Professional Social Science Research Articles

Achieving Sustained, Indigenous and Inclusive Growth (The Allama Iqbal Lecture)

The world economy is now facing paramount problems such as long tern stagnation of economic growth and worsening income distributions (or economic polarisation). This is even more embarrassing, because the humans have been seeking more equal society during the post-WWII era by engaging in the revised capitalism or social democracy by the most of capitalist developed economies, the balanced growth strategies under social democracy by most of the developing economies and more dramatically the socialist economic regime by the already collapsed socialist blocs, not to mention the still barely surviving North Korea. “Growth stagnation and economic polarisation” is not the one which has been intended and anticipated by policies but is opposite to intention as well as expectations. Some of the critics on capitalist economy have been arguing that this is the outcome of the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist economy from the Marxian perspective and/or the result of the neoliberal policies since the 1980s [Piketty (2014) and Stiglitz (2012)]. However, if one understands that the neoliberalism had short-lived only during the Thatcher-Reagan era, of course with some lingering effects, this episode can be seen as a typhoon within the tea cup. In this regard, broadly speaking, the common underlying institutions of post-war politicaleconomy regime of the world economy can properly be called as the economic equalityseeking “egalitarian democracy” which includes the revised capitalism and social democracy, not to mention the socialism. Therefore, one can see that the efforts to create more economically equal society or in other words, the shared growth have in fact created more unequal as well as growth-stagnated economies against the intention as well as expectation. This seems to be the fundamental dilemma faced now by the world economies and these are perhaps waiting for the economic as well as any other social science profession to come up with a solution to it. Of course, some naive Marxists or leftist economists would claim that this phenomenon of the worsening income inequality is simply the fact of the capitalist economy

Utilizing a logic model to identify clinical research problems: a lesson from philosophy of science

Communication and decision making in the health care workplace often involve finding solutions to ill-structured problems in uncertain, dynamic environments influenced by the competing interests of multiple stakeholders. In this environment, doctoral-prepared nurses who practice as administrators, policy makers, or advanced practice practitioners are often compelled to make important decisions based upon evaluating the merit of colleagues’ proposals against some desired organizational or population outcome. Of equal importance is the nurse leader’s own capacity to construct a compelling argument or proposal that will drive the organization forward to meet the evolving needs for quality health care. Where do we learn the skills necessary to foster this kind of critical thinking in our professional communications? The author suggests that one teaching–learning approach can be found through the thoughtful application of the work of British philosopher Steven Toulmin. Toulmin defined a model for both the analysis and derivation of logical arguments or proposals that can be readily learned and applied for use in health care systems. This model posits that a substantive argument or claim can be evaluated based on the assumptions it presumes (warrants) and the strength of the evidence base (backing). Several of the social science professions have adapted Toulmin’s model to generate analysis and creative solutions to complex or emergent problems. The author proposes that an application of this model be included in the pedagogy of doctoral level Philosophy of Science or Nursing Theory courses. The Toulmin process often provides the doctoral student or novice researcher with their first real learning experience in defining the scope and inherent challenges of framing a clinical issue to be the focus of their scholarly translational projects. Several illustrations, which were eventually researched and further developed for capstone scholarly projects, are presented as exemplars of this process. Toulmin, argument, research process, hypothesis formation, nursing education

Significado psicológico del concepto investigación en investigadores

<p align="justify">Esta investigación se planteó como objetivo establecer el significado psicológico de la “actividad de investigar”, para un grupo de profesionales de las Ciencias Sociales. Se usó la técnica de Redes Semánticas Naturales, versión definida por Valdez (2004), que hace énfasis en el análisis del significado psicológico construido a partir de las vivencias. El instrumento fue aplicado a 46 asistentes de un evento académico en el área de Ciencias Sociales, elegidos mediante un muestreo no probabilístico intencional. Los resultados muestran un total de 220 palabras diferentes asociadas al término <em>investigación</em> (valor J). Los dos términos de mayor peso semántico fueron <em>indagación</em> (106) y <em>búsqueda</em> (101), en contraste con las palabras <em>análisis y disciplina</em>, cuyo peso semántico fue 33. A través de una prueba de independencia entre las variables sociodemográficas y el grupo SAM, se evidenció que no existe relación significativa con el género y la edad.</p>

