Pushing boundaries and blurring categories in digital media and religion research

As religious identity and spiritual practices transform and expand in the digital media moment, this article advocates for more critical scholarship on media and religion that examines the complex ways that individuals make meaning in the digital age. First, I present an overview of foundational media and religion theories that analyze the interactions between these ever‐changing fields, such as the culturalist tradition, mediatization theory, and the social shaping of technology approach. Furthermore, this essay highlights insightful research trends that blur distinctions between media spaces and complicate definitions of religion. Finally, a discussion of gaps in the scholarship will justify an argument for more theories centered in international contexts, as well as analysis of the relationships between media technologies, aesthetics, affect, identity and religious expression. These emerging approaches provide more in‐depth discussions of how the fast‐changing and ever‐complex digital culture is deeply connected to the evolving nature of religion and human existence.     

Pushing the boundaries of our understanding of disability and violence: voices from the Global South (Guyana)

Our knowledge about disabled people’s lives is largely based on research in the Global North. This article considers disability and violence in the Global South, specifically in Guyana. It aims to push conceptual and empirical boundaries of our understanding of violence and disability. Conceptually, it argues for a social model materialist theory of disability attuned to how material barriers to disabled people’s inclusion in society and space are reproduced through processes of exclusion unfolding across geographic scales ranging from the global, to the inter-personal and intra-personal. It argues that Lacanian psycho-analytic theory provides a complimentary lens for understanding why people engage in acts that construct disabled people as ‘deserving’ of violence. Empirically, the article broadens our understanding of disability and violence by focusing on poverty, violence as a cause of impairment and disability, and disabled women’s and men’s experiences of violence in a majority world context.     

Qualitative research in family therapy: a substantive and methodological review

Over the last decade, marriage and family therapy (MFT) researchers have developed a growing interest in qualitative research. In this article, we review substantive and methodological trends in the published qualitative studies within the MFT field. The research is compared and contrasted in the following areas: General topic, epistemological theory, methodological theory, sampling and sample, data collection, data analysis procedure, and approach to reliability and validity. We also provide recommendations for future research.     

Social research and social policy: The theoretical connection

Thoughtful scholars have discussed the complex nature of the social research-social policy relationship, and yet many persons continue to plan, conduct, interepret, and fund social research as if they expected it to generate facts that have simple effects on policy. This paper argues that such expectations reflect two, untenable assumptions:Simple positivism andfactual efficacy. These assumptions are reviewed, and a more defensible model for the research-policy relationship is proposed based onplausible theory. Implications for the latter model are then explored. The holder of a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan, his professional interests center upon role theory, the study of teaching, social decision-making, and relationships among social research, theory, and policy impact.     

Online epistemic communities: theoretical and methodological directions for understanding knowledge co-elaboration in new digital spaces

This paper presents, illustrates and discusses a generic framework for studying knowledge co-elaboration in online epistemic communities ("OECs"). Our approach is characterised by: considering knowledge co-elaboration as a design activity; distinguishing discussion and production spaces in OECs; characterising participation via the notion of role; fine-grained analyses of meaning, content and communicative functions in interactions. On this basis, three key issues for ergonomics research on OECs are discussed and illustrated by results from our previous studies on OSS and Wikipedia. One issue concerns the interrelation between design (task) and regulation. Whereas design task-oriented activity is distributed among participants, we illustrate that OCEs function with specialised emerging roles of group regulation. However, the task-oriented activity also functions at an interpersonal level, as an interplay of knowledge-based discussion with negotiation of competencies. Another issue concerns the foci of activity on the (designed) knowledge object. Based on a generic task model, we illustrate asymmetry and distinctiveness in tasks' foci of participants. The last issue concerns how design-use mediation is ensured by specific forms of mediation roles in OECs. Finally we discuss the degree of generality of our framework and draw some perspectives for extending our framework to other OECs.     

Afterword: comparative versus historical research

ABSTRACT

The articles in this special issue represent the triumph of detailed historical research over an older version of comparative research that was too eager to reduce complex settings to correlations among a few variables. While the events in MENA starting at the end of 2010 revived interest in revolutions, they also suggested new ways of thinking about revolutions, or rather about the long chains of interactions that may or may not lead to regime change. Emotions, individuals, identities, networks and much more help us see the interactions among players in a variety of formal and informal arenas.     

Decolonial sociology: W.E.B. Du Bois's foundational theoretical and methodological contributions

Decolonial theory offers sociologists, especially critical race scholars, powerful theoretical and methodological tools to understand historical and contemporary injustice and resistance. As a revolutionary epistemology, decolonial theory and methods feature critical insights into knowledges from subaltern voices concerned with how the implementation of modern technologies shape colonial structures, inequalities, the daily lives of the colonized, and resistance strategies. However, decolonial studies have long been the purview of the humanities and remain marginal to the social sciences due, partially, to a dearth of foundational theorizing. Challenging scientific colonialism, historicism, and Eurocentric conceptions of civilization while simultaneously linking these phenomena to racialized exploitation of labor within a modern global capitalist system and resistance to it, W. E. B. Du Bois's sociological theories, methods, and advocacy offer insightful ways to begin decolonizing the discipline, theoretically and in practice, in scholarship and in the world. This article outlines Du Bois's theoretical and empirical contributions by putting him in dialogue with a century of decolonial scholarship before offering suggestions for how to mobilize Du Bois's decolonial theory and methods for a pluriversal decolonial sociology.     

Promising research and methodological approaches for health behavior research with homeless persons

High-risk health behaviors have high prevalence among homeless persons prompting substantial research on health behavior and behavior change strategies within the population. Previously, much of this research focused solely on the target behavior without consideration of contextual factors that may contribute to the behavior or that may inhibit behavior change. We describe three overlapping trends in homeless health behavior research – longitudinal, qualitative, and participatory – which consider the link between the context of homelessness and health behavior. These approaches contribute to the understanding of the social determinants of health behavior and health and demonstrate opportunities for intervention beyond the individual level.     

Tax evasion research: A critical appraisal and theoretical model

If social science is to contribute to an understanding of tax evasion behavior, it must develop accurate measures of evasion at the individual level, identify the variables associated with evasion, and construct compelling explanatory models. Toward this end, past research on tax evasion and noncompliance is reviewed with an emphasis on distinguishing between those variables that instigate the behavior and those that act as constraints against its occurence. The conclusions of this review suggest the potential value of a social psychological model of tax evasion behavior that specifies a set of situationally defined instigations and constraints and their logically analogous counterpart within the individual.     

Conducting research on violence in Asian American communities: methodological issues

Conducting culturally competent research is a challenge as the United States becomes increasingly multicultural. When conducting research on violence in Asian American communities, researchers need to consider how culture, race, and ethnicity influence definitions of concepts, and methodological issues such as research designs, sampling, developing and translating instruments, ethical issues, recruiting research participants, supervising and training interviewers, and disseminating findings. Examples from the authors' research studies on community violence in the Khmer community, domestic violence in the Chinese American community, and dating violence in Asian American groups are extrapolated to highlight various themes. A commitment to a research program that collaborates with the community under study and cultural experts is vital at every stage of the research process.     

Conducting research using web-based questionnaires: Practical,methodological, and ethical considerations

The use of the internet for social science research is becoming increasingly common. This paper outlines practical, methodological and ethical issues for researchers to consider when using web-based questionnaires. This is illustrated by consideration of the authors' own experience of conