Social Research Research Articles

Community Diversity and Social Media Use in Local Governments

Compared to its ubiquity, social media use remains a divisive topic in the public sector. While local governments have increasingly adopted social media to increase civic engagement, many are still hesitant. Among the many factors that may have influenced the adoption of social media in local governance, we argue that community diversity deserves more attention. This study theorizes the relationship between local governments’ use of social media and community diversity. We examine this relationship within the context of township governments, which is an understudied area of research in public administration. The results indicate that community diversity is related to an increase in social media use. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and suggest fruitful avenues of inquiry in public administration social media research.

Husserl’s Layered Theory of Empathy and Theory of Mind

ABSTRACT The ability to understand other minds is key to communication, social organization, and culture, and actively researched in disciplines such as psychology, ethology, and primatology. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) developed an elaborate theory of how we understand others, then commonly referred to as empathy (Theorie der Einfühlung). Much recent work on Husserl's theory has interpreted him in opposition to Theory of Mind (ToM), but Husserl's layered account of empathy has received little attention, and so have the more recent versions of ToM, which work with orders of intentionality, and which are applied widely in social cognition research today. This article focuses on Husserl's layered approach, highlighting the main takeaways of his theory, while also providing a commentary, which reflects on his work from a contemporary perspective. This yields a rather different interpretation of him, one which reveals hitherto unnoticed connections with diverse areas of social cognition scholarship.

Conducting power analysis for meta-analysis with dependent effect sizes: Common guidelines and an introduction to the POMADE R package.

Sample size and statistical power are important factors to consider when planning a research synthesis. Power analysis methods have been developed for fixed effect or random effects models, but until recently these methods were limited to simple data structures with a single, independent effect per study. Recent work has provided power approximation formulas for meta-analyses involving studies with multiple, dependent effect size estimates, which are common in syntheses of social science research. Prior work focused on developing and validating the approximations but did not address the practice challenges encountered in applying them for purposes of planning a synthesis involving dependent effect sizes. We aim to facilitate the application of these recent developments by providing practical guidance on how to conduct power analysis for planning a meta-analysis of dependent effect sizes and by introducing a new R package, POMADE, designed for this purpose. We present a comprehensive overview of resources for finding information about the study design features and model parameters needed to conduct power analysis, along with detailed worked examples using the POMADE package. For presenting power analysis findings, we emphasize graphical tools that can depict power under a range of plausible assumptions and introduce a novel plot, the traffic light power plot, for conveying the degree of certainty in one's assumptions.

Responding to negative emotion in a pre-service mathematics classroom

AbstractEmotions associated with prior mathematics learning experiences endure for some pre-service teachers, leaching into their own teaching of mathematics. Taking a sociology of emotions framing, the naturalistic study used event-oriented social inquiry and employed multiple methods (classroom transcripts, interviews, email conversations and reflective notes). In the event selected for this paper, we identified the importance of teacher educators intentionally attending to emotions in pre-service mathematics classes to address a dominant cognitive emphasis in learning to teach mathematics. We found that collective empathy was central to an emotional climate in which responses to individual and collective emotions were considered. We argue that collectively creating an emotionally safe environment in pre-service teacher education can help disrupt cycles of negative emotion associated with mathematics.

REFLECTIONS ABOUT DOING ON-LINE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND THE ABSENCE OF PUBLIC POLICIES REGARDING THE RELATION BETWEEN DIGITAL VULNERABILITY AND HEALTH INEQUALITY

The social restriction imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic challenged traditional qualitative research methods (e.g., face-to-face interviews or in situ participant and non-participant observations), requiring researchers to adapt classic qualitative practices to this new scenario. In this article, we proposed a reflection on how online communications can produce rich, meaningful, intricate, and detailed qualitative data. For that, we initially explained the pre-pandemic context of our research and the changes that were necessary after the pandemic onset. Afterward, we explored how we decided to do online research and how we prepared ourselves to do so, explaining how our data was produced and sharing the experiences that resulted from this. We also explored how the social inequalities in underdeveloped countries, such as Brazil, and the lack of public policies regarding the relation between public health policies and digital vulnerability still put people in what we call digital insufficiency, which might implicate in the social researcher finding different ways to engage with the population studied. Finally, we reflected on how misconceptions about the capacities of the fieldwork (e.g., that it must be in-person) could diminish the potentialities of qualitative research. We suggested that qualitative methods should move from a conventional single-site location to multiple sites of observation and participation. This approach aligns better with a more situated and contextualized qualitative researcher interested in contemporary sociocultural changes.

