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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Social Science'
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Blomley, Matthew. "The new science, social science, and society." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.620289.
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Lambert, Ian J. "Realism and social science." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.278516.
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Booth, M. A. "Elaboration and social science." Thesis, Booth, M.A. (1988) Elaboration and social science. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 1988. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/50563/.
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Social science is in jeopardy, both from attempts to make it like other sciences, and from the emphasis on human creativity and meanings, which would embed studies of society within the humanities. The multiplicity of theoretical positions within the social sciences, along with that multiplicity which is present in any person's social understanding, needs analysing in terms neither of 'meaning', nor of 'context', but through an understanding of the process of 'elaboration', by which multiplicity develops. Rather than awaiting a new theoretical 'paradigm', permitting the integration of systematic knowledge about human society, social scientists need more mutual recognition of their already shared approach to understanding. Elaboration in intellectual work is, like the secondary process of Freud, a process utilizing both the heterogeneity of past understanding, and an awareness which goes beyond any previous interpretation; the interplay of these in elaboration brings together and articulates a new aspect of multiplicity.
Accounts of consciousness, and of epistemology and ontology, which do not lead to any sense of elaboration except that of the increasing of complexity by the adding of further details, are contrasted with the duality - in terms of the discrete and the holistic - which recent attempts at modelling brain functioning have suggested. By linking these to Freud's argument about the theoretical complexity required by any conceptualization of consciousness, the understanding of elaboration is developed and then traced in examples of recent usage.
Processes of fragmentation and integration occur in social change, as well as in the development of social understanding. In neither case is their 'truth' an appropriate criterion for responding to these elaborations. Evaluating their 'scope', and so taking account of the comprehensiveness of the elaborations, is more useful in the human condition of multiplicity. Judgments of scope are a basis for comparing positions that are incommensurable, i.e. relativism as an epistemological problem is replaced by the practical methodological issues introduced by considering the discrete and holistic aspects of any elaboration. The ontological interplay of discrete and holistic processes in social practices and institutions has been elaborated recently in ways invoking Freud's terminology; construing this as elaboration provides a way of conceiving the duality of social structure. Elaborating social understanding in terms of this way of representing structural and intellectual change underlines the importance for social science of criteria for evaluating the process of elaboration.
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Hadder, R. Neill (Richard Neill). "Techniques of Social-science-fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278249/.
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This thesis includes an original science-fiction novella entitled "The Hunted" and accompanying commentary which illustrates how anthropological fiction can use characterization, setting, and conflict to build effective inter-subjective models.
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Yu, Jingyuan. "Discovering Twitter through Computational Social Science Methods." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/671609.
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Visibilitzant la vida quotidiana de la gent, Twitter s'ha convertit en una de les plataformes d'intercanvi d'informació més importants i ha atret ràpidament l'atenció dels científics. Investigadors de tot el món s'han centrat en les ciències socials i en els estudis d'Internet amb dades de Twitter com a mostra del món real, i en l'última dècada s'han dissenyat nombroses eines d'anàlisis i algorismes. La present tesi doctoral consta de tres recerques, en primer lloc, donats els 14 anys (fins a 2020) d'història des de la fundació de Twitter, hem assistit a una explosió de publicacions científiques relacionades, però el panorama actual de la recerca en aquesta plataforma de mitjans socials continuava sent desconegut. Per a omplir aquest buit de recerca, vam fer una anàlisi bibliomètrica dels estudis relacionats amb Twitter per a analitzar com van evolucionar els estudis de Twitter al llarg del temps, i per a proporcionar una descripció general de l'entorn acadèmic de recerca de Twitter des d'un nivell macro. En segon lloc, atès que hi ha moltes eines de programari analític que estan disponibles actualment per a la recerca en Twitter, una pregunta pràctica per als investigadors júnior és com triar el programari més apropiat per al seu propi projecte de recerca. Per a resoldre aquest problema, vam fer una revisió del programari per a alguns dels sistemes integrats que es consideren més rellevants per a la recerca en ciències socials. Atès que els investigadors júnior en ciències socials poden enfrontar-se a possibles limitacions financeres, vam reduir el nostre abast per a centrar-nos únicament en el programari gratuït i de baix cost. En tercer lloc, donada l'actual crisi de salut pública, hem observat que els mitjans de comunicació social són una de les fonts d'informació i notícies més accessibles per al públic. Durant una pandèmia, la forma en què s'emmarquen els problemes de salut i les malalties en la premsa influeix en la comprensió del públic sobre l'actual brot epidèmic i les seves actituds i comportaments. Per tant, decidim usar Twitter com una font de notícies de fàcil accés per a analitzar l'evolució dels marcs de notícies espanyols durant la pandèmia COVID-19. En general, les tres recerques s'han associat estretament amb l'aplicació de mètodes computacionals, incloent la recol·lecció de dades en línia, la mineria de textos, l'anàlisi de xarxes i la visualització de dades. Aquest projecte de doctorat ha mostrat com la gent estudia i utilitza Twitter des de tres nivells diferents: el nivell acadèmic, el nivell pràctic i el nivell empíric.Visibilizando la vida cotidiana de la gente, Twitter se ha convertido en una de las plataformas de intercambio de información más importantes y ha atraído rápidamente la atención de los científicos. Investigadores de todo el mundo se han centrado en las ciencias sociales y en los estudios de Internet con datos de Twitter como muestra del mundo real, y en la última década se han diseñado numerosas herramientas de análisis y algoritmos. La presente tesis doctoral consta de tres investigaciones, en primer lugar, dados los 14 años (hasta 2020) de historia desde la fundación de Twitter, hemos asistido a una explosión de publicaciones científicas relacionadas, pero el panorama actual de la investigación en esta plataforma de medios sociales seguía siendo desconocido. Para llenar este vacío de investigación, hicimos un análisis bibliométrico de los estudios relacionados con Twitter para analizar cómo evolucionaron los estudios de Twitter a lo largo del tiempo, y para proporcionar una descripción general del entorno académico de investigación de Twitter desde un nivel macro. En segundo lugar, dado que hay muchas herramientas de software analítico que están disponibles actualmente para la investigación en Twitter, una pregunta práctica para los investigadores junior es cómo elegir el software más apropiado para su propio proyecto de investigación. Para resolver este problema, hicimos una revisión del software para algunos de los sistemas integrados que se consideran más relevantes para la investigación en ciencias sociales. Dado que los investigadores junior en ciencias sociales pueden enfrentarse a posibles limitaciones financieras, redujimos nuestro alcance para centrarnos únicamente en el software gratuito y de bajo coste. En tercer lugar, dada la actual crisis de salud pública, hemos observado que los medios de comunicación social son una de las fuentes de información y noticias más accesibles para el público. Durante una pandemia, la forma en que se enmarcan los problemas de salud y las enfermedades en la prensa influye en la comprensión del público sobre el actual brote epidémico y sus actitudes y comportamientos. Por lo tanto, decidimos usar Twitter como una fuente de noticias de fácil acceso para analizar la evolución de los marcos de noticias españoles durante la pandemia COVID-19. En general, las tres investigaciones se han asociado estrechamente con la aplicación de métodos computacionales, incluyendo la recolección de datos en línea, la minería de textos, el análisis de redes y la visualización de datos. Este proyecto de doctorado ha mostrado cómo la gente estudia y utiliza Twitter desde tres niveles diferentes: el nivel académico, el nivel práctico y el nivel empírico.