Supporting inclusive practicum experiences for international students across the social sciences: building industry capacity

ABSTRACTPracticum experiences are critical learning environments for developing requisite skills, knowledge, behaviours and attitudes across the professions. Evidence suggests that international students in professional social and behavioural science programs struggle across a number of dimensions while on practicum. Key issues for these students coalesce around English language competency and cultural competency in the workplace. Research evidence likewise suggests that workplaces generally struggle to provide culturally inclusive practicum experiences for international students. This difficulty is evident at the level of individual supervisors, as well as at the level of schools and host organisations. This article reports on the capacity of host organisations to offer inclusive practicum experience for international students across professional programs in the social and behavioural sciences. The article reviews the literature in relation to the needs of international students and factors supporting inclusive practicum experiences, before outlining the method and findings of a needs analysis undertaken as part of a research project conducted in south-east Queensland, Australia. Suggestions are provided about how the capacity of host organisations can be developed to offer quality practicum experiences for international students.

The Wrong Type of Pluralism: Toward a Transdisciplinary Social Science

When heterodox economists talk of pluralism they are generally talking about pluralism within the economics profession—they are asking: how can we have a more pluralistic economics profession? This paper argues that another, perhaps more useful, way to think of pluralism and economics is from the perspective of all the social sciences. When considered in reference to the social science profession rather than in reference to the economics profession, the amount of pluralism increases significantly, since different social sciences follow quite different methodologies. But looking at pluralism from the social science perspective reveals a different type of pluralism problem in social science. While there may be plenty of pluralism within social science as a whole, there is a serious question about whether it is appropriately distributed. This paper argues that heterodox economists' agenda should be a greater blending of all the social science departments. It summarizes proposals to do so on both the undergraduate level and graduate level, and explains why supporting variations of these proposals would be a strategy that would further the objectives of most heterodox economists more than would their current strategy of pushing for more pluralism in economics.

Energy research and the contributions of the social sciences: A retrospective examination

Physical and environmental scientists and policy-makers tend to have exaggerated expectations of what social science and social scientists ask for, what they can do, what policy relevance means in both the short and the long term, and what “short” and “long” mean in social science. There is also a tendency to misapprehend the crucial distinction between ad-hoc actors in the social realm, such as policy-makers and their advisors, journalists, experienced politicians, and policy critics, and professional and disciplinary social science. The former are licensed to make quick judgments on at best imperfect evidence. The latter cannot reasonably be expected to come up with anything ‘quickly’ on a new or unfamiliar problem for lack of an experiential data base. This paper addresses the possible contribution of professional political science to debate, policy, and policy advice with regard to long-term global climate change—not so much with an eye to making recommendations as to who ought to be involved doing what as to asking how reasonable and intellectually stimulating policy-useful questions might be framed within the discipline.

Competencies and Responsibilities of Social Science Data Librarians: An Analysis of Job Descriptions

This study examines job announcements for social science data librarians and professionals to identify trends in the profession. A collection of 167 job postings in 2005–2012 from the International Association for Social Science Information Services &Technology website was analyzed on the frequencies of term occurrence and co-occurrence in job qualifications and responsibilities. The study verifies that employers valued non-technical skills as heavily as technical skills, and detects dissimilar emphases of data activities for data librarians and non-librarian professionals: the former on data discovery and collection, and the latter on data analysis and preservation. An increasing requirement of data management planning was also found for data librarians.