'I have to remind myself that everyone's search is different': experiences and outcomes of searching and not searching for donor connections among donor conceived adults.

What are the experiences and outcomes of donor conceived adults who are actively searching for, open to contact with, or not searching for donor connections? Most participants were actively searching or open to contact, and 67% had found or been found by a connection; finding or not finding experiences were complex. There is variation among donor conceived individuals in their interest in donor connections. Individual reasons for searching for connections, and which donor connections are searched for, also vary. Most research studies have focussed on individuals who are actively searching for their donor or donor siblings. Global increases in direct-to-consumer DNA testing and social media participation mean that connections may be made to individuals unaware of their (or their relatives') involvement with donor conception. These social and technological changes have also increased the chances of donor conceived individuals being contacted without expecting or desiring contact. This study included 88 donor conceived adults, in the UK, who participated in an online multi-method survey between January and August 2022. The survey was designed in consultation with staff and volunteers from the UK's largest community networks for donor conception families (Donor Conception Network, DCN) and donor conceived people (Donor Conceived Register Registrants' Panel, DCRRP). It was piloted by five donor conceived people before its launch. Participants were recruited with assistance from DCN and DCRRP, via social media, university mailing lists, and snowballing. Participants were mostly female (n = 65, 74%) and sperm donor conceived (n = 79, 90%). Of the 88 participants, 39 (44%) were actively searching for their donor connections, 44 (50%) were open to contact but not actively searching, and 5 (6%) were not searching. Questions were closed (yes/no, rating scale, or multiple choice) or open-ended, addressing experiences of donor conception, searching for connections, and finding or not finding connections. Data were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative results showed no differences between the groups on any demographic variables or in when or how they found out about being donor conceived, and no differences between active searchers and those open to contact in whether they had found their donor connections. Significant differences were found between groups in their interest in their genetic history and the perceived importance of genetics to their sense of identity, with active searchers being more interested and rating this as more important than those open to contact. Methods of searching significantly differed across groups, with active searchers using genetic testing and social media more than those open to contact. 59 participants across all groups (active searchers (n = 29, 74%), open to contact (n = 27, 61%), not open to contact (n = 3, 60%)) had found or been found by a donor connection. Experiences of finding or not finding donor connections among participants actively searching or open to contact were captured by the theme complexities, with six subthemes: uncertainties in searching and relating; searching as open-ended; different donor connections, different experiences; expectations and realities; searching and finding or not finding as catalysing change; and experiences of other donor conceived people. Most participants were members of relevant community organizations. As is common in research in this area, the sample was mostly female and conceived using donor sperm. Donor conceived people who are disinterested in donor connections may be unlikely to participate in research on this topic. The nature and impact of the search process itself should be considered when developing appropriate mechanisms of support for all donor conceived people, regardless of whether they are actively searching for connections or not. Further research should seek to better understand how donor conceived people with varying levels of interest in searching for donor connections differ from one another. This study was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council [New Investigator Award ES/S015426/1]. The authors have no competing interests to declare. N/A.

Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)

A significant strand of cultural and social studies research on late modernity has focused on intimacies; in particular, ‘mediated intimacies’ (Attwood et al., 2017; Barker et al., 2018; Gill, 2009), exploring how the media, in its various forms, represents and affects intimate relationships. Romance fiction, the most popular global genre, offers a key source text for exploring intimate and romantic relationships and the ways culturally and politically specific forms of intimacy are shared transnationally. Of particular interest is the increase in the twenty-first century of romantic stories that deal with the intersection of intimacy and migration. This article brings together critical work on intimacy and affect, scholarship on popular romance, and research on migration and transcultural exchange to explore how contemporary Anglophone popular romance fiction mediates intimate relationships in the context of migration. Focusing on two romance novels featuring South East Asian migration to the USA — Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019) and Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) — I explore how these novels represent marriage migration and its relationship to and impact on intimacy. Both novels are aware of existing stigmas around marriage migration (the risk of abuse or fraudulent marriage), but the association of marriage with ‘authentic’ romantic love in the romance genre ultimately serves to uphold such stigmas, rather than challenge them. The texts pay equally close attention to the performativity of romantic love, noting how heteronormative, western norms of romance are required for migrants but, in the case of You, Me, U.S., can also be queered. These texts are concerned with the movement of people and cultures while themselves travelling across borders as products of a transnational, global publishing market. These fictions, then, showcase how their particular articulations of intimacy offer new insights for scholars interested in marriage migration.