As Twitter has covered up people’s daily life, it has became one of the most important information exchange platforms, and quickly attracted scientists’ attention. Researchers around the world have highly focused on social science and internet studies with Twitter data as a real world sample, and numerous analytics tools and algorithms have been designed in the last decade. The present doctoral thesis consists of three researches, first, given the 14 years (until 2020) of history since the foundation of Twitter, an explosion of related scientific publications have been witnessed, but the current research landscape on this social media platform remained unknown, to fill this research gap, we did a bibliometric analysis on Twitter-related studies to analyze how the Twitter studies evolved over time, and to provide a general description of the Twitter research academic environment from a macro level. Second, since there are many analytic software tools that are currently available for Twitter research, a practical question for junior researchers is how to choose the most appropriate software for their own research project, to solve this problem, we did a software review for some of the integrated frameworks that are considered most relevant for social science research, given that junior social science researchers may face possible financial constraints, we narrowed our scope to solely focus on the free and low-cost software. Third, given the current public health crisis, we have noticed that social media are one of the most accessed information and news sources for the public. During a pandemic, how health issues and diseases are framed in the news release impacts public’s understanding of the current epidemic outbreak and their attitudes and behaviors. Hence, we decided to use Twitter as an easy-access news source to analyze the evolution of the Spanish news frames during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, the three researches have closely associated with the application of computational methods, including online data collection, text mining, complex network and data visualization. And this doctoral project has discovered how people study and use Twitter from three different levels: the academic level, the practical level and the empirical level.
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Curry, Phyllis A. "Wife battering : a social (science) problem /." Access Digital Full Text version, 1989. http://pocketknowledge.tc.columbia.edu/home.php/bybib/10901462.
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Sivaramakrishnan, A. "Social science, professional authority and citizenship." Thesis, University of Southampton, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.382911.
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O'Connor, Brendan T. "Statistical Text Analysis for Social Science." Research Showcase @ CMU, 2014. http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/541.
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What can text corpora tell us about society? How can automatic text analysis algorithms efficiently and reliably analyze the social processes revealed in language production? This work develops statistical text analyses of dynamic social and news media datasets to extract indicators of underlying social phenomena, and to reveal how social factors guide linguistic production. This is illustrated through three case studies: first, examining whether sentiment expressed in social media can track opinion polls on economic and political topics (Chapter 3); second, analyzing how novel online slang terms can be very specific to geographic and demographic communities, and how these social factors affect their transmission over time (Chapters 4 and 5); and third, automatically extracting political events from news articles, to assist analyses of the interactions of international actors over time (Chapter 6). We demonstrate a variety of computational, linguistic, and statistical tools that are employed for these analyses, and also contribute MiTextExplorer, an interactive system for exploratory analysis of text data against document covariates, whose design was informed by the experience of researching these and other similar works (Chapter 2). These case studies illustrate recurring themes toward developing text analysis as a social science methodology: computational and statistical complexity, and domain knowledge and linguistic assumptions.
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Anzola, David. "The philosophy of computational social science." Thesis, University of Surrey, 2015. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/808102/.
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The thesis is a collection of six stand-alone chapters aimed at setting the foundations for the philosophy of computational social science. Agent-based modelling has been used for social research since the nineties. While at the beginning it was simply conceived as a methodological alternative, recently, the notion of ‘computational social science’ has started to be used to denote a separate disciplinary field. There are important differences with mainstream social science and traditional social research. Yet, the literature in the field has not accounted for these differences. Computational social science is a strongly practice-oriented field, where theoretical and philosophical concerns have been pushed into the background. This thesis presents an initial analysis of the methodology, epistemology and ontology of computational social science, by examining the following topics: 1) verification and validation and 2) modelling and theorising, 3) mechanisms 4) explanation 5) agency, action and interaction and 6) entities and process philosophy. Five general conclusions are drawn from the thesis. It is first argued that the wider ontological base in agent-based modelling allows for a new approach to traditional social dualisms, moving away from the methodological individualism that dominates computational social science. Second, the need to place a distinction between explanation and understanding and to make explanatory goals explicit is highlighted. Third, it is claimed that computational social science needs to pay attention to the social epistemology of the field, for this could provide important insights regarding values, ideologies and interests that underlie the practice of agent-based modelling. Fourth, it is suggested that a more robust theorisation regarding the experimental and model-based character of agent-based modelling should be developed. Finally, it is argued that the method can greatly contribute to the development of a processual account of social life.
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Ross, Derek Gilbert. "The Social Role of Popularized Science." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/35372.
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In this thesis I will argue that popularized science books should adhere to normative criteria regarding the presentation, interpretation, and understanding of the natural sciences. The increasing popularity of popular science texts (PSTs) - based on sales, critical notice, and scholarly attention - indicates that they can function to interest and partially educate the lay public in scientific principals and practices. I will identify and analyze the narrative, rhetorical features of two popular science texts: Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See and Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams. These texts are selected based on a series of normative criteria, criteria constructed for the purpose of enhancing the public understanding of science. Additionally, these criteria are needed to help the lay public develop a proper appreciation of science. A proper appreciation of science, I argue, enables people to make better informed decisions regarding their own personal welfare and also that of the natural world. Finally, a proper appreciation of science, stimulated by PSTs, may help both scientists and the lay public reconceive the possibilities of narrative, public writing, and civic discourse.Master of Arts
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Gauthier, Roberto. "La représentation de la science chez les finissants de sciences humaines au collégial /." Thèse, Chicoutimi : Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1995. http://theses.uqac.ca.
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Gagnon, P. "The social foundation of the division between pure science and applied science." Thesis, University of Manchester, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.356113.
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Kumlin, Terese. "Social science students’ perceptions of motivational methods and approaches in science class." Thesis, Malmö högskola, Fakulteten för lärande och samhälle (LS), 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-36394.
