Work In Social Sciences Research Articles

Culture, Theory, Data: An Introduction

Culture, Theory, Data:An Introduction Ted Underwood (bio), Laura McGrath (bio), Richard Jean So (bio), and Chad Wellmon (bio) Culture. Theory. Data. In that group of three terms, the obvious interloper is data—a word not widely used in the humanities until this century. Not that humanists ever lacked data. Our sources and archives are data in the oldest sense of the word. Daniel Rosenberg's careful history of data concludes that it has long been "a rhetorical concept," meaning simply "that which is given prior to argument."1 Of course, evidence is never given in an absolute sense. As Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson have reminded us, every number in a table is collected and constructed by human hands.2 But these constructions are converted into data when someone provisionally accepts them as given for the sake of a particular argument. Historical sources play a similar rhetorical role, and Rosenberg shows that the seventeenth century discussed them in a similar way, writing about "historical data" and even "scriptural data."3 By the late eighteenth century, however, data was specializing to contexts like "medicine, finance, natural history, and geography."4 By the twentieth century, it had become strongly associated with the sciences and with systematic, numeric recordkeeping. Economists certainly had data. But historians believed they had data only when they were working with a document like a ledger or a census. The word felt alien enough that it was often invoked to mark a divide between the humanities and social sciences. In 1979, for instance, Tony Judt pushed back against social-scientific work in history by remarking that such projects "resort to quantified and quantifiable data to compensate for the lack of an argument and the glaring absence of conceptual insight."5 If "conceptual insight" is akin to theory, Judt saw data as a poor substitute. By the 1970s, data was becoming a metonym not only for the evidentiary procedures of science but for computers in particular. Lawrence Stone, criticizing quantitative work in the humanities around the same time as Judt, envisioned a scene where "squads of diligent assistants assemble data, encode it, programme it, and pass it through the maw [End Page 519] of the computer."6 Computers may seem less alien today than they did in 1979 (at any rate, they less commonly have a "maw"), but they are still strongly associated with the word data. So including data in the title of this special issue is probably enough to suggest that its essays will discuss the role that computational methods and digital media play in contemporary research on culture. Which they do. On the other hand, as computers become increasingly embedded in daily life, data has expanded to cover a much wider range of things than it did forty years ago. The word still tends to imply that the information it describes is numeric or can be turned into numbers. But these days, what can't be turned into numbers? Even our recipes and home movies are transmitted digitally. Moreover, contemporary statistical models are no longer restricted to overtly quantitative problems with a small number of variables.7 Machine learning can create variables as needed to model images, social networks, and unstructured text. Most of us regularly use models created this way to answer questions and find documents. Studying culture with data is no longer a specialized practice requiring "squads of diligent assistants" who "encode" variables for analysis. It is something most scholars already do, consciously or not. For that reason, the title of this issue is not something like "Culture, Theory, Digital Humanities." Instead of advancing a subfield, we hope to explore theoretical questions that may be relevant to anyone studying culture, whether they use computational models explicitly in their research or "only" to translate unfamiliar languages, navigate social networks, and find sources. In shaping the event that brought these authors together (a symposium in Charlottesville, Virginia in May 2022), we invited people who work in media studies, information science, sociology, and anthropology, as well as historians and literary scholars. Literary history was often the center of our conversation, as you might expect from the title of this journal. But we came to...

A Systematic Review Towards Big Data Analytics in Social Media

The recent advancement in internet 2.0 creates a scope to connect people worldwide using society 2.0 and web 2.0 technologies. This new era allows the consumer to directly connect with other individuals, business corporations, and the government. People are open to sharing opinions, views, and ideas on any topic in different formats out loud. This creates the opportunity to make the “Big Social Data” handy by implementing machine learning approaches and social data analytics. This study offers an overview of recent works in social media, data science, and machine learning to gain a wide perspective on social media big data analytics. We explain why social media data are significant elements of the improved data-driven decision-making process. We propose and build the “Sunflower Model of Big Data” to define big data and bring it up to date with technology by combining 5 V's and 10 Bigs. We discover the top ten social data analytics to work in the domain of social media platforms. A comprehensive list of relevant statistical/machine learning methods to implement each of these big data analytics is discussed in this work. “Text Analytics” is the most used analytics in social data analysis to date. We create a taxonomy on social media analytics to meet the need and provide a clear understanding. Tools, techniques, and supporting data type are also discussed in this research work. As a result, researchers will have an easier time deciding which social data analytics would best suit their needs.

Michel Serres, ‘a legend for us to read our world,’ or just a geographer?

