodology in digital mental health, including agreed standards, data sharing, measuring harms, prevention strategies, and mechanistic research; (3) regulation and funding issues; and (4) implementation in real-world settings (including multidisciplinary collaboration, training, augmenting existing service provision, and social and population-focused approaches). Examples are provided with more detail on human-centered research design, lived experience perspectives, and biomedical ethics in digital mental health approaches for SMI. The group agreed by consensus on a number of recommendations: (1) a new and improved approach to digital mental health research (with agreed reporting standards, data sharing, and shared protocols), (2) equal emphasis on social and population research as well as biological and psychological approaches, (3) meaningful collaborations across varied disciplines that have previously not worked closely together, (4) increased focus on the business model and product with planning and new funding structures across the whole development pathway, (5) increased focus and reporting on ethical issues and potential harms, and (6) organizational changes to allow for true communication and coproduction with those with lived experience of SMI. This study approach, combining an international expert meeting with patient and public involvement and engagement throughout the process, consensus methodology, discussion, and publication, is a helpful way to identify directions for future research and clinical implementation in rapidly evolving areas and can be combined with measurements of real-world clinical impact over time. Similar initiatives will be helpful in other areas of digital mental health and similarly fast-evolving fields to focus research and organizational change and effect improved real-world clinical implementation.

How to Use Discrete Choice Experiments to Capture Stakeholder Preferences in Social Work Research

How to Use Discrete Choice Experiments to Capture Stakeholder Preferences in Social Work Research

Co-producing composite storytelling comics: (counter) narratives by academics of working-class heritage

Composite storytelling as a social qualitative research method represents a growing spirit of creativity to explore themes of social injustice. This article discusses the potential methodological affordances and challenges of such approaches when used to collectively unsettle, interrogate and (re)imagine what it means to become an academic of working-class heritage. The participatory project discussed in this paper involved eight social science and humanities academics in UK-based elite higher education institutions. In a series of storytelling sessions, the participants created narrative encounters to foster moments of critique and analysis to explore the complex social realities of their routes into and through academia as people of working-class origins. Working alongside an illustrator, the participants used empirical insights to create composite stories in multimodal comic formats. Through this work, we seek to prompt further discussions about the generative possibilities of pursuing similar methods in the social sciences and beyond to challenge forms of social injustice.

The Causes and Consequences of Refugee Flows: A Contemporary Reanalysis

The world faces a forced displacement crisis. Tens of millions of individuals have been forced across international boundaries worldwide. Therefore, the causes and consequences of refugee flows are the subjects of significant social science inquiry. Unfortunately, the historical lack of reliable data on actual refugee flows, country-specific data reporting timelines, and more general pre-2000 data quality issues have significantly limited empirical inferences on these topics. We replicate 28 articles on these topics using data newly released after a multiyear collaboration with the United Nations on annual dyadic flows. We observe major inconsistencies between the newly released flow numbers and the stock-based flow estimates upon which decades of research are based; we also find widespread inappropriate treatment of missing historical values. When we replicate the existing literature using the newly introduced flow data, correcting the treatment of missing historical values, and temporally extending/restricting the study periods, we produce significantly different results.

The study of social commerce in Generation Z context: the role of social support and privacy risk

PurposeThe recent proliferation of social media platforms has witnessed a growth in social commerce by using social media to facilitate interactivity between customers and vendors. While emergent studies on social commerce are growing, their focus tends to be on millennials and cross-age groups. Given the growth of digital natives in shaping the online shopping experience of the future, we deemed an application to Generation Z necessary and overdue.Design/methodology/approachWe draw on the existing literature and develop a framework to understand social commerce dynamics for digital natives. We employ PLS and CB-SEM to test our proposed model.FindingsOur findings demonstrate the importance of social commerce information sharing activities in facilitating social support, a sense of warmth and belongingness, and online trust for Generation Z platform users. We also investigate the roles of online trust and perceived risk on intention to purchase and find support for both relationships. Finally, we discuss the findings in terms of theoretical and managerial contributions and conclude the study with limitations and future research directions.Originality/valueThis research is unique by using social commerce theory to explore Gen Z platform users. The finding will contribute to information system literature by expanding the social commerce research stream.