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How to motivate students effectively is a question teachers have asked for thousands ofyears. In my teaching program at Malmö University, a variety of teaching methods andapproaches, that also increase motivation, have come into focus. These include:teaching at the right level, using a variety of teaching methods, seeing every student,being enthusiastic about the material, using formative evaluation, connecting lessons tostudents’ everyday life, and adapting classes to students’ interests. The aim of this studyis to find out how secondary students in a social science program perceive teachingmethods and approaches aimed at increasing motivation, and determine which methodsthey perceive as most/least effective. The study used both qualitative and quantitativemethods. 23 upper-secondary students from a class at a school in southern Swedenwere interviewed in four focus groups, where participants were purposefully sampled.10 of these students were also asked to complete a questionnaire ranking the teachingmethods and approaches on a scale of 1-7 (where 1 was most effective at increasingmotivation and 7 least effective), and the mean values of these scores were used in theanalysis. A phenomenological approach and content analysis were used to code andanalyze the data. Students perceived all of the motivational methods to be effective, themost effective being teaching lessons at the right level, followed by using a variety ofteaching methods, with mean values of 1.9 and 3.2, respectively. Adapting lessons tostudents’ interests and connecting them to everyday life were the least effective, withmean values of 5.6 and 5.7, respectively. The categories of teachers having a positiveattitude towards the material and the students, and seeing every student, had the samemean value, 3.8, while formative evaluation had a mean value of 3.9. When trying tomotivate students, it would thus appear more effective to make sure that lessons aretaught at the right level and that teachers vary the lessons, than to adapt lessons tostudents’ interests or connect the material to everyday life. While this was a small studyand the findings cannot be generalized to school populations, they are of high interestfor the researcher.
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Chen, Chen. "Romantic Transfer: From Science to Social Ideologies." Thesis, Harvard University, 2017. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33052848.
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The transfer of learning is arguably the most enduring goal of education. The history of science reveals that numerous theories transfer from natural-science to the socio-political realm, but educational practitioners often deem such transfers romantic and rhetorical, ignoring the opportunities and challenges such transfers may hold. In terms of opportunities, romantic transfer encourages students to relate science to events in social life and further to discover new ways to understand social issues and propose social hypotheses. In terms of challenge, romantic transfers are often based on superficial and even imprecise understandings of science and depend on oversimplified labels and metaphors. In many cases, the romantic transfers are imaginative. Although logically romantic transfers are based on analogical resonance, empirically they are hardly proven to be valid. Nevertheless, when students imagine social and ideological implications of the hard science terminologies and theorems, they are at risk for considering the emergent ideologies as proven by hard sciences that are often considered authoritative, objective, and universal. Literal understanding of science-inspired by still unexamined ideologies can lead to maladaptive and even dangerous social actions. Because many of the romantic transfers are interdisciplinary and controversial, teachers may avoid explicit discussion about romantic transfer with students, and do not wish to assume responsibility of doing so. However, the question remains whether avoiding explicit discussion and debates about romantic transfer would inhibit students from spontaneously romanticize science concepts. This dissertation presents four studies that systematically investigate questions of romantic transfer—informal, emergent, and metaphorical boundary transections from natural science to social ideologies that often occur unexpectedly.
My first study shows that participants who scored high in transferential thinking style also scored high in scientism beliefs and that participants who scored high on both tend to give literal interpretations to (religious) text. Following, my second study shows that students who reviewed the conservation of energy in physics are more likely to believe that luck is conserved, a naïve karmic religious idea. My third study shows that students are able to transfer spontaneously from theories in physics to more politically charged contexts. Specifically, students who learned the theory of entropy are more likely to prefer tightened social control, whereas students who learned self-organization theory are more likely to prefer stronger individual agency and relaxed social control. Study-4 involved interviews with the participants from Study-3 and shows that students’ narratives about social control are largely consistent with the thermodynamic concepts they have learned. Occasionally, students can critically evaluate the plausibility of their romantic transferences.
This dissertation shows that science instruction implicitly empowers students to make social hypotheses and to engage in moral-civic-political discourse. To consider pedagogies that respond to such an opportunity without falling victim to hasty generalizations, we need both science and civic educations to equip students with the methods to examine self-generated social hypothesis. We also need pedagogies that promote the awareness and tolerance of metaphors to offset the dangers of literalism.
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Li, Fu Min. "Collecting web data for social science research." Thesis, University of Macau, 2018. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b3953492.
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Watkins, Mark N. "Technology and the history-social science framework." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1992. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1055.
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Klaus, Helmut. "Social science research students' conceptions of thesauri." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1998. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/15916/1/Helmut_Klaus_Thesis.pdf.
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It is widely recognised that meaning and interpretation are fundamental aspects of user-system interaction in the retrieval of specialised information. Important constituents of information retrieval system are thesauri. To identify what understandings of thesauri exist, is crucial to improve instruction of database users and for an assessment of the functioning of thesauri in specialised information. Thesauri as phenomena can be viewed from a techno scientific perspective and a lifeworld perspective. The lifeworld perspective is made up of the collective understanding of those who use them. Lifeworld aspects of thesauri, i.e., how they are understood by social science researchers, have been disclosed by applying phenomenographic research against the background of the hermeneutical constitution of the online dialogue. The phenomenographic interpretative model has been used since its knowledge interest focuses on how techno scientific concepts are conceived of in the lifeworld. This has rendered descriptions of conceptions of thesauri in the form of two main categories: 1) the thesaurus as being separable from the database with the subcategories a) the thesaurus as a control device, and b) as incomplete terminology; 2) the thesaurus as being inseparable from the database with the subcategories of a) descriptors as evaluation criteria, and b) as search enhancers. Based on the configuration of the online dialogue, searching without understanding the thesaurus has also been described in the form of a third, 'empty' category and contrasted with the conceptions of thesauri. The findings represent a contribution to the hermeneutics of the online dialogue, and the results are immediately applicable for the development of discourses in the instruction of end-users and future information professionals. They also provide an empirical argument in support of further conceptual development of thesauri, which strives to make explicit the meaning of descriptors by incorporating terminological and epistemological knowledge, thus integrating domain knowledge into the database search process. The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
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Klaus, Helmut. "Social Science Research Students' Conceptions Of Thesauri." Queensland University of Technology, 1998. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/15916/.
