Social Science Community Research Articles

Consulta às bases científicas de dados e gerenciado eletrônico de referências: abordagem à construção de artigos científicos na Universidade Federal de Rondônia (UNIR)

Finding a scientific production of the different areas of knowledge, inserting citations in text and formatting as bibliographic references according to the norms of dissemination can become difficult for beginners in the research. Thus, an extension action developed at the Federal University of Rondonia (UNIR) - Campus de Vilhena was designed to discuss these issues, such as Applied Social Sciences (Accounting Sciences, Administration, etc.) and External Community, a vision of the construction process of Scientific articles, from a consultation to databases and management of references until the publication of works. An action lasting 10 hours and developed in August 2013, is divided into three stages: i) installation of a free reference manager (EndNote Web), search of articles in national and international databases and reference management (Exporting and archiving of PDFs); ii) use of the manager as a formatter of bibliographic references in word processors (Word, open office etc.); And finally, iii) discussion of article structures accepted by the scientific community.

Consulta às bases científicas de dados e gerenciado eletrônico de referências: abordagem à construção de artigos científicos na Universidade Federal de Rondônia (UNIR)

Finding a scientific production of the different areas of knowledge, inserting citations in text and formatting as bibliographic references according to the norms of dissemination can become difficult for beginners in the research. Thus, an extension action developed at the Federal University of Rondonia (UNIR) - Campus de Vilhena was designed to discuss these issues, such as Applied Social Sciences (Accounting Sciences, Administration, etc.) and External Community, a vision of the construction process of Scientific articles, from a consultation to databases and management of references until the publication of works. An action lasting 10 hours and developed in August 2013, is divided into three stages: i) installation of a free reference manager (EndNote Web), search of articles in national and international databases and reference management (Exporting and archiving of PDFs); ii) use of the manager as a formatter of bibliographic references in word processors (Word, open office etc.); And finally, iii) discussion of article structures accepted by the scientific community.

Thirty-five years of political geography and Political Geography: The good, the bad and the ugly

When Political Geography (Quarterly) was established in 1981, the field barely registered in the international social science community and had become a "moribund backwater". The journal has motivated and reflected a sizable body of published works for almost two generations. The impact of these articles, however, is muted for a variety of reasons including a large diversity of subjects and methodologies, a lack of sustained and replicable research on important contemporary subjects, a tendency to dilettantism, and a failure to achieve any coherent notion of what constitutes political geographic research. Because the discipline of political geography is so amorphous and opaque to both its practitioners and observers, the potential benefits of its approach are muted and its achievements enervated. The field's achievements can partly be gauged by a comparison of the journal's content to its original agenda. Notable missed opportunities for focus and impact are identified, especially in a failure to clarify the important role that context plays in political behavior. Publication expectations in academia have changed, propelling authors to try to rush to print, while not coincidentally publishing production standards have slipped. The likely trends are further centrifugal pressures on disciplinary staples and an erosion of what seemed like a relatively coherent sub-discipline in 1981.

Rethinking the Call for a US National Data Center in the 1960s: Privacy, Social Science Research, and Data Fragmentation Viewed from the Perspective of Contemporary Archival Theory

This article reconsiders from current archival perspectives the debate surrounding the failed proposal for a national data center in the 1960s. Whereas most accounts of the 1960s effort to construct a national data center in the United States focus on privacy issues, this account focuses more broadly on contextualizing the concerns of the social science community regarding the fragmented state of data archives and on explaining why that moment in particular was a crucial culminating point of sociohistorical and technological pressures in the wider histories of digital computing, archives, data storage, and social science scholarship.

The History of the Development and Propagation of QDA Software

In the 1980s researchers began to develop software for the analysis of qualitative data. Since then such computer packages have transformed the nature and practice of qualitative research. This paper identifies and examines the processes that led to the development of a QDAS community from the perspective of social worlds theory. Based on interviews with developers and propagators of qualitative data analysis software (QDAS), this paper discusses its history and development, illustrating how a community emerged from the intersection of two social worlds, the computing world and the social science world. It shows use of QDAS spread to the wider social science community via informal and formal social networks, and the ways in which the simultaneous development of communications technologies enabled its further expansion.