AbstractIn pondering the purpose and relevance of the thought of the French philosopher, Michel Serres, this article surveys recent secondary literature about his works in geography, social science, literary and humanities subjects. Where they are thought to be helpful, the article includes some biographical details. It first discusses Serres's prescience as a philosopher of the ecological and climate crises and the Anthropocene. It then considers his democratization of knowledge and knowledge making by analysing aspects of his particular narrative style which was designed to both speak across academic disciplinary boundaries and communicate with wider demographics. Notable amongst the latter are the symbolic mythical, human and more‐than‐human stock characters that recurred in his thought, speech and writings. The article then gathers together the topographical features and locations which serve as metaphors in his works. Lastly, it considers Serres's legacy as a philosopher of the digital age.

SOCIAL SCIENCE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

This article discusses the role of the social sciences in the time of COVID-19. The pandemic has led to a renewed appreciation of the social and with this comes the prospect for the social sciences to gain greater relevance. We note the reasons why disasters lead to an increase in sociality and the activities that social scientists are well-placed to undertake: speaking truth to power, calling out lies and sectional advantage, separating fact from opinion, assessing the consequences of political action, predicting social futures (saying how the world will be), assessing public opinion (saying how people would like it to be), and advocating for social justice (saying how the world should be). Social science work shows that another world is possible and that another world is desired. More significantly, it also shows how to bring this world into being.

GENOMIC POLITICS AND EQUALITY

GENOMIC POLITICS AND EQUALITY

Ethics in Qualitative Study in Social Work: Systematic Review

For most of the research process, participants of humans are essential. When a human is participating in research, the main person who handles the study or the person managing the investigation is responsible for protecting the rights of those participants. By following standard ethical guidelines, a researcher can protect the rights of those participants. Voluntary Participation and Informed Consent, Anonymity and Confidentiality, Communication done through telephones, Session Implementation and Triangulation of the Environment for interviews, Analysis of data and distribution of the results, Obstacles of a Cultural and Linguistic Nature and Managing and Handling Anxiety During an Interview is the elements which have been considered in this paper. This study investigated entirely based on secondary index journal articles adopted a systematic review as a method. Moreover, when a researcher joins people from diverse cultures in the interview process, it is essential to enhance their awareness of those cultures and build flexibility within the review process. This study contributes to social science and remarkable Social work linked qualitative inquiry to provide a good data collection process to find new insights.

Conducting practice research

ABSTRACT The conduct of practice research is both similar and different from traditional social science and social work research. It is similar in terms of common research methods applied to essential social work practice issues. But practice research is quite different when it comes to framing and negotiating the research questions, engaging in participatory data analysis, and using research findings. This paper introduces core elements of practice research to social work scholars and researchers in relation the evolving context of social service delivery in China. This analysis features the evolving definition of practice research along with the principles that guide the conduct of practice research. Included in this discussion is a comparative analysis with other research methods and an illustrative case related to evidence-informed practice. It concludes with a discussion of considerations for scholars and researchers invested in the improvement of social services in diverse Chinese contexts.

The Science of Social Work: Public Perceptions

The Science of Social Work: Public Perceptions

Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of Anthropology in Action presents a collection of articles that reflect on and analyse the role of social science in epidemic response. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep social and economic inequalities within and across countries which produce unequal COVID-19 outcomes. Researchers have long noted the connections between socioeconomic inequalities and infections, and there is growing recognition that epidemics are also social and political events (Bardosh et al. 2020). Anthropological and other social science research has contributed to epidemic response, through attention to cultural and politico-economic context, reframing community ‘resistance’, bolstering community engagement in preparedness and response, and informing response activities, including risk communication (Abramowitz 2017; Bardosh et al. 2020). Despite this, much of the work has been ad hoc and not systematically integrated into the systems of epidemic response, with the exception of the Centres d’Analyses des Sciences Sociales (CASS) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This special issue is timely, in that it builds on foundational work in social science and epidemic response, draws on tensions and experience from recent epidemics including COVID-19 and Ebola, and charts a way forward at both a theoretical and a practical level.

Critical Social Science in Sport Management Research: A Scoping Review.

Sport management scholars have called for the application of broader research approaches, including critical social science. Such approaches help uncover the less-desirable aspects of sport and, therefore, offer a basis for positive change. While there have been advancements in the use of innovative research approaches over time, there remains little understanding of how these calls have been addressed. The purpose of this scoping review is to examine trends, gaps, and the use of critical social science and associated approaches in sport management scholarship. Two hundred sixteen relevant articles were identified through a database search (i.e., five platforms), complemented with a manual search of 419 journals. Results indicate that an increase in critical research published in sport management journals was evident following 2005. Findings suggest that there remains space for increased publication of critical social science work in sport management journals and for researchers to better articulate their research approaches in scholarly outputs.