Public control of coal resources of the United States’ Powder River Basin for a managed decarbonization transition

Abstract The United States (US) has set aggressive targets for reaching a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and a net-zero economy by 2050. Reaching these goals will require both rapid expansion of zero- and negative-carbon infrastructure and a phase-out of unabated fossil fuel infrastructure. New subsidy and regulatory actions focus on eliminating coal emissions at the point of consumption either through carbon capture and storage (CCS) or coal-fired power plant retirement. Yet, these pathways have opposite implications for coal production: CCS is coal intensive, while coal retirement is not. Despite a record of chaotic and harmful transition and significant social scientific research suggesting better outcomes from managed, coordinated decline, these mechanisms rely on uncoordinated private decision making by mine and plant owners. Coal mining has rapidly declined since peak production in 2008. Production has dropped by half; bankruptcies are the norm; and coal mine and power plant host communities have experienced highly disruptive decline as a result of this unmanaged transition. Given this history, we argue the current market-based, plant-driven governance approach could worsen transition challenges, including potentially stranding costly CCS investments. We argue that the US should complement its extensive investments in technology demonstrations with innovative governance demonstrations to facilitate a just energy transition. Specifically, we argue that the Powder River Basin, which is the US’ largest coal basin and consists primarily of federally leased coal, should be brought under public control for managed decline both to meet emissions reduction targets and advance a just energy transition.

Environmental conflicts in the mass media: insight from the media representation of ecological distributive conflicts (EDCs) in Italy

ABSTRACT Despite the increasing prominence of local ecological-distributive conflicts (EDCs) as subjects of social science research in recent decades, interaction between the media and territorial conflict has remained overlooked, still requiring further investigation. Indeed, there is currently a lack of systematic, up-to-date analysis of the relationship between the media and ecological-distributive protests that goes beyond the investigation of NIMBY narratives to provide a general overview of territorial protest representations and their implications for conflict. Based on the application of Political Claims Analysis to the national newspaper, la Repubblica, and its reporting of six Italian local EDCs, this article aims to discuss the ambivalent representations of territorial protest in the media, while also highlighting the implications of different narrative patterns for the values and perspectives embedded in public opinion. The twofold aim is to investigate the media’s narrative strategies with regard to local protests and their evolution throughout the mobilizations and to assess how the cultural context influences the likelihood that different messages will gain support. This investigation is crucial not only for filling the existing gap regarding the relationship between media and the ongoing spread of EDCs in Italy, but also for grasping broader dynamics concerning media management of environmental conflict, something that is becoming increasingly relevant to both the political and media spheres.

Challenges of conducting qualitative social work research with older adults

ABSTRACT This study was conducted using a qualitative descriptive design to explore the challenges encountered by researchers who have conducted social work research with older adults using qualitative research methods. Within the scope of the research, in-depth interviews were conducted with 18 researchers who have conducted qualitative social work research on older adults. Following the thematic analysis of the data obtained, three themes were identified: challenges encountered in the preparation process, challenges related to the researcher, and challenges related to old age. The research findings suggest that researchers may encounter various challenges when conducting qualitative social work research with older adults, despite the fact that a prior educational background in social work provides an advantage. It is anticipated that the visibility of qualitative research experiences with older individuals will contribute to the design of studies that are responsive to the general characteristics of the old age period and the problems and requirements of this period.

Creativity and the Loudness of the Silent Narratives of Youth in Care: A Fieldwork-Inspired Perspective

This article explores creative approaches within social work research, focusing on youth in care. This perspective-driven piece merges literature review and my viewpoints on creative methods, while also critiquing my fieldwork to highlight my application of these approaches. This article also adopts the wormhole throat metaphor to illustrate creativity as a shortcut in social work research, tying together universes—early observations and fuller understandings of youth in care. Concluding, this article advocates for the practical use of creativity in research and argues how researchers’ poststructuralist perspectives, in conjunction with creative approaches, can strengthen consciousness regarding the fragmented and often contradictory experiences of youth in care, leading to the emergence of more empowering narratives.

Explainable Generative AI (GenXAI): a survey, conceptualization, and research agenda

Generative AI (GenAI) represents a shift from AI’s ability to “recognize” to its ability to “generate” solutions for a wide range of tasks. As generated solutions and applications grow more complex and multi-faceted, new needs, objectives, and possibilities for explainability (XAI) have emerged. This work elaborates on why XAI has gained importance with the rise of GenAI and the challenges it poses for explainability research. We also highlight new and emerging criteria that explanations should meet, such as verifiability, interactivity, security, and cost considerations. To achieve this, we focus on surveying existing literature. Additionally, we provide a taxonomy of relevant dimensions to better characterize existing XAI mechanisms and methods for GenAI. We explore various approaches to ensure XAI, ranging from training data to prompting. Our paper provides a concise technical background of GenAI for non-technical readers, focusing on text and images to help them understand new or adapted XAI techniques for GenAI. However, due to the extensive body of work on GenAI, we chose not to delve into detailed aspects of XAI related to the evaluation and usage of explanations. Consequently, the manuscript appeals to both technical experts and professionals from other fields, such as social scientists and information systems researchers. Our research roadmap outlines over ten directions for future investigation.