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It is widely recognised that meaning and interpretation are fundamental aspects of user-system interaction in the retrieval of specialised information. Important constituents of information retrieval system are thesauri. To identify what understandings of thesauri exist, is crucial to improve instruction of database users and for an assessment of the functioning of thesauri in specialised information. Thesauri as phenomena can be viewed from a techno scientific perspective and a lifeworld perspective. The lifeworld perspective is made up of the collective understanding of those who use them. Lifeworld aspects of thesauri, i.e., how they are understood by social science researchers, have been disclosed by applying phenomenographic research against the background of the hermeneutical constitution of the online dialogue. The phenomenographic interpretative model has been used since its knowledge interest focuses on how techno scientific concepts are conceived of in the lifeworld. This has rendered descriptions of conceptions of thesauri in the form of two main categories: 1) the thesaurus as being separable from the database with the subcategories a) the thesaurus as a control device, and b) as incomplete terminology; 2) the thesaurus as being inseparable from the database with the subcategories of a) descriptors as evaluation criteria, and b) as search enhancers. Based on the configuration of the online dialogue, searching without understanding the thesaurus has also been described in the form of a third, 'empty' category and contrasted with the conceptions of thesauri. The findings represent a contribution to the hermeneutics of the online dialogue, and the results are immediately applicable for the development of discourses in the instruction of end-users and future information professionals. They also provide an empirical argument in support of further conceptual development of thesauri, which strives to make explicit the meaning of descriptors by incorporating terminological and epistemological knowledge, thus integrating domain knowledge into the database search process. The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
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Han, Chunhui. "Social gate: a new social accountable framework for computer networks." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=66970.
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Internet is a tremendous success and is an indispensable part of our everyday activities. However, Internet does not provide sufficient integrity to ensure the end hosts accountable for the communication. In this thesis, we present a new social accountable framework for the Internet that leverages the trusted links found on online social networks to hold the people and organizations accountable for their actions. Our framework is incrementally deployable without modifying the operating systems or applications running on the hosts. We provide the full design and discuss how different types of applications can be mapped onto the proposed framework. A prototype of this social accountable framework is partially implemented to evaluate the performance of the framework.L'Internet est un succès extraordinaire et est une pièce indispensable de notre vie quotidienne. Cependent, l'Internet ne fourni pas assez d'integrité pour assurer que les hébergeurs finaux soient responsables pour les communications. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons un nouveau cadre social responsable pour l'Internet qui exploite les liens de confiance trouvés sur les réseaux sociaux pour tenir les utilisateurs et les organisations responsables pour leurs actions. Notre cadre se déploit de facon itérative sans la modification du système d'exploitation ou les applications qui y exécutent. Nous présentons le plan complet et élaborons comment différent types d'applications peuvent s'adapter au cadre proposé. Un prototype de ce cadre social responsable est partiellement mis en application pour évaluer sa performance.
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Mason-Wilkes, Will. "Science as religion? : science communication and elective modernism." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2018. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/109735/.
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My central concern in this thesis is how science should be understood by the public. I argue that science should be understood, and valued for, the formative aspirations of the scientific community. The formative aspirations of the scientific community are the values members try to uphold as members of the group, even when this is not always possible. These aspirations are constitutive of the scientific ‘form of life’. I argue that science and religion are distinct forms of life, and through their formative aspirations can be differentiated from one another. Drawing on the theory of Elective Modernism (Collins and Evans 2017), I argue that the formative aspirations of science overlap with democratic values. Media representations of science shape public understanding. Non-fiction television is a ubiquitous and trusted medium for the communication of science. Non-fiction science television programme makers were interviewed to understand the process of science television production: the pressures, tensions and constraints inherent to this process. I analyse representations of science in British non-fiction television programmes and argue that a ‘religious’ portrayal of science can be identified in some programmes. I identify a contrasting ‘secular’ portrayal of science in other programmes. The religious portrayal presents science as providing a definitive creation narrative. In this portrayal scientific knowledge is presented as a set of certain and immutable truths which are revealed by nature with little or no human intervention. In this portrayal science is presented as providing meaning. The secular portrayal’s representation aligns more closely with a sociological understanding of science. In this portrayal scientific knowledge is represented as requiring human skill to produce and as being subject to change, revision and debate. Science in this portrayal is represented as producing both positive and negative outcomes for society. From the perspective of Elective Modernism, if citizens are to properly understand, engage with and value science they need an understanding informed by sociological conceptions of science which emphasise science’s formative aspirations as its defining characteristic. The requirements for the production of an ‘elective modernist’ portrayal of science, one which foregrounds the formative aspirations of science, are discussed. The problematic consequences of the religious portrayal of science are laid out. Presenting science as a religion disguises its formative aspirations. This provides an inaccurate picture of how science works and a widespread (mis)understanding of science as a religion would undermine democratic society.
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Arbel, Tal. "The American Soldier in Jerusalem: How Social Science and Social Scientists Travel." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493383.
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The dissertation asks how social science and its tools—especially those associated with the precise measurement of attitudes, motivations and preferences—became a pervasive way of knowing about and ordering the world, as well as the ultimate marker of political modernity, in the second half of the twentieth century.
I explore this question by examining in detail the trials and tribulations that accompanied the indigenization of scientific polling in 1950s Israel, focusing on the story of Jewish-American sociologist and statistician Louis Guttman and the early history of the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, the survey research organization he established and ran for forty years. Along with a wave of scientist-explorers who traveled to the postcolonial areas in the early Cold War, Guttman set out to the Middle East, leaving a secure academic position and settling in Jerusalem on the eve of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The inventor of cumulative scaling (known today as “Guttman scaling”)—a method of measurement first developed and used in The American Soldier, the classic World War II study of soldiering—Guttman sought to test in Israel the applicability of cutting-edge socio-psychological research techniques to the problems of a new state. With these objectives in mind, he established a small volunteer-based research unit within the Haganah, the largest among the paramilitary Zionist organizations in British Palestine, which then became part of the nascent Israeli Army. By the late 1950s, the military unit had evolved into a successful national research organization—the first of its kind outside the United States—that employed over two dozen workers and carried out studies on all aspects of social life for government offices, the military, and clients in the private sector.
Joining others who have rejected Basalla’s diffusion model, my dissertation shows there was nothing inevitable about the spread of these statistical methods and tools. Rather, they traveled and took root through an active, engaged, and directed process, which required the entrepreneurial initiative and cultural labor of individuals, and depended in turn on the institutional experience and habits of mind they brought with them, their embodied skills, relationships and personal virtues. More concretely, I argue that the eventual institutionalization of this scientific practice and its attendant rationality in Israel was due primarily to Guttman’s ability to recreate the conditions of knowing by rendering social science expertise intelligible in the vernacular, and to make an “ecological niche” for scientific claims and methods to feel at home away from home.
Yet, while Guttman was successful in recreating some of the conditions of social scientific knowing, conducting large-scale survey research in a “hostile,” or error generating environment – whether shortage of trained workers, resistant subjects and dismissive decision-makers, competing epistemic values, or the strains of war and state building – often engendered local adaptations. Highlighting the “iterability” of science in translation, I also show that behavioral concepts and claims embedded in the ‘deliverables’ produced by Guttman were often reframed, modified, and infused with local modes of reasoning and understanding as they were vernacularized.
The dissertation thus serves to illuminates both the processes that governed the global circulation of scientific ideas and tools in the postwar period and the central role this knowledge migration played in shaping the history of the modern social sciences.History of Science
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McGovern, Brian John. "The idea of applied social science : with special reference to social anthropology." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.304873.