Historicizing postsocialist privatization at the juncture of the cultural and the economic

ABSTRACT Privatization was one of the key mechanisms in the transformation from planned to market economies in the former Eastern Bloc following the collapse of communist regimes. Although this radical change in ownership structures is most often understood as belonging to the sphere of the economy, it also profoundly affected society and shared values. As historians are increasingly turning to the post-1989 period in Central and Eastern Europe, this introduction and special issue argue that economic and political history alone are not sufficient to investigate the process of privatization; approaches from social and cultural history are also necessary. Transformation, and privatization in particular, was the result of complex interactions between the economic policies of nation-states, the actions of transnational organizations and private corporations, the development of global capitalism, but also of local traditions, cultural stereotypes and representations, and the transformation of institutions other than political and economic ones. By taking into account this complex nexus of factors, we argue, historical research can bring a new quality to the existing social science work on postsocialist privatization and economic transformation more generally.

Three Gaps in Computational Text Analysis Methods for Social Sciences: A Research Agenda

ABSTRACT We identify three gaps that limit the utility and obstruct the progress of computational text analysis methods (CTAM) for social science research. First, we contend that CTAM development has prioritized technological over validity concerns, giving limited attention to the operationalization of social scientific measurements. Second, we identify a mismatch between CTAMs’ focus on extracting specific contents and document-level patterns, and social science researchers’ need for measuring multiple, often complex contents in the text. Third, we argue that the dominance of English language tools depresses comparative research and inclusivity toward scholarly communities examining languages other than English. We substantiate our claims by drawing upon a broad review of methodological work in the computational social sciences, as well as an inventory of leading research publications using quantitative textual analysis. Subsequently, we discuss implications of these three gaps for social scientists’ uneven uptake of CTAM, as well as the field of computational social science text research as a whole. Finally, we propose a research agenda intended to bridge the identified gaps and improve the validity, utility, and inclusiveness of CTAM.

Shaping a Science of Social Work: Professional Knowledge and Identity. Edited by John Brekke and Jeane Anastas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 252. $45.00 (cloth).

<i>Shaping a Science of Social Work: Professional Knowledge and Identity</i>. Edited by John Brekke and Jeane Anastas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 252. $45.00 (cloth).

Formation of Data Science Teams based on Scenario Characteristics

The objective of this research was to identify a set of attributes to characterize data science scenarios to assists in the formation of an accompanying data science team. The six scenario characteristics were developed in consultation with a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to identify the important aspects of a data science endeavor. Concurrently, a generalizable role by task matrix was developed that captures the high-level data science functions and potential team member roles. This matrix was based on the NATO data science process function definitions, linked to the U.S. Department of Labor social science work activities, and data science role definitions. The mapping of the characteristics to the role by task matrix results in guidelines for forming a data science team; an example scenario with its characteristics and proposed team design is described. This work suggests methods to customize team information for specific data science needs based on scenario attributes.

Shaping a Science of Social Work: Professional Knowledge and Identity. Edited by John S. Brekke and Jeane W. Anastas

<i>Shaping a Science of Social Work: Professional Knowledge and Identity</i>. Edited by John S. Brekke and Jeane W. Anastas

Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History

“The Romans were not dupes.” This sentence, found on page 46 of Chrisomalis's Reckonings, has the form of a constative statement but is actually a kind of performative utterance. It appears in a chapter dedicated to the Roman number system. In general, when we learn Roman numerals at school, we are also taught about the awkwardness of the system. Instead of the two characters needed to write 28 in the Indian-Arabic-Western ciphers (Chrisomalis notes the difficulty of speaking simply of the Arabic or the Indian system, since there is more than one of each), the Romans needed no fewer than six characters to write the same number, XXVIII. The Roman system, moreover, is not practical for the performance of even simple mathematical operations such as addition or multiplication. Why, then, did it last for almost two millennia? Why did it resist a dozen alternative systems known in Europe during that period? Yes, there were that many, as we learn from reading Chrisomalis, a specialist in the anthropology and history of numeral notations. In a previous book, he gathered and described in detail more than one hundred number systems that human societies have conceived and used. The present study builds on that encyclopedic work to ask more specific questions about the adoption, diffusion, and abandonment of numeral notations.Chrisomalis devotes two chapters to studying the Roman system. He begins by explaining the error in reasoning made when we say that Roman numerals are not practical for algebraic operations. Presupposing that Romans and medieval Europeans used the numbers as we use our ciphers today is an ethnocentric projection: they did not count on paper (or parchment or papyrus) but always with pebbles or an abacus. They wrote down only the results of their mathematical operations, in part because of the high cost of parchment, but also probably because of the rapidity of counting with the abacus (as is suggested by the efficiency of the suan pan still used in China). Even if, moreover, Roman numbers on average require more characters than their counterparts in a positional system, the round numbers, which are largely more present in written texts, are actually shorter: X, L, C, and M for 10, 50, 100, and 1,000, respectively. So probably it was not purely mathematical or cognitive considerations that led to the abandonment of Roman notation. An advantage of using Indian-Arabic-Western ciphers was that doing so left marks that made the accounting needs of modern, international commerce easier to meet. The printing industry also helped to spread and impose the new system.By stating that the Romans were not dupes, Chrisomalis seeks not only to overcome ethnocentric bias but also to situate numerals in their social and cultural contexts, analyze numbers as they have been used and not simply as abstract mathematical constructions, reject Whig historiography (“the history of computational perfection”), and open paths for the future (“we are not at the end of the history of numbers”). By looking for the intelligence of actors—by treating actors politely, as Isabelle Stengers would say—the researcher renders himself and his readers more intelligent. Sharing intelligence between the actors and the researcher, the predicate of the first becoming that of that second and vice versa, is a sign of successful work in social science. Hence the importance of Chrisomalis's short but powerful utterance on page 46.

