Understanding theory in social science research: Public administration in perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 014473942096315
Author(s):  
Onah Celestine Chijioke ◽  
Asadu Ikechukwu ◽  
Aduma Aloysius
Keyword(s):  
Role Theory ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Good Theory ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Correct Application ◽  
The Relationship

The role theory plays in research work cannot be over-emphasized. A theory that is apt gives direction to research work in explaining, organizing, analyzing, and predicting phenomenon and showing their relationships in order to enhance understanding. Despite these roles played by theory, upcoming scholars and students many at times fail to use theory that is apt in their research work, while some skip to adopt any theory in their research, even when it is necessary to adopt one. Thus, leading to disjointed and poor research work. Lack of good theory and/or lack of its correct application instantly de-links the relationship and blurs the understanding of research questions, variables, and hypotheses, which theory integrates to give a coherent and holistic view of phenomenon, and answering the question of “why” the phenomenon is the “way” it is. Explanatory and qualitative research approaches were employed. Secondary data were collected from books, journal articles; internet materials, etc. were used in analyzing the roles theory plays in research work. The findings are (1) that the purpose of theory is to explain, describe, analyze, and predict phenomenon to aid understanding (2) a good theory that is apt and well applied gives clarity and logicality to the problem understudy (3) theory in research is like a bridge that links concepts, variables, and hypotheses. The paper recommends among other things that scholars/teachers should devote more chapters or contribute more papers in journal specifically on theory.

ESRC Review

2020 ◽  
pp. 657-698
Author(s):  
Simeon J. Yates ◽  
Jordana Blejmar
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Levels Of Automation ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Technological World ◽  
Ways Of Being

Two workshops were part of the final steps in the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) commissioned Ways of Being in a Digital Age project that is the basis for this Handbook. The ESRC project team coordinated one with the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (ESRC-DSTL) Workshop, “The automation of future roles”; and one with the US National Science Foundation (ESRC-NSF) Workshop, “Changing work, changing lives in the new technological world.” Both workshops sought to explore the key future social science research questions arising for ever greater levels of automation, use of artificial intelligence, and the augmentation of human activity. Participants represented a wide range of disciplinary, professional, government, and nonprofit expertise. This chapter summarizes the separate and then integrated results. First, it summarizes the central social and economic context, the method and project context, and some basic definitional issues. It then identifies 11 priority areas needing further research work that emerged from the intense interactions, discussions, debates, clustering analyses, and integration activities during and after the two workshops. Throughout, it summarizes how subcategories of issues within each cluster relate to central issues (e.g., from users to global to methods) and levels of impacts (from wider social to community and organizational to individual experiences and understandings). Subsections briefly describe each of these 11 areas and their cross-cutting issues and levels. Finally, it provides a detailed Appendix of all the areas, subareas, and their specific questions.

Politics and Research: Epistemological Moments

1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (01) ◽  
pp. 149-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adelaide H. Villmoare
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

In reading the essays by David M. Trubek and John Esser and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I thought about what I call epistemological moments that have provided contexts within which to understand the relationship between social science research and politics. I will sketch four moments and suggest that I find one of them more compelling than the others because it speaks particularly to social scientists with critical, democratic ambitions and to Trubek and Esser's concerns about politics and the intellectual vitality of the law and society movement.

Introduction: Defining Moments in the British-Irish Relationship

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
John Coakley ◽  
Jennifer Todd
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Defining Moments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Elite Interviews ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter traces the history of the relationship between the two communities in Northern Ireland and the tension between the British and Irish governments within which it was traditionally embedded. It documents the process of incremental—and sometimes radical—societal change that has transformed the nature of the conflict, as the overwhelmingly dominant position of the unionist community has been replaced by a more evenly balanced relationship. Associated with this has been the evolution of institutional machinery designed to facilitate conflict resolution and the emergence of effective channels of communication between British and Irish elites. The chapter describes the manner in which the testimonies of these elites were collected as part of research on the process of negotiation of peace in Northern Ireland. It assesses the value of elite interviews and witness seminars as significant source material for social science research.

5. Finding Answers: Theories and How to Apply Them

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-158
Author(s):  
Sandra Halperin ◽  
Oliver Heath
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Independent Variable ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter shows how to develop an answer to a particular research question. It first considers the requirements and components of an answer to a research question before discussing the role of ‘theory’ in social science research, what a ‘theoretical framework’ is, and what a hypothesis is. It then explores the three components of a hypothesis: an independent variable, a dependent variable, and a proposition (a statement about the relationship between the variables). It also looks at the different types of hypotheses and how they guide various kinds of research. It also explains why conceptual and operational definitions of key terms are important and how they are formulated. Finally, it offers suggestions on how to answer normative questions.

scholarly journals Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work

2019 ◽  
Vol 95 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Doherty ◽  
Kate Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Material Quality ◽  
Precarious Labor ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractWaste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.