What Drives Energy Consumers?: Engaging People in a Sustainable Energy Transition

Providing clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy for people everywhere will require converting to an energy system in which the use of fossil fuels is minimal. A sustainable energy transition means substantial changes in technology and the engagement of the engineering community. But it will also mean changes in behavior and policies and, thus, will require the engagement of the social science community. The choices, preferences, and behaviors of individuals and households are major direct influences on energy demand, and they also shape the acceptability and effectiveness of technologies, strategies, and policies to bring about a sustainable energy transition. A successful transition to a more sustainable energy system will require a wide range of sustainable actions by diverse people across the globe.

A Bright Future for Financial Agent-Based Models

The history of research in finance and economics has been widely impacted by the field of Agent- based Computational Economics (ACE). While at the same time being popular among natural science researchers for its proximity to the successful methods of physics and chemistry for example, the field of ACE has also received critics by a part of the social science community for its lack of empiricism. Yet recent trends have shifted the weights of these general arguments and potentially given ACE a whole new range of realism. At the base of these trends are found two present-day major scientific breakthroughs: the steady shift of psychology towards a hard science due to the advances of neuropsychology, and the progress of artificial intelligence and more specifically machine learning due to increasing computational power and big data. These two have also found common fields of study in the form of computational neuroscience, and human-computer interaction, among others. We outline here the main lines of a computational research study of collective economic behavior via Agent-Based Models (ABM) or Multi-Agent System (MAS), where each agent would be endowed with specific cognitive and behavioral biases known to the field of neuroeconomics, and at the same time autonomously implement rational quantitative financial strategies updated by machine learning. We postulate that such ABMs would offer a whole new range of realism.

Osvrt na srpski prevod priručnika Društvena stratifikacija u zemljama BRIK - promene i perspektive, Zavod za udžbenike, Beograd, 2014

Serbian State Publisher of Textbooks from Belgrade once more confirmed its dedication to the mission of contributing to increase the quality of education and development of science and culture in Serbia through publishing important contemporary educational texts of high quality. Just one year after the World Scientific Publishing Co. in Singapore published the English original (2013), they offered to the domestic social science community and general public the Serbian translation of the results of the pioneering comparative research of Social stratification in BRIC countries - Changes and Perspectives, which was published in 2014 by Serbian State Publisher of Textbooks. This path breaking compendium edited leading sociologists with up to date research findings from China (Li Peilin, Institute for sociology of the Chinese academy of social sciences, CASS, 2005), Russia (M.K. Gorshkov, Institute for sociology of the Russian academy of sciences, RAS, 2009), Brazil (Celi Scalon, Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, 2009) and India (K.L. Sharma, National university in Jaepur, 2010). Mentioned editors gathered teams of researchers in respective countries. Only K.L. Sharma, wrote alone nine thematic chapters on: social stratification changes; working class; peasants; entrepreneurs; middle class; income inequality; educational inequality; consumption and class consciousness and values, paying special attention to castes specific to Indian society.

Varieties of militarism: Towards a typology

Militarism – a mercurial, endlessly contested concept – is experiencing a renaissance of sorts in many corners of the social science community. In critical security studies, the concept’s purview has become increasingly limited by an abiding theoretical and analytical focus on various practices of securitization. We argue that there is a need to clarify the logic and stakes of different forms of militarism. Critical security scholars have provided valuable insights into the conditions of ‘exceptionalist militarism’. However, if we accept that militarism and the production of security are co-constitutive, then there is every reason to consider different manifestations of militarism, their historical trajectories and their interrelationships. To that end, we draw on the work of historical sociologists and articulate three more ideal types of militarism: nation-state militarism, civil society militarism and neoliberal militarism. We suggest this typology can more adequately capture key transformations of militarism in the modern period as well as inform further research on the militarism–security nexus.

BEHAVIORAL AND CULTURAL ACCOUNTS OF CORRUPTION IN THE INTERFACE BETWEEN PUBLIC OFFICER AND CLIENT

This paper applies a behavior analytic framework to examine corrupt behavior. With this article, we heed to the call made some decades ago to behavior analysts to extend the interests and strategies of their discipline into domains traditionally assigned to the social sciences. This article has three objectives: First, to examine corruption as behavioral and cultural phenomena; Second is to draw the attention of the social sciences community to the potentials of behavior analytic tools to investigate corrupt behavior; Third, to appeal to behavior analysts to direct some research attention to corruption, which is one of the most critical issues of the twenty-first century.Keywords: corruption, Contingencies, Metacontingencies, Cultural practices, Culture.