The teaching of social sciences in health: between practice and theory

The models of teaching social sciences and clinical practice are insufficient for the needs of practical-reflective teaching of social sciences applied to health. The scope of this article is to reflect on the challenges and perspectives of social science education for health professionals. In the 1950s the important movement bringing together social sciences and the field of health began, however weak credentials still prevail. This is due to the low professional status of social scientists in health and the ill-defined position of the social sciences professionals in the health field. It is also due to the scant importance attributed by students to the social sciences, the small number of professionals and the colonization of the social sciences by the biomedical culture in the health field. Thus, the professionals of social sciences applied to health are also faced with the need to build an identity, even after six decades of their presence in the field of health. This is because their ambivalent status has established them as a partial, incomplete and virtual presence, requiring a complex survival strategy in the nebulous area between social sciences and health.

Making DA-RT a Reality

Calls for greater data access and research transparency have emerged on many fronts within professional social science. For example, the American Political Science Association (APSA) recently adopted new guidelines for data access and research transparency. APSA has also appointed the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) ad hoc committee to continue exploring these issues. DA-RT sponsored this symposium. In addition, funding agencies like the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have expanded requirements for data management and data distribution. These pressures present challenges to researchers, but they also present opportunities.

Corporate Water Stewardship: Achieving a Sustainable Balance

Globally, corporations and industry are seeking to secure access to sufficient quantities of water to meet current and future needs in a socially, economically and environmentally responsible way in the midst of an unfolding global water crisis with risks that transcend communities, industry and the environment. Through a business case centered on sustainability performance, risk management and productivity and through implementation of a strategic framework based on a water mass balance at the enterprise level, industry can take actions that support restoration of a sustainable water balance at the community and watershed levels while also generating business value for that particular enterprise. Within this framework, the volume of consumptive water use is used to establish the target water volume that an enterprise would balance through implementation of community water partnerships (CWP) that provide water access and sanitation, watershed restoration and protection, and water for productive use benefits. Quantification of CWP project benefits is achieved either through metering or standard methods known and accepted by the engineering, conservation, and social science professions. A 100% sustainable balance is achieved when an enterprise implements a portfolio of locally relevant CWPs that collectively produce an annual volumetric benefit equivalent to the annual volume of consumptive water use for that particular enterprise. This approach can also support efforts by industries that seek to operate in a manner consistent with the United Nations resolution regarding the human right to water and sanitation, as well as those that may seek certification under emerging global water stewardship standards.

A Multidisciplinary Research Agenda for Understanding Vaccine-Related Decisions.

There is increasingly broad global recognition of the need to better understand determinants of vaccine acceptance. Fifteen social science, communication, health, and medical professionals (the “Motors of Trust in Vaccination” (MOTIV) think tank) explored factors relating to vaccination decision-making as a step to building a multidisciplinary research agenda. One hundred and forty seven factors impacting decisions made by consumers, professionals, and policy makers on vaccine acceptance, delay, or refusal were identified and grouped into three major categories: cognition and decision-making; groups and social norms; and communication and engagement. These factors should help frame a multidisciplinary research agenda to build an evidence base on the determinants of vaccine acceptance to inform the development of interventions and vaccination policies.

Different Perspectives to Analyze the Penal Justice System in Function of Crime Control from Professionals of Social Sciences

Penal justice system is made of many agencies that take decisions, agencies of execution of penal decisions, so it’s difficult to understand immediately the relation between them and their position regarding the law itself. This article unifies the ways of looking at the penal justice system in its wholeness and gives different perspectives to analyze it. Different parts of penal justice system raise to us important questions so to have a view of all parts of it, even those hidden, we need to see it from different perspectives. Penal justice system might be seen from different perspectives: its structure, police role, penal decisions phase, common policies of crime control of different institutions or penal procedures foreseen in the penal legislation. To understand penal justice system we need to be familiar with penal legislation, institutional practices but also to know the so-called “system models” and management styles which are some of more suggested perspectives to be used by social sciences professionals. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n4p249

Jak se píše sociální vědění

This study reviews the book: Charles CAMIC - Neil GROSS - Michèle Lamont (eds.), Social Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, and puts it into the context of contemporary accounts of the chang- ing practice of social science research, academic culture, styles of thinking and writing. It attempts to analyze the "turn to practice" heralded in the book and demonstrates how the actual research practices in the social sciences are af- fected by the absence of "standard" forms, methods or styles of research. The core ideas of the so-called "new" sociology of ideas, which is behind the whole project aiming at the analysis of social practices manifested in processes of the "produc- tion, evaluation and application" of social knowledge, are also presented in detail. It follows from the argument elaborated in this text that it seems inevitable to rethink the very concept of "professional" social science, which was rejected in an earlier development as morally and practically untenable, since the democratization of the research process and the transforma- tion of the relation between the social sciences and their audience(s) manifest more and more distinctly that with the departure from the concept of professional social science, the public irrelevance of social knowledge is more and more trans- parent and pervading.

Encouraging Research in Social Work: Narrative as the Thread Integrating Education and Research in Social Work

The call for more research-based practice is universal as all the social science professions look to bring research into the forefront. Social work research must be seamlessly integrated into social work education in order to adequately address trends in evidence-based practice. International trends call for research to be seamlessly integrated with teaching and learning, so that social work practitioners and educators can function in an environment that is ‘research-led, research-based and research-informed’ [C. Hunt (2011) The National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030: Report of the Strategy Group, Department of Education and Skills, Dublin, p. 44]. This review and analysis of recent literature in nursing, medicine, social work and social care suggests that the creative arts can be a way to encourage student thinking and questioning skills as well as a potential link to relevant social science research models and thus engender a more research-minded environment. Additionally, the trend toward humanities in general, infusing education with an interdisciplinary flavour, supports the use of creative methods in both teaching and research. This brief literature review and discussion focuses on these issues with specific attention to narrative and story-telling as one particular theme in education and research.

Inequalities in Health: Realities, Efforts and Way Forward

AbstractInequalities in health are not a new phenomenon but a challenge for public health practitioners around the globe. Considering the importance of the topic, a one day symposium was organized targeting public health, medical and social science professionals and students in Munich, Germany on March 17th, 2012. The paper documents major highlights of the event and summarizes the importance of such events in sensitizing current and future professionals on different aspects of health inequality and in drawing their attention into the topic.

La educación como praxis transformadora

Este artículo de reflexión se propone rescatar la tradición del pensamiento de Paulo Freire y Orlando Fals Borda, quienes postularon la educación como eje fundante para la liberación y la transformación de las sociedades, en la perspectiva de destacar la vigencia de sus postulados y, esencialmente, reivindicar el llamado que nos hacen a los profesionales de las ciencias sociales y a la sociedad en general, de actuar responsable y conscientemente en la transformación de la vida social.

Dialogue and Social Change: An Interdisciplinary and Transformative History

Intergroup dialogue is an interdisciplinary field of practice that seeks to improve intergroup relations and effect social change. The use of dialogue as a method is growing within numerous social science professions including social work, and an understanding of the origins of dialogue will allow current practitioners to place their work within a larger context. This article provides a historical overview of the application of dialogue theory and methods, an analysis of the relationship between social constructionism and intergroup dialogue, and provides important directions for social workers who can utilize intergroup dialogue to promote social justice.