Exploring the Philosophical Assumptions in Social Education Research

Educational research enquiries differ based on philosophical beliefs and assumptions regarding researchers’ explicitly stated views. This paper critically explores the most dominant philosophical stances in social research sciences, namely positivism, interpretivism and pragmatism. It begins with an overview of the role of the aforementioned beliefs and assumptions in shaping research. It then delves into the epistemology, ontology and value views underlying each philosophical belief to examine its strengths and weaknesses. This discussion might be beneficial for researchers who encounter problems in determining designs for their research.

The concept that went viral: Using machine learning to discover charisma in the wild.

The term "charisma" is recognized as sociology's most successful export to common speech. While sociologists habitually dismiss popular uses of the word, we address its vernacularity head on as a worthy object of study and as a potential resource for conceptual development. Using machine learning, we locate "charisma" within the wider discursive field out of which it arises (and continues to arise) across four corpora; namely: Weber's major writings; social scientific research (123,531 JSTOR articles); and social media ("X") posts containing of "charisma" (n=77,161) and its 2023 variant, "rizz" (n=85,869). By capturing meaning structures that discursively suspend "charisma" across multiple dimensions, we discern three spectrathat help todistinguish charisma's sociological and non-sociological uses. Spectrumone differentiates perspectives which see charisma as having either a structural or individual-level range of efficacy. Spectrumtwo differentiates indifferent/analytical perspectives on charisma from perspectives which see it as desirable but also morally conservative. Spectrumthree differentiates between relational and individualized ontologies for charisma. We find that, rather than hewing closely to the Weberian formulation, social scientific uses exist in an intermediate position vis-à-vis these three spectra. Thus, scholars participate in what they otherwise criticize as charisma's vulgarization. The article concludes with recommendations for how to constructively interact with 'popular charisma.'

Perspectives on inequalities in social science research and environmental sustainability in India

While the Anthropocene has seen the dissolution of nature-society dualism, disciplinary barriers have been deep-seated and limited a complete integrated analysis of the environmental crisis. Concerned by the scarcity of literature on structural and institutional barriers that leverage upon and extend this deep-seated duality between natural and social science, this paper maps the broader field of social science research in India. It also explores the epistemic effects of such inequalities on environmental research and its ability to meaningfully engage with interactions between the social and the natural worlds.

A Scoping Review of Intimate Partner Violence Research in Canada.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is at epidemic levels across low-, middle-, and high-income countries, including Canada, where recent lifetime prevalence indicated that over 40% of women had IPV experiences. In response to this, Canada's federal government has made investments toward IPV prevention and response. We conducted a scoping review of English and French literature identified through searches of multiple databases and specific journals to assess the current state of IPV research in Canada. A total of 267 articles met inclusion criteria of being peer-reviewed research primarily about IPV in either French or English published from 2020 to 2022 with at least one Canadian-affiliated author. Almost a third of studies described services for survivors but did not evaluate service effectiveness. We noted a significant gap in research on the IPV experiences of gender and/or sexual minorities. Canada's federal social science research funding agency was the most common funder, with the two federal government departments with specific IPV funding initiatives in place cited as funding less than 6% of included studies. In general, there remains an overfocus on IPV epidemiology and on descriptions of service use, and not enough research examining the effectiveness and implementation of interventions, especially grounded in theoretical, gendered, and trauma- and violence-informed frameworks. Funders and researchers are encouraged to consider moving resources from ongoing description of well-established factors to assessment and implementation of evidence-informed interventions, and, crucially, primary prevention of IPV and all forms of gender-based violence.

What's a parent to do? Measuring cultural logics of parenting with computational text analysis

Leading theories on parenting in the United States suggest that parenting varies widely by socioeconomic status, with middle-class parents practicing “concerted cultivation”—marked by parents' intensive efforts to foster their children's development—and working-class parents engaging in the “accomplishment of natural growth”—with children given more freedom to manage their own time. While frequently inferred that these parenting practices reflect different cultural logics of parenting, such logics are inherently hard to measure. Our paper proposes a new inductive way to study parenting logics using computational text analysis applied to a nationally representative survey where respondents provided parenting advice across three hypothetical parenting situations. Analyzing this advice using Biterm Topic Modeling we find that nearly all parenting logics reflect some form of intensive parenting, but within that are multiple nuanced versions varying across two dimensions: (1) assertive vs negotiated parenting, and (2) pedagogic vs pragmatic parenting. Using fractional multinomial logistic regression, we find little difference in how parenting logics vary by race/ethnicity, education, and income, suggesting more similarity across groups and more variability within groups than commonly understood. These findings also demonstrate how computational techniques may provide complementary tools to enrich the study of long-standing questions in social science research, at times offering an analytical naïveté that human coding cannot offer.