A framework to quantify the strength of ecological links between an environmental stressor and final ecosystem services.

Anthropogenic stressors such as climate change, increased fire frequency, and pollution drive shifts in ecosystem function and resilience. Scientists generally rely on biological indicators of these stressors to signal that ecosystem conditions have been altered. However, these biological indicators are not always capable of being directly related to ecosystem components that provide benefits to humans and/or can be used to evaluate the cost-benefit of a change in health of the component (ecosystem services). Therefore, we developed the STEPS (STressor - Ecological Production function - final ecosystem Services) Framework to link changes in a biological indicator of a stressor to final ecosystem services. The STEPS framework produces "chains" of ecological components that explore the breadth of impacts resulting from the change of a stressor. Chains are comprised of the biological indicator, the ecological production function (EPF; which uses ecological components to link the biological indicator to a final ecosystem service), and the user group who directly uses, appreciates, or values the component. The framework uses a qualitative score (High, Medium, Low) to describe the Strength of Science (SOS) for the relationship between each component in the EPF. We tested the STEPS Framework within a workshop setting using the exceedance of critical loads of air pollution as a model stressor and the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Classification System (FEGS-CS) to describe final ecosystem services. We identified chains for four modes of ecological response to deposition: aquatic acidification, aquatic eutrophication, terrestrial acidification, and terrestrial eutrophication. The workshop participants identified 183 unique EPFs linking a change in a biological indicator to a FEGS; and when accounting for the multiple beneficiaries, we ended with 1104 chains. The SOS scores were effective in identifying chains with the highest confidence ranking as well as those where more research is needed. The STEPS framework could be adapted to any system in which a stressor is modifying a biological component. The results of the analysis can be used by the social science community to apply valuation measures to multiple or selected chains, providing a comprehensive analysis of the effects of anthropogenic stressors on measures of human well-being.

Science, as the Subject of Historical and Social Analysis: A Case Study

The case study presented in the article introduces an intense debate within the social science community in Hungary that arose due to a research report analysing the living conditions of Roma communities in segregated settlements. Firstly, the prevailing norms of the community which were violated by a young researcher are described. Then the article provides an overview of the research report that generated intense criticism against the author and outlines critics representing the “guards” and a defence of “separatist” researchers. Finally, it elaborates on the consequences of the debate and analyses why the study became the focal point of the intense criticism while introducing some potential explanations from the social psychology and sociology of scientific knowledge. All in all, the article does not intend to take a side in the argument only to give a constructivist analysis about the dispute.

Studi Hubungan Internasional di Indonesia

This paper would like to analyze the development of study of International Relations in Indonesia which has progressed very rapidly. The science of lucrative International Relations since April 1919 in Britain and into Indonesian territory since the 1945�s, has been in great demand by the public, gaining a place in the hearts of the social scientific community, and contributing a lot to the foreign decision-making played by the government. Therefore, it is important to look at opportunities, challenges, and prospects for the development of International Relations studies in Indonesia to date.

Modeling attitude diffusion and agenda setting: the MAMA model

Attitude diffusion is where “attitudes” (general, relatively enduring evaluative responses to a topic) spread through a population. Attitudes play an incredibly important role in human decision-making (for instance, in health care decisions) and are a critical part of social psychology. However, existing models of diffusion do not account for key differentiating aspects of attitudes. In this work, we develop the “Multi-Agent, Multi-Attitude” (MAMA) model which incorporates several key factors of attitude diffusion: (1) multiple, interacting attitudes; (2) social influence between individuals; and (3) media influence. All three components have strong support from the social science community. Using the MAMA model, we re-visit the problem of influence maximization in a attitude diffusion setting where media influence is possible—we show that strategic manipulation of the media can lead to statistically significant decreases in diffusion of attitudes. Finally, to better understand the dynamics of the model, we use an absorbing Markov chain to characterize state transitions in the model.

Promoting replicable sexual science: A methodological review and call for metascience

Concerns have increased within the medical and social science communities about the replicability of scientific findings, and subsequently, assessments of replicability and proposals for how it may be increased have become more common. Sexual scientists, however, with few exceptions, have yet to formally participate in the published discourses about replicability. In this commentary, I begin by highlighting how replicability is important for science in general, and then arguing that sexual science could be uniquely and negatively impacted without more direct involvement in the replicability movement from those within our field. I then briefly review several mechanisms through which replicability can be undermined in research, and some of the proposals for addressing these issues. I conclude by offering some ideas for how sexual scientists might begin to evaluate and improve the replicability of our field, and stress the need for sexual scientists to add their voices to the ongoing discussions about the problem of replicability of scientific findings.