FROM THE EDITOR

1 F R O M T H E E D I T O R This coming year’s issues mark the hundredth anniversary of The Yale Review’s founding, and are designed to celebrate the intellectual riches of this university, present and past. In each, we will feature exclusively work by members of the Yale faculty. Our July issue will be devoted to pieces reprinted by Yale faculty giants of the past. The e√ect, we hope, will be to compose a portrait of the mind of Yale over the past century, but particularly at this exciting time in its long history. The Yale Review traces its history back to 1819, when a group of Yale faculty members started a quarterly journal then known as The Christian Spectator. In 1843 it was renamed The New Englander , and its contents were broadened to matters beyond theology , so long as they ‘‘gave utterance to the New England way of thinking’’ – which meant Congregationalist and Whiggish views, along with strictly orthodox morals and a firm anti-slavery stand. In 1892, the magazine changed its name again, and this time the new editor – Henry Walcott Farnam, Professor of Political Economy at Yale – changed its focus more decisively. Where The New Englander appealed to Yale graduates who were busy with the nation’s industrial revolution and western expansion, Farnam 2 M C C L A T C H Y Y wanted a more professional social science journal. He called it The Yale Review (now known as the Old Series), and devoted its pages to ‘‘the critical and impartial discussion of economic, political and social questions of the day.’’ Over the next two decades, its editors were all members of the Yale Department of Political Science and History, and they included Arthur Twining Hadley, who himself became president of Yale in 1899. The modern history of the journal, though, really began under an umbrella in 1911. Crossing the campus one day in a rainstorm, Wilbur Cross ducked under Hadley’s presidential umbrella. Hadley was on his way to visit his tailor, and Cross accompanied him there and then back again to his o≈ce. During their walk, he outlined to the president plans for a new and greater Yale Review, ‘‘a magazine which might take an honorable place in a fast-moving world.’’ The president was enthusiastic. (In fact, we have hanging in our o≈ces a note Hadley wrote in 1919: ‘‘The thing on which I look back with most satisfaction in my whole administration is the development of the publishing work of the university and the recognition it has obtained throughout the world. I regard the Yale Review and the Yale University Press as our best products of the last twenty years.’’) When Cross assumed the editorship and launched a new series of the journal, he was a member of the English Department at Yale, and had recently published a popular biography of Laurence Sterne. In the years that followed, he served as dean of the graduate school, chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was four times elected governor of Connecticut. During all that time, for thirty years, he stayed on as editor of The Yale Review and transformed the journal into the nation’s leading university quarterly. ‘‘One of the most important services an editor can render to his readers,’’ he once wrote, ‘‘is to keep the road open for candid statements of di√erent standpoints from writers of exceptional ability, and to let these writers present their material as their own consciences and minds may direct.’’ To that end, Cross set out vigorously to attract the best writers from around the world. But he also regularly drew on the Yale faculty. In fact, the very first essay in the first issue of the New Series was by William Graham Sumner, a distinguished Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale and the first professor to teach a course entitled ‘‘Sociol- F R O M T H E E D I T O R 3 R ogy.’’ His essay in the October 1911 issue was called simply ‘‘War,’’ and it was remarkably prescient. Looking ahead, Sumner wrote: ‘‘There is...

Metodología para el análisis político: un enfoque flexible a partir de problemas, mecanismos e inferencias causales

This article discusses some methodological premises including their limitations. If one of the main goals in the social sciences is to build knowledge as the backbone for the social or political scientists, the core of the work lies upon a series of circumstances that make data collection really difficult in order to get theoretical generalization, especially when the access to specific research sources is conflictive. The article also describes a research methodology to do political analysis by presenting a “handy and functional roadmap”, that allows social science professionals to organize data to generate immediate diagnosis. The most important proposal establishes the identification of “problems” to carry out the political analysis attached to the study of social mechanisms and actors. It is assumed that political analysis reaches depth when using an approach “based on problems” to manage all the information, to draw conclusions and even to attempt a prognosis looking at future decision making.

Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Health

The health care system in the United States has been called the best in the world, but many of its residents cannot afford or do not have access to adequate care. Health Disparities in the United States explores how socioeconomic status, race, and ethnic make-up affect health disparities; what the wide gulf in care and health outcomes means for the medical community, cultural subsets, and society at large; and how to address the issue effectively. Topics examined include:* The relationship between income and social status and health care and outcomes* The effect of race and ethnicity on health and the availability of care* Conscious, unconscious, and institutionalized bias in treatment options* How and when race and ethnicity should be taken into account in treating illness* Practical and practicable ideas for reducing health disparities Analyzing the complex web of social forces that influence health outcomes in the United States, this book is a vital teaching tool and a comprehensive reference for social science and medical professionals.