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McCarney, H. J. "Science and ideology." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.380516.
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The aim of this thesis is to explicate the concepts of ideology and science; in particular, social science, in the work of Marx and in later Marxism. These concepts are standardly discussed in close association with each other in both Marxist and non-Marxist contexts. Yet, in the literature on Marxism at any rate, the kind of significance they have for each other has been widely misunderstood. Historically the most important expression of such misunderstanding is the tendency in writings influenced by, or within the ambit of, 'Western Marxism' to assume that the central question concerns the precise nature of the distinction between science and ideology as rival or alternative forms of cognition. Answers to this question have generally sought to distinguish them in terms of cognitive success and failure, with ideology as the dark shadow or distorted 'other' of science. It will be shown that in relation to Marx's thought this mode of question and answer is wholly misconceived. Science and ideology function there as categorially diverse notions which are such that the problem of how to demarcate their individual shares of a common field of reference cannot arise. Problems that do pressingly arise in connection with this body of thought include the following. How does science succeed in being ideological, when it does? More specifically, how is the ideological status of Marx's own social science to be conceived? To answer these questions one has to recognise the diversity of the ways in which ideology operates and to devise theoretical models which can capture that diversity. In what follows, three basic models, labelled for convenience 'semantic', 'syntactic', and 'dialectical', will be distinguished. It will be argued that the dialectical model is the appropriate one for understanding Marx's social science. The account of the concept of ideology given here is based on that contained in my book The Real World of Ideology. ' The account there has been abridged in order to bring out what are for present purposes its essential features. A copy of the book is enclosed with the thesis. The basic plan of the thesis is as follows. The first chapter is concerned, as an essential preliminary, with explicating the conception of ideology that operates in the work of Marx and in 'classical Marxism'. The second chapter deals with a basic misconception of this legacy which has a special relevance in the present context. This is the idea that ideology is essentially to be understood as an epistemological category. The way is then clear to pose the question of the nature and status of Marx's social science. This is done in the third chapter, where it also proves possible to dispose of the claims of the syntactic model as the basis for an answer. The semantic model is a much more serious candidate and requires extended discussion. The paradigmatic version of the model in Western Marxism is the conception of Marxist social science as a 'critical theory of society'. The fourth chapter discusses the prototype of such interpretations in the work of the 'Frankfurt School' theorists. The next two chapters (5 and 6) deal with more recent attempts by writers in the British analytical tradition to vindicate the project of Marxist social critique. The failure of the project in all these versions clears the ground for an inquiry into the claims of the dialectical model. This is pursued in chapters 7 and 8, paying close attention to the evidence on the subject yielded by Marx's writings. The result is to establish the dialectical scheme as the basic instrument for understanding his social theory. In the final chapter developments treated earlier at the level of relations between ideas are set in a historical context. This enables the dialectical thesis to be grasped in a richer, more solid setting, and enables it in turn to shed its light on the question of the overall shape of the Marxist intellectual tradition.
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Daly, Tricia School of Media Film & Theatre UNSW. "Representing the human body ??? science as social meaning." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Media, Film and Theatre, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/23293.
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Representing the human body ??? science as social meaning adopts and develops systemic functional social semiotics to analyse the popular science texts, The Human Body, Superhuman, Human Instinct, Brain Story, The Secret Life of Twins and How to Build a Human. These are predominantly produced through the resources of the Wellcome Trust and/or the BBC/TLC (The Learning Channel), and feature celebrity doctors (Robert Winston) or scientists (Susan Greenfield) as presenters. Adopting a modified and expanded systemic functional semiotics derived from Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), it is argued that these texts share a logic that displaces social/historical time (including broader historical and social struggles) by constructing the apparent timelessness of middle-class families, by metaphor and abstraction. Central to the temporalities of these programmes is the notion of ???going back??? to the familial in which conscious (patriarchal) time is seen as ???male??? and the unconscious timeless is seen as ???female???. Second, the penetrative digital modes of the programmes imagine different, if conventional, genders, emphasising the interior and inertial female. The popular medical science discourses highlighted in the analysis constitute an unconscious set of taken-for-granted socio-political contexts in which medical and bioscientific knowledge is paraded and celebrated. Narrative resolution of the contradictions inherent in the contextual refrain of contemporary global capitalism is largely achieved through time by the semiotic realisation of ???going back??? to evolutionary, genetic, and (hence to) essential time and to abstracted spatial metaphors. The production origins (British, multi-national) of the factual science documentary prefigure or pre-structure the genre???s conservative colonising discourse around gender, ???race??? and evolution that are developed as social, political or even military metaphors.
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Owen, Tim. "Social science and the study of human biotechnology." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.433032.
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Philip, W. M. "The contribution of Adam Ferguson to social science." Thesis, University of Surrey, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.332766.
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Higgs, Gary. "Social and Environmental Applications of Geographical Information Science." Thesis, University of South Wales, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.680113.
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Goudie, Robert J. B. "Bayesian structural inference with applications in social science." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2011. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/78778/.
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Structural inference for Bayesian networks is useful in situations where the underlying relationship between the variables under study is not well understood. This is often the case in social science settings in which, whilst there are numerous theories about interdependence between factors, there is rarely a consensus view that would form a solid base upon which inference could be performed. However, there are now many social science datasets available with sample sizes large enough to allow a more exploratory structural approach, and this is the approach we investigate in this thesis. In the first part of the thesis, we apply Bayesian model selection to address a key question in empirical economics: why do some people take unnecessary risks with their lives? We investigate this question in the setting of road safety, and demonstrate that less satisfied individuals wear seatbelts less frequently. Bayesian model selection over restricted structures is a useful tool for exploratory analysis, but fuller structural inference is more appealing, especially when there is a considerable quantity of data available, but scant prior information. However, robust structural inference remains an open problem. Surprisingly, it is especially challenging for large n problems, which are sometimes encountered in social science. In the second part of this thesis we develop a new approach that addresses this problem|a Gibbs sampler for structural inference, which we show gives robust results in many settings in which existing methods do not. In the final part of the thesis we use the sampler to investigate depression in adolescents in the US, using data from the Add Health survey. The result stresses the importance of adolescents not getting medical help even when they feel they should, an aspect that has been discussed previously, but not emphasised.
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Mengistu, Dawit Bezu. "Social Science Studies and Experiments with Web Applications." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för datavetenskap och medieteknik (DM), 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-78122.