SiSOB Data Extraction and Codification: A Tool to Analyse Scientific

This paper describes the methodology and software tool used to build a database on the careers and productivity of academics, using public information available on the Internet, and provides a first analysis of the data collected for a sample of 360 US scientists funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and 291 UK scientists funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). The tool’s structured outputs can be used for either econometric research or data representation for policy analysis. The methodology and software tool is validated for a sample of US and UK biomedical scientists, but can be applied to any countries where scientists’ CVs are available in English. We provide an overview of the motivations for constructing the database, and the data crawling and data mining techniques used to transform webpage-based information and CV information into a relational database. We describe the database and the effectiveness of our algorithms and provide suggestions for further improvements. The software developed is released under free software GNU General Public License; the aim is for it to be available to the community of social scientists and economists interested in analysing scientific production and scientific careers, who it is hoped will develop this tool further.

The Use of Longitudinal Mediation Models for Testing Causal Effects and Measuring Direct and Indirect Effects

Mediation variables are those intervening variables ( M ) that affect the relationship between the independent variable ( X ) and the dependent variable ( Y ). The causal relation between X and Y through the mediation variable M must be established to analyze mediation. M is a mediator, if it involves indirect effects among the set of original variables X and Y . A requirement for a variable to have a causal effect on another is that the cause must precede the outcome in time. This paper argues that the right way to prove the mediation effect is by analyzing different moments in time to support the relations among the variables, which can be done using longitudinal models. The use of traditional analysis in mediation models without the time effect (assumed to occur instantaneously) biases the parameter estimation and could create the possible cancelation of effects, if the paths have opposite signs. Mediation models (without the time effect) are quite frequently used in social sciences. In contrast, the longitudinal mediation model is a very uncommon methodology within the social science community. The aim of this paper is to shed some light about how to analyze the time framework and to provide a methodology to solve the possible limitations that could hinder the robustness of the mediation analysis.

Editorial: Advances in Farm Animal Genomic Resources.

Editorial: Advances in Farm Animal Genomic Resources.

Parametric and Non Parametric Approach in Structural Equation Modeling (SEM): The Application of Bootstrapping

Lately, there was some attention for the Variance Based SEM (VB-SEM) against that of Covariance Based SEM (CB-SEM) from social science researches regarding the fitness indexes, sample size requirement, and normality assumption. Not many of them aware that VB-SEM is developed based on the non-parametric approach compared to the parametric approach of CB-SEM. In fact the fitness of a model should not be taken lightly since it reflects the behavior of data in relation to the proposed model for the study. Furthermore, the adequacy of sample size and the normality of data are among the main assumptions of parametric test itself. This study intended to clarify the ambiguities among the social science community by employing the data-set which do not meet the fitness requirements and normality assumptions to execute both CB-SEM and VB-SEM. The findings reveal that the result of CB-SEM with bootstrapping is almost similar to that of VB-SEM (bootstrapping as usual). Therefore, the failure to meet the fitness and normality requirements should not be the reason for employing Non-Parametric SEM.

Knowledge problems in climate change and security research

The demand for policy‐relevant information on climate change has never been higher, but there remains a gap between the type of information climate projections provide and an understanding of the consequences for human well‐being. This review explores the knowledge available to support assessments of climate change and security for a wide range of policy stakeholders. Both the climate science and social science communities undertake valuable research toward understanding climate change and the interaction of environment and security, but address different aspects of the problem. Differences in the types of knowledge produced include analytical methods, language, and scale issues. This makes research conclusions difficult to reconcile and provides a barrier to knowledge sharing. It is largely left to policy and security analysts to bring these two very different types of information together in accessible, policy‐relevant assessments. Often this is done by considering the potential implications of existing climate change projections, with little or no input from social scientists on the complexities of the relationship between environment and security. An alternative approach to climate change and security assessments is to consider the problem from a systems perspective. This approach has the potential to offer new insight across disciplines and improve the utility of research outcomes to inform action on climate change and security. WIREs Clim Change 2015, 6:383–399. doi: 10.1002/wcc.346This article is categorized under: Integrated Assessment of Climate Change > Methods of Integrated Assessment of Climate Change