"Learning to Listen to Them and Ask the Right Questions." Bennet Omalu, Scientific Objectivities, and the Witnessing of a Concussion Crisis.

The death of American Football player Mike Webster has become foundational to narratives of sport's twenty-first century concussion crisis. Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist who conducted Webster's autopsy and subsequently diagnosed Webster with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), has, likewise, become a central figure in the concussion crisis. Indeed, it is frequently argued that there is something about Omalu in particular that made it possible for him to “witness” CTE when the disease entity had hitherto remained invisible to a great many medics and scientists. In this article, and drawing upon auto/biographies, I consider Omalu's self-described mode of scientific witnessing which purportedly allowed him to (re)discover CTE. I find Omalu's described objectivity to be shaped by three factors: First, the importance of “trained judgment” within which Omalu's scientific training is emphasized. Second, the infusion of religiosity within scientific practice. Third, a self-described position as an “outsider” to both football and American culture. Throughout this analysis, I pay attention not only to the ways in which Omalu's narratives depart from conventional depictions of scientific objectivity; I also note the similarities with particular bodies of social scientific work, most notably within a feminist “turn to care” in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related standpoint epistemologies. Following these analyses, I argue that, first, Omalu's writing affords the dead a “response-ability” that is often absent within analyses of the concussion crisis and, second, that a focus upon diverse forms of objectivity, such as those described in Omalu's work, complements existing work into concussion science that has foregrounded scientific conflict of interest.

Impact of pandemic containment measures COVID-19 on social work research with older people

Researching people's everyday lives, exploring and working out answers together with people are fundamental processes of social work, whether working with individuals, different groups or communities. Without research, we cannot possibly know what specific tasks we can undertake or what social work goals we can achieve when it comes to helping situations. In recent decades, social work with older people has directed research toward the area of exploring the needs of people in long-term care, which has been shaped primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic. Measures taken to contain the pandemic have limited or even prevented opportunities to research the real-life situations of people in long-term care. Social work research with older people was limited in its ability to determine the impact of the pandemic on the lives of older people, which was a violation of fundamental ethical values in providing tailored care in the new life situations of the most vulnerable, frail, and needy members of society. This paper highlights the importance of social work research that addresses the immediate living environment in order to fully understand people's life situations that impact the development of both the profession and the science of social work. However, the barriers to research due to pandemic containment measures have impacted the profession and the development of social work science.

Blueprints for rural economy: Philip Lowe's work in rural and environmental social science

AbstractPhilip Lowe died in February 2020, and so an academic career spanning five decades in environmental and rural social science and the sociology of knowledge came to an end. A pioneer of the social science of environmentalism, since the early 1990s, Philip Lowe had been closely associated with the Centre for Rural Economy at Newcastle University in the UK and had been the intellectual force behind establishing rural economy as both a subject and mode of social science analysis. This article reflects on a career and the evolving concept of ‘rural economy’ as an economic form, a policy realm and a knowledge practice. Through this history, it presents an account of the contribution of Philip Lowe's research and writing that, as a result of his death, now stands as a bounded and complete body of work for the benefit of future generations of scholars.

Social Work Field Instruction Program: The Case of Leyte Normal University

The study aimed to assess the extent of implementation of the guidelines and standards set by Commission on Higher Education (CHED) Memorandum Order No. 39 s, 2017 for Field Instruction Program of the Bachelor of Science in Social Work in Leyte Normal University with focus on: objectives, administration, field learning experiences, and facilities. Respondents of the study were the agency supervisors, faculty supervisors, and practicum students. A descriptive-normative survey using a validated, research-made questionnaire was utilized as the basic tool in gathering data. The result showed no significant difference in the perceptions of the respondents on the implementation of field instruction program policies and standards in terms of: objectives, administration, and field learning experiences.. However, significant difference was noted on the area of facilities. The results implied that the Field Instruction Program of Leyte Normal University satisfied most of the policies and standards set by CMO No 39, s. 2017.