Social Science Collaboration Research Articles

Polarization in the social sciences: Assortative mixing in social science collaboration networks is resilient to interventions

Academic collaboration in the social sciences is characterized by a polarization between hermeneutic and nomological researchers. This polarization is expressed in different publication strategies. The present article analyzes the complete co-authorship networks in a social science discipline in two separate countries over five years using an exponential random graph model. It examines whether and how assortative mixing in publication strategies is present and leads to a polarization in scientific collaboration. In the empirical analysis, assortative mixing is found to play a role in shaping the topology of the network and significantly explains collaboration. Co-authorship edges are more prevalent within each of the groups, but this mixing pattern does not fully account for the extent of polarization. Instead, a thought experiment reveals that other components of the complex system dampen or amplify polarization in the data-generating process and that microscopic interventions targeting behavior change with regard to assortativity would be hindered by the resilience of the system. The resilience to interventions is quantified in a series of simulations on the effect of microscopic behavior on macroscopic polarization. The empirical study controls for geographic proximity, supervision, and topical similarity (using a vector space model), and the interplay of these factors is likely responsible for this resilience. The paper also predicts the co-authorship network in one country based on the model of collaborations in the other country.

Social Science Collaboration with Environmental Health

BackgroundSocial science research has been central in documenting and analyzing community discovery of environmental exposure and consequential processes. Collaboration with environmental health science through team projects has advanced and improved our understanding of environmental health and justice.ObjectiveWe sought to identify diverse methods and topics in which social scientists have expanded environmental health understandings at multiple levels, to examine how transdisciplinary environmental health research fosters better science, and to learn how these partnerships have been able to flourish because of the support from National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).MethodsWe analyzed various types of social science research to investigate how social science contributes to environmental health. We also examined NIEHS programs that foster social science. In addition, we developed a case study of a community-based participation research project in Akwesasne in order to demonstrate how social science has enhanced environmental health science.ResultsSocial science has informed environmental health science through ethnographic studies of contaminated communities, analysis of spatial distribution of environmental injustice, psychological experience of contamination, social construction of risk and risk perception, and social impacts of disasters. Social science–environmental health team science has altered the way scientists traditionally explore exposure by pressing for cumulative exposure approaches and providing research data for policy applications.ConclusionsA transdisciplinary approach for environmental health practice has emerged that engages the social sciences to paint a full picture of the consequences of contamination so that policy makers, regulators, public health officials, and other stakeholders can better ameliorate impacts and prevent future exposure.CitationHoover E, Renauld M, Edelstein MR, Brown P. 2015. Social science collaboration with environmental health. Environ Health Perspect 123:1100–1106; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1409283

Making an Issue out of a Standard

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences.

When Natural met Social: A Review of Collaboration betweenthe Natural and Social Sciences

This paper investigates the opportunities for further collaboration betweenthe natural and social sciences. From 81 systematically identified and reviewedpapers published in scientific journals, it became clear that complex situationsthat depend on human behaviour as well as natural processes require natural–socialscience collaboration. The creation of a community of collaborative natural–socialscience research, that learns from and can contribute to best practice acrossthe sciences, is advocated to support natural– social science collaboration.Across disciplines, it became clear that such a community should deal with (1)difference between paradigms in the current sciences; (2) creationof skills and competences of the involved scientists; (3) scarcityof institutions sympathetic to collaborative research; and (4) theinternal organization of collaborative projects.

Promoting Social Science Collaboration With Ophthalmology

Promoting Social Science Collaboration With Ophthalmology

The Structure of a Social Science Collaboration Network: Disciplinary Cohesion from 1963 to 1999

Has sociology become more socially integrated over the last 30 years? Recent work in the sociology of knowledge demonstrates a direct linkage between social interaction patterns and the structure of ideas, suggesting that scientific collaboration networks affect scientific practice. I test three competing models for sociological collaboration networks and find that a structurally cohesive core that has been growing steadily since the early 1960s characterizes the discipline's coauthorship network. The results show that participation in the sociology collaboration network depends on research specialty and that quantitative work is more likely to be coauthored than non-quantitative work. However, structural embeddedness within the network core given collaboration is largely unrelated to specialty area. This pattern is consistent with a loosely overlapping specialty structure that has potentially integrative implications for theoretical development in sociology.

International Social Science Council

The Vienna Centre came into being in May 1963 as a result of a UNESCO initiative. Its primary objective was seen as the development of social science collaboration between European countries with different socio‐economic and political systems. In practice this meant the organization of research studies which were to be jointly carried out by both West and East European countries.

THE GENERAL PRACTITIONER

THE GENERAL PRACTITIONER Samuel Wolfe CopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.53.7.1156-a Published Online: August 29, 2011

Notes on the Disparagement of “Sociologizing” in Collaborative Research

In recent years I've had the privilege of participating in numerous transactions involving psychiatrists in collaborative enterprises with social scientists. Frequently in this context I have heard the term "sociologizing," or some kindred expression, used to imply a disparagement of journeyman sociologists' activities in reconceptualizing ordinary experiences. In some cases the criticism seemed well-founded, even in terms of the most generous standards laid down by the sociologist himself for his professional methodology. The language, for example, might have been unnecessarily stultified or florid, even for the academic community's norms; or the use of statistics might have been unnecessarily mechanical and pointless. In other cases the criticism did not seem well founded and thus seemed to merit closer examination. The problems associated with it seem applicable to social science collaboration in other applied fields as well as psychiatry.