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This thesis explores a web-based method to do studies in cultural evolution. Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is defined as social learning that allows for the accumulation of changes over time where successful modifications are maintained until additional change is introduced. In the past few decades, many interdisciplinary studies were conducted on cultural evolution. However, until recently most of those studies were limited to lab experiments. This thesis aims to address the limitations of the experimental methods by replicating a lab-based experiment online. A web-based application was developed and used for replicating an experiment on conformity by Solomon Asch [1951]. The developed application engages participants in an optical illusion test within different groups of social influence. The major finding of the study reveals that conformity increases on trials with higher social influence. In addition, it was also found that when the task becomes more difficult, the subject's conformity increases. These findings were also reported in the original experiment. The results of the study showed that lab-based experiments in cultural evolution studies can be replicated over the web with quantitatively similar results.
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Saksena, Michelle J. "Three Essays on the Social Science of Obesity." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405893684.
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Seyedi, Seyedalireza <1980>. "Predictability in Social Science, The statistical mechanics approach." Doctoral thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2015. http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/7199/1/seyedi_seyedalireza_tesi.pdf.
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The subject of this work concerns the study of the immigration phenomenon, with emphasis on the aspects related to the integration of an immigrant population in a hosting one. Aim of this work is to show the forecasting ability of a recent finding where the behavior of integration quantifiers was analyzed and investigated with a mathematical model of statistical physics origins (a generalization of the monomer dimer model). After providing a detailed literature review of the model, we show that not only such a model is able to identify the social mechanism that drives a particular integration process, but it also provides correct forecast. The research reported here proves that the proposed model of integration and its forecast framework are simple and effective tools to reduce uncertainties about how integration phenomena emerge and how they are likely to develop in response to increased migration levels in the future.
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Seyedi, Seyedalireza <1980>. "Predictability in Social Science, The statistical mechanics approach." Doctoral thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2015. http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/7199/.
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The subject of this work concerns the study of the immigration phenomenon, with emphasis on the aspects related to the integration of an immigrant population in a hosting one. Aim of this work is to show the forecasting ability of a recent finding where the behavior of integration quantifiers was analyzed and investigated with a mathematical model of statistical physics origins (a generalization of the monomer dimer model). After providing a detailed literature review of the model, we show that not only such a model is able to identify the social mechanism that drives a particular integration process, but it also provides correct forecast. The research reported here proves that the proposed model of integration and its forecast framework are simple and effective tools to reduce uncertainties about how integration phenomena emerge and how they are likely to develop in response to increased migration levels in the future.
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Kim, Sang Hyun. "Making the science of global warming : a social history of climate science in Britain." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/24778.
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This study describes the development of climate science in Britain during the period from the 1950s to mid 1980s, with particular respect to the topic of CO2-induced global warming. The study of climate and of its variations had traditionally been descriptive and regionally oriented, and regarded more or less as a minor branch of meteorology. With advances in numerical methods and computing technology, however, climate science was gradually transformed into a highly physics-based and mathematical science. By the late 1970s, climate science, became dominated largely by dynamical meteorologists, atmospheric physicists and physical oceanographers, armed with complex physico-mathematical modelling as a principal methodology. It was not that other approaches did not exist. In the 1960s and early 1970s, observational studies of climate such as those cultivated by Hubert Lamb, and simple climate modelling studies focusing on climate sensitivity and feedback processes, played a far more important role in raising the issues of climate change, both natural and anthropogenic. However, mainstream meteorologists and dynamical climatologists, who occupied a higher status within the cultural hierarchy of science, firmly believed that climate and its change could only be studied properly using numerical models of the large-scale atmospheric circulation – i.e. general circulation models (GCMs). This cultural hierarchy constrained the way in which the modern science of global climate change was developed and the issue of CO2-induced global warming was understood and investigated. Such a tendency was particularly strong in Britain. Nevertheless, the resulting GCM-based science of global warming was by no means homogeneous. This thesis argues that different institutional goals, different national political environments, different understandings of how to relate to policy, and the hierarchical relations between scientific subcultures all combined to produce different paths and styles of global warming research.
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Bartoszuk, Karin, Cecelia McIntosh, and Brian Maxson. "Integration and Synergy of Research and Graduate Education in Science, Humanities, and Social Science." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2014. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/6174.
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Hubner, Austin Y. "Let's talk about science: The effects of memory on the social transmission of science." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524162787813551.
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Manco, Vega Alejandra. "Early career researchers and PhD students from the social sciences use of Social Networking Sites (SNS) for science communication: an affordances approach." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-332028.
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This research aims to understand the different practices and strategies early career researchers and PhD students from the social sciences have in Social Networking Sites (SNSs) for science communication in one particular country: Brazil. Following this purpose, the central research question is which are the motives and rationale of the researchers for using social networking sites for science communication. Two sub-questions arise from this general research question: How do practices and strategies relate to the academic system of this country? And How do the traditional science communication practices translate into the use of Social Networking Sites (SNS)? This research is empirically oriented building up on case studies in Brazil. This study makes use of the adaptation that Van Dijck (2013) made of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the review of affordances of social media platforms (Bucher & Helmond, 2016) to apply it to the study of social media as the theoretical approach. The methodological approach of this research is qualitative, using both interviews and netnography as research methods. The primary motivations for using different Social Networking Sites are all related to connectivity: communication with peers, to the public and research subjects, updating themselves about their research issue, dissemination of research, availability of papers, self-branding and participation in interest groups are the most mentioned. These motivations translate into cross-posting practices and integrated communication strategies -combining online and offline elements- on the different Social Networking Sites. These motivations translate into perceived affordances all related to social affordances, therefore, social capital processes: availability, scalability, visibility and multimediality. The academic system of the country has remained unchanged as it privileges traditional scholarly academic formats; therefore, early career researchers and PhD students from the social sciences only use the different Social Networking Sites (SNS) as a side aid but not as a primary means of communication. Social media is underused as a means of public science communication, even though these platforms offer a lot of advantages for pursuing such issue. Traditional science communication practices translate into the use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs). The most important issue that came out in this report was the fact that social affordances provided by Social Networking (SNSs) are still required to be endorsed by real life meeting to start further collaboration and the fact that English is the preferred language for such issues.
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Larsson, Malin. "Laboratory Chemistry in Natural Science." Thesis, Kristianstad University College, Department of Teacher Education, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hkr:diva-3988.
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University level laboratory work is reformulated to fit into the chemistry and
natural science education in the upper secondary school of Sweden. This thesis
describes how this reformulation is performed both from the chemical and the
didactic point of view. The resulting laboratory manual has been tested by students
in the target group with positive response. Interest lay in how to present
laboratory experiments far different from what they usually did and how it actually
connected to their studies in natural science. How much did attitudes and
self-efficacy influence the implementation of the laboratory work and how did
the students collaborate? The author designed the laboratory work, observed an
implementation of parts of the laboratory work through laboratory lessons in a
school class and made a follow-up interview with the teacher.
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Sweet, Christopher Pennington. "Science and educational research." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1990. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10018495/.