Tsugaru Gaku as Area Studies: Research plasticity and researcher hybridity

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Rausch
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Specific Area ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
Social Science Researcher ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
Social Scientific

This review essay speaks to the crisis of Area Studies, offering a view from the field in the form of a review of Tsugaru Gaku (Tsugaru Studies) as a specific Area Studies research case. After presenting an overview of the work of social science researchers working in Japan, both foreign and Japanese, the essay turns to major questions articulated in the literature of Area Studies regarding the purpose, character and future of Area Studies. By reviewing the multi-dimensional and combinative implications in the process and dissemination of his own social science research work together with consideration of the work of Japanese social scientists conducting research in rural Japan and publishing in Japanese, the author positions such ‘domestic,’ place-based sociological and anthropological research as a vital contribution to the future of Area Studies. Capitalizing on social scientific research that can contribute to Area Studies research requires a view of the ‘plasticity of research.’ Further, recognition of the ‘hybridity of the Area Studies researcher,’ both as the trained Area Studies specialist as well as a ‘domestic social science researcher’ capable of theory, methodology and analysis, as well as dissemination of Area Studies research originating in a specific place and in a specific language, is vital to the future of Area Studies research.

Digitalisierung und Nachbarschaft

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

There has hardly been any other development that has changed our everyday lives as significantly as digitalisation, and there is hardly anything as commonplace as neighbourship. Despite the links between these two concepts growing, they have been neglected in social science research in Germany so far. The prevailing sentiment is that the Internet and social media sites have no connection to the real world, but there are countless neighbourship groups on Facebook, Twitter hashtags named after neighbourhoods or entire websites, such as ‘nebenan.de’, which endeavour to strengthen local community bonds through digital means. In short, the social developments in this respect are already considerably more advanced than the knowledge that exists about it. This anthology makes a fundamental contribution to the sociological debate on digitalisation and neighbourship by aiming to provide an overview of the relationship between digitalisation and neighbourship on the one hand, and open up avenues for further research on the other. It therefore examines and systematises attempts to strengthen local community bonds using digital media from different perspectives.

scholarly journals Determinants of the COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Spectrum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael Piltch-Loeb ◽  
Diana Silver ◽  
Yeerae Kim ◽  
Hope Norris ◽  
Elizabeth McNeill ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
United States Population ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wait And See ◽  
Logistic Regressions ◽  
The Relationship

Polls report nearly one-third of the United States population is skeptical or opposed to getting the COVID-19 vaccine. Most of these polls, as well as the scientific research that has been conducted on vaccine hesitancy, was done prior to vaccine eligibility opening to all adults. Now that COVID-19 vaccines are widely available, further research is needed to understand the factors contributing to vaccine intentions across the vaccine hesitancy spectrum. This study conducted an online survey using the Social Science Research Solution (SSRS) Opinion Panel web panelists, representative of U.S. adults age 18 and older who use the internet, with an oversample of rural-dwelling and minority populations between April 8 and April 22, 2021- as vaccine eligibility opened to the country. We examined the relationship between COVID-19 exposure and socio-demographics with vaccine intentions [eager-to-take, wait-and-see, undecided, refuse] among the unvaccinated using multinomial logistic regressions [ref: fully/partially vaccinated]. Results showed vaccine intentions varied by demographic characteristics and risk exposures during the period that eligibility for the vaccine was extended to all adults.

scholarly journals Quality of Social Science Research in India

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Shovon Ray ◽  
M. Parameswaran ◽  
Manmohan Agarwal ◽  
Sunandan Ghosh ◽  
Udaya S. Mishra ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Quality Index ◽  
Keyword Search ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Quality Of Research

The chapter analyses the quality of research in terms of quality of articles and of journals by using a quality index. It uses two-dimension indicators to judge the quality of articles, that is, citations (scholarly) and readership, which is the number of hits an article receives in a simple Google keyword search. The quality of a journal is measured in terms of three dimensions: its presence over time, its presence across space, and its depth. The study took 21351 journal articles from 1006 journals (902 journals from Scopus and 104 journals from ISID for five-year period, 2010–14. It emerged that India’s social science research (SSR) contributes more to public debates and policy formulations and relatively less in pushing the frontiers of knowledge for further research.

scholarly journals Reliability and validity of measuring social support networks by web and telephone

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Kogovšek
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Order Effect ◽  
Personal Network ◽  
Convenience Sample ◽  
Second Year ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

Egocentered networks are common in social science research. Here, the unit of analysis is a respondent (ego) together with his/her personal network (alters). Usually, several variables are measured to describe the relationship between egos and alters. In this paper, the aim is to estimate the reliability and validity of the averages of these measures by the multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) approach. In the study, web and telephone modes of data collection are compared on a convenience sample of 238 second year students at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana. The data was collected in 2003. The results show that the telephone mode produces more reliable data than the web mode of data collection. Also, method order effect was shown: the data collection mode used first produces data of lower reliability than the mode used for the second measurement. There were no large differences in validity of measurement.

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