Affordances-driven ethics for research on mobile instant messaging: Notes from the Global South

Mobile instant messaging (MIM) applications have received increasing attention from social science researchers lately. Despite the high frequency of its use for multiple purposes, research in such environments entails specific ethical challenges, more familiar for researchers from the Global South, where MIMs have become an important part of the media landscape for a decade or so. This article discusses the ethical dilemmas that emerged in two distinct cases where authors were part of the research teams, concluding that current frameworks fall short in the sociotechnical dimension. To address this, we complement the casuistic-heuristic model with an affordances-driven approach, which contemplates the agency of the group members within the interactive processes that take place in digital environments and the possibilities and constraints that platforms' features offer during the research process.

Audio-as-Data Tools: Replicating Computational Data Processing

The rise of audio-as-data in social science research accentuates a fundamental challenge: establishing reproducible and reliable methodologies to guide this emerging area of study. In this study, we focus on the reproducibility of audio-as-data preparation methods in computational communication research and evaluate the accuracy of popular audio-as-data tools. We analyze automated transcription and computational phonology tools applied to 200 episodes of conservative talk shows hosted by Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones. Our findings reveal that the tools we tested are highly accurate. However, despite different transcription and audio signal processing tools yield similar results, subtle yet significant variations could impact the findings’ reproducibility. Specifically, we find that discrepancies in automated transcriptions and auditory features such as pitch and intensity underscore the need for meticulous reproduction of data preparation procedures. These insights into the variability introduced by different tools stress the importance of detailed methodological reporting and consistent processing techniques to ensure the replicability of research outcomes. Our study contributes to the broader discourse on replicability and reproducibility by highlighting the nuances of audio data preparation and advocating for more transparent and standardized practices in this area.

Research ethics in social science research during health pandemics: what can we learn from COVID-19 experiences?

The COVID-19 pandemic posed many ethical and practical challenges for academic research. Some of these have been documented, particularly in relation to health research, but less attention has been paid to the dilemmas encountered by educational and social science research. Given that pandemics are predicted to be more frequent, it is vital to understand how to continue crucial research in schools and other learning communities. This article therefore focuses specifically on research ethics in educational and social science during the pandemic of 2020–2022. The research involved interviews and workshops with University College London (UCL) academics, professional staff and graduate students and encompassed those involved in reviewing ethics applications, researchers dealing with ethics in projects that continued despite disruptions caused by COVID-19, and successful research projects specifically designed to study the effects of COVID-19 in various contexts. The article discusses some of the crucial knowledge and practical experiences that were accumulated. The operational and epistemological lessons learned from this particular institution may have wider relevance to research ethics processes in higher education environments where academics and students are grappling with post-COVID-19 ethical dilemmas and inform broader debates about how research institutions can build institutional knowledge to improve practices of ethics review at the times of health emergencies in future. Our evidence points to the significance of inter- and multidisciplinary, collaborative approaches that flatten institutional hierarchies and to the crucial role played by professional staff. In addition, we argue that ethics review processes must be underpinned by critical debates about wider issues of unequal power relationships between research partners, the nature of knowledge production, ownership and utilisation. To enhance equity and epistemic justice in research practices, ethics education should be an ongoing integral part of research ethics within research institutions.

Preponderant Relationships: Violent Crime, Premises Security Litigation, and Low-Income Housing

ABSTRACT This paper advances knowledge of the ways in which criminological research can assist the courts in rendering legal decisions. To do so, we examine case examples from premises security litigation involving low-income housing developments. We describe the investigative tasks of a premises security lawsuit, address the challenges of examining and explaining a criminal assault, and show how criminological scholarship can point to the importance of place management in suppressing or facilitating crime in low-income housing developments. We examine three preponderant relationships – offender and victim, security standards and proximate causation, and place management and crime opportunities – to provide insight into the translation of criminological knowledge into actionable legal outcomes. We address the nexus of environmental criminology and premises security litigation to strengthen the scientific foundation of criminological research and improve the quality of forensic social scientific research in the legal system.