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At present the most powerful and influential groups in education see the solution to matters of educational concern as mainly falling within the province of an educational research which is fundamentally scientific. This thesis sets out to examine whether this assumption can be substantiated and, in the possible scenario that it cannot, to look at an alternative form of educational research. It begins with the philosophical arguments which support the view that educational research, where it is empirical, should be mainly scientific and continues by looking at what contemporary educational researchers have said about the nature of educational research. The role philosophy of education might take in this context is also examined. The thesis continues by looking at the prescribed methodology of educational research and examines the philosophical assumptions of such a methodology. It continues by looking at the major assumption of scientific endeavour which is that it is nomological. The conclusions drawn from the aforegoing are that, for various philosophical reasons, the notion that educational research can be founded on scientific method and applied through a process parallel to engineering is fallacious and needs to be reviewed. A review of the philosophical situation with regard to understanding human beings as would be necessary to understanding them in an educational context is undertaken in the fourth chapter. This marks the beginnings of an alternative, non-scientific, framework for educational research. A case is made for the thesis that individual actions are understood properly against a background of information which includes beliefs, intentions and historical circumstances. Consideration is then given as to how this might be put in such a way as to be of practical use in the deliberation of how to tackle educational issues. The final chapter outlines how a possible substantive piece of educational research might look.
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Hatfield, Denise Truex. "Addressing second and third grade California science and social science content standards through environmental literature." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2006. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/3056.
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In response to the federal legislation No Child Left Behind, schools across the country implemented required reading programs for classroom instruction. Open Court's Reading program meets this criterion for many schools. The text in Open Court Reading for grades two and three was evaluated for science and social science content standards that would be supportive of environmental education. Supplemental lessons from Project Learning Tree, Project WILD, and Project WET were identified.
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Bordianu, Gheorghita. "Learning influence probabilities in social networks." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=114597.
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Social network analysis is an important cross-disciplinary area of research, with applications in fields such as biology, epidemiology, marketing and even politics. Influence maximization is the problem of finding the set of seed nodes in an information diffusion process that guarantees maximum spread of influence in a social network, given its structure. Most approaches to this problem make two assumptions. First, the global structure of the network is known. Second, influence probabilities between any two nodes are known beforehand, which is rarely the case in practical settings. In this thesis we propose a different approach to the problem of learning those influence probabilities from past data, using only the local structure of the social network. The method is grounded in unsupervised machine learning techniques and is based on a form of hierarchical clustering, allowing us to distinguish between influential and the influenceable nodes. Finally, we provide empirical results using real data extracted from Facebook.L'analyse des réseaux sociaux est un domaine d'études interdisciplinaires qui comprend des applications en biologie, épidémiologie, marketing et même politique. La maximisation de l'influence représente un problème où l'on doit trouver l'ensemble des noeuds de semence dans un processus de diffusion de l'information qui en même temps garantit le maximum de propagation de son influence dans un réseau social avec une structure connue. La plupart des approches à ce genre de problème font appel à deux hypothèses. Premièrement, la structure générale du réseau social est connue. Deuxièmement, les probabilités des influences entre deux noeuds sont connues à l'avance, fait qui n'est d'ailleurs pas valide dans des circonstances pratiques. Dans cette thèse, on propose un procédé différent visant la problème de l'apprentissage de ces probabilités d'influence à partir des données passées, en utilisant seulement la structure locale du réseau social. Le procédé se base sur l'apprentissage automatique sans surveillance et il est relié à une forme de regroupement hiérarchique, ce qui nous permet de faire la distinction entre les noeuds influenceurs et les noeuds influencés. Finalement, on fournit des résultats empiriques en utilisant des données réelles extraites du réseau social Facebook.
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Campbell, Robert Arthur. "An inquiry into the generic social processes of science." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape10/PQDD_0013/NQ38229.pdf.
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Gilchrist, Lauri. ""Aboriginal communities and Social Science research: Voyeurism in transition"." School of Native Human Services, 1997. http://142.51.24.159/dspace/handle/10219/472.
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Examination of the relationship of research to Aboriginal peoples reveals a curious paradox. Volumes of research have generated data and theory on Aboriginal people in Canada, and yet there is little research which Aboriginal peoples have been able to determine themselves.
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Stokes, P. A. "Finalization, cybernetics and the possibility of a social science." Thesis, Swansea University, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.639114.
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The discipline of sociology was constructed in the 19th and early 20th centuries on conceptual foundations inspired by mechanics and thermodynamics, realms of organized simplicity and disorganized complexity respectively. The social world, on the other hand, is a realm of organized complexity. Sociology has, therefore, been erected on sets of inappropriate fundamental ideas and is consequently a discipline in crisis. It is a discipline that cannot quite get to grips with its subject matter. The work argues that the appropriate conceptual foundation for the social sciences is the realm of communication and control, ideas that were given a rigorous formulation in cybernetics, information theory and systems thinking since the 1940s. Many people have seen the prima facie appropriateness of these ideas for the study of human society and numerous attempts have been made to apply them. Almost all of these efforts have been failures, at least from a sociological point of view. The thesis suggests that the problem with all such previous attempts is that they considered of too direct an application of cybernetics to sociology, entailing a metaphoric reduction that threatened the intellectual integrity of the discipline. Work in the history of science suggests where deep theoretical, foundational work may well be achieved for a realm in the abstruse so to speak, it is when attempts are made to apply these results to more phenomenal domains to which in principle they are deemed appropriate and relevant and problems of an apparent 'lack of fit' arise. It has been found that a group of intermediating concepts are necessary to draw the two domains together in a workable fit. This has been called a process of 'finalization of science'. The burden of this dissertation therefore has been to construct a finalization process that would effect the fruitful union of cybernetics and sociology. To this end it is observed that social organizing is the outcome when the concerted control attempts when two or more people become intertwined through their emergent interdependence. Thus the concept of social organization is proffered as the generic candidate of a finalized version of cybernetic control that is amenable for sociological usurpation. Specifically, it is proposed that Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) is the appropriate finalized form of this concept.
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Donovan, Claire Angela. "Government policy and the direction of social science research." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.392801.