The Bayesian reservoir model of psychological regulation.

Social and behavioral scientists are increasingly interested the dynamics of the processes they study. Despite the wide array of processes studied, a fairly narrow set of models are applied to characterize dynamics within these processes. For social and behavioral research to take the next step in modeling dynamics, a wider variety of models need to be considered. The reservoir model is one model of psychological regulation that helps expand the models available (Deboeck & Bergeman, 2013). The present article implements the Bayesian reservoir model for both single time series and multilevel data. Simulation 1 compares the performance of the original version of the reservoir model fit using structural equation modeling (Deboeck & Bergeman, 2013) to the proposed Bayesian estimation approach. Simulation 2 expands this to a multilevel data scenario and compares this to the single-level version. The Bayesian estimation approach performs substantially better than the original estimation approach and produces low-bias estimates even with time series as short as 25 observations. Combining Bayesian estimation with a multilevel modeling approach allows for relatively unbiased estimation with sample sizes as small as 15 individuals and/or with time series as short as 15 observations. Finally, a substantive example is presented that applies the Bayesian reservoir model to perceived stress, examining how the model parameters relate to psychological variables commonly expected to relate to resilience. The current expansion of the reservoir model demonstrates the benefits of leveraging the combined strengths of Bayesian estimation and multilevel modeling, with new dynamic models that have been tailored to match the process of psychological regulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Domestic Violence in Nyeri County, Kenya: What and When?

Domestic violence is a worldwide problem affecting many households. Nyeri County, one of the 47 counties in Kenya has, according to reports, experienced a steep increase. Nyeri County has experienced tremendous development, and therefore, changes in terms of education, occupation, and economic activities, making it one of the richest counties in Kenya. With these changes in levels of education, strong cultural adjustments, and increased economic endowment, the expectation is that there should be harmony in the homes. Contrary to that, there is a lot of domestic violence as captured by scholars and the media. This study sought to investigate three things namely; when the violence takes place, the types of violence, and why the violence tales place. The study was underpinned by the frustration-aggression theory and the social learning theory, where descriptive and evaluative research designs were used. The following respondents were sampled to participate in the study: 384 household heads, 12 assistant chiefs, 15 police officers, 30 religious leaders, 12 NGOs/CBOs, 3 Sub-county administrators, and 20 village elders. Primary methods of data collection were questionnaires, interviews, focus group discussions, and observation. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS version 26 to give frequency distribution, means and percentages, and findings were presented using tables, graphs, and charts. Qualitative data was analyzed using thematic narrations, with findings presented using narrations and descriptions. The study found out that the cases increase when the farmers receive the coffee bonuses, when learners are going back to school and fees is needed, during the festive seasons and traditional festivities, as well as during the drought season. The study concludes that domestic violence is evident throughout the year, but there are times when the cases increase as a result of conflict in the gender roles. In this case, therefore, the study recommends that there should be a social talk on the gender roles in the study area so as to ease the adamant rise and spread of domestic conflicts related to the various sets of culturally defined and allocated sex roles. Further, there is need to empower both men and women in Nyeri county so that no gender feels threatened by the other. This will go a long way in ensuring that there is peace and stability in families and social relationships.

A multi-dimensional typology of allyship action in violent intergroup conflict settings: Differentiating actor, target, and type of action

ABSTRACT Despite an increase in social psychological research on allyship, less attention has been paid to allyship action in violent intergroup conflict settings. In this contribution, first, we introduce a multi-dimensional typology of allyship action in such settings by differentiating allyship based on the a) actors (i.e. individuals, collectives, and societies), b) targets (i.e. victim- vs perpetrator-focused), and c) types of those actions (i.e. low- vs high-cost action). Second, we mostly draw on examples from our own research programmes and where relevant from global conflicts and previous studies on allyship to show the applicability of the proposed typology. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical implications, reflect on the limitations of past studies and suggest directions to address research gaps. Our typology contributes to the collective action and intergroup conflict literatures by showing how allyship action has been studied in conflict settings andthe similarities and differences between conflict and non-conflict settings.