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Using the UK Social Science Research Council (SSRC)lEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC)l as a case study, this thesis tests the hypothesis that government funding of social science research has altered research directions. Academics often assume a causal link between government policy, ESRC-funded research and research directions but no adequate evidence has been presented to support this claim. As a senior ESRC figure puts it, 'Most of the people who say these things, even though they are social scientists, speak without looking at very simple .... evidence that's publicly available.' This research examines this evidence in detail and draws upon extensive interviews with ESRC figures. Various governments have viewed social science as either the equivalent of, or inferior to, natural science. The ESRC has been caught in the middle of this conceptual and ideological battle. An understanding of the history of social science in the UK Research Council system, and of the development of the disciplines of sociology and economics in particular, is crucial in revealing how the Left and Right have confronted the idea of a 'science of society' and the impact, if any, upon social science research via the ESRC. This thesis concludes that there is no evidence that government policy has deliberately been filtered through the ESRC in order to direct the social science research effort. There have, however, been indirect consequences of government funding social SCIence through the Research Council system. An ex-ESRC Secretary explains that governments do not understand what social science is so they support 'social science that makes sense to natural scientists', which is 'social science in the service of natural science and technology'. Through fear of budget cuts the ESRC never sought to correct this image and has more recently strategically promoted this brand of social science to its advantage. This has led to a picture of the ESRC as positivistic and directive but, as an ex-committee secretary says, this is 'more apparent than real'. A closer examination of the ESRC's relationships with government, its research priorities and the secretariat's dealings with academics reveals a very different day-to-day picture.
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Whyte, Nicholas. "The social context of science in Ireland, 1890-1930." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.361237.
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Puentes, Kalid. "Introducing neo-surrealism : the social science of performance art." Thesis, Brunel University, 2017. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/17144.
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This study is concerned with the obscurity surrounding the boundaries of a socio-political context and a metaphysical context, especially as it correlates to Contemporary Performance Art. This dichotomy seemingly results in symbolic conflation and therefore necessitates the inclusion of social science as part of Performance Studies discourse. The intersection of these disciplines aligns with respect to the significance of context: the role of communication when considering the phenomenon of interpreting the perspective of other individuals. In this study, the various layers appropriated to the contextualisation of Performance art are explored: how it pertains to the theatrical framework, audience, art, social order, and the sublime. To this end, the influence of the socio-political construct of reality on the theatrical framework of a performance is examined. The premise is that a socio-political context both precedes and follows a performance and likely affects 5 how a performance is experienced. This investigation relies upon the methodological approach of Grounded Theory that allows the freedom of exploring this phenomenon in conjunction to the development of a communicative model. To delimit the scope of this study, I primarily focus on the symbolic, insofar as it affects the context of a performance. The analysis of this study supports the development of a theorisation that introduces an approach to the theatrical framework, defined as Neo-Surrealism. Drawing upon Immanuel Kant's philosophical work on judgement, a precept is introduced for a theatrical framework: Neo- Surrealism is a platform that constitutes the demarcation of sacred space, where the signification of the aesthetic has symbolic authority over the signification of the socio-political construct. In the present study, the term transgression as situated in a metaphysical context of sacred space, changes its symbolic signification from a complicit act against the socio-political construct to a complicit act against the limitations of perception, positioning this semiotic sign to constitute an aesthetic infinitude. This theorisation serves to support a philosophical dialectic that incorporates performative methods from Ritual Studies. This aspect of the dissertation acts as a counterpart to the documented artwork aimed at reinforcing the specific purposes as outlined through the research. The practical portion of this study consists of three performances that rely upon the platform of Neo-Surrealism. Each performance strategically responds to the influence of the socio-political construct in separate ways. Neo-Surrealism: What is Performance art? (2015) contains a fictitious narrative that is integrated in an academic context. I portray several different archetypes; this theoretically makes my identity impalpable to an audience comprised mostly of students that are unfamiliar with my work. Neo-Surrealism: The Audition (2016) is centred on the site specificity of the performance, challenging the application of the communicative model in an unfamiliar socio-political context, Anchorage, Alaska. Neo-Surrealism: The Rehearsal (2017) is aimed at asserting the relevance of the platform of Neo-Surrealism by expanding the symbolic boundaries of Performance Art.
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Lloyd, Alyson S. "The applications of loyalty card data for social science." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2018. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10060364/.
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Large-scale consumer datasets have become increasingly abundant in recent years and many have turned their attention to harnessing these for insights within the social sciences. Whilst commercial organisations have been quick to recognise the benefits of these data as a source of competitive advantage, their emergence has been met with contention in research due to the epistemological, methodological and ethical challenges they present. These issues have seldom been addressed, primarily due to these data being hard to obtain outside of the commercial settings in which they are often generated. This thesis presents an exploration of a unique loyalty card dataset obtained from one of the most prominent UK high street retailers, and thus an opportunity to study the dynamics, potentialities and limitations when applying such data in a research context. The predominant aims of this work were to firstly, address issues of uncertainty surrounding novel consumer datasets by quantifying their inherent representation and data quality issues and secondly, to explore the extent to which we may enrich our current knowledge of spatiotemporal population processes through the analysis of consumer activity patterns. Our current understanding of such dynamics has been limited by the data-scarce era, yet loyalty card data provide individual level, georeferenced population data that are high in velocity. This provided a framework for understanding more detailed interactions between people and places, and what these might indicate for both consumption behaviours and wider societal phenomena. This work endeavoured to provide a substantive contribution to the integration of consumer datasets in social science research, by outlining pragmatic steps to ensure novel data sources can be fit for purpose, and to population geography research, by exploring the extent to which we may utilise spatiotemporal consumption activities to make broad inferences about the general population.
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Möllering, Guido. "Trust : social science theories and their application to organisations." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.619845.
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Lang, Iain Alexander. "Citing power : the use of concepts in social science." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.270711.
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Hendry, Christopher N. "The utilisation of social and behavioural science through consulting." Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 1985. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/19783/.
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The thesis is concerned with organisational consulting, and the 'theories' which guide social and behavioural consultants in what they do. To preserve the 'integrity of the phenomena' the research has utilised an interviewing methodology to obtain accounts which reveal 'personal theories'. The aim has been to achieve an adequate phenomenology of consultants' ideas, rooted in their personal lives and organisational role situations, and not just to treat consultancy as the disembodied application of skills and knowledge. Consultants' ideas and practices can thereby be viewed in relation to their role-contexts, and can be seen as adapted to specific operating situations, particularly in the comparison of internal,commercial and academic consultants. Thus far, the study makes a substantive contribution to the understanding of social consultancy by locating ideas and practices in role circumstances. But such consultants are also ah occupational group, sharing a common role-context. The role is the product of wider organisational and societal processes. Beyond the specific slant given by differences in their immediate work-role, therefore, there appear common features in their working models. Two paradigms, the negotiative and systems, are identified and analysed as projections of consultants' role experiences which were also functional for clients, insofar as they developed the cohesion of managers as a group and their capacity to cope with problems facing organisations in the period 1960-79. Ideas and practices are thus viewed, ideologically, in relation to an historical period and social formation. By considering consultants' ideas, as ideology, in relation to their market situation (expressed in role) we confront a central question in social theory - the relation between ideas and the material structures and processes of society. At this point the study therefore attempts to connect the sociology of knowledge directly with the theory of ideology, and to make a substantive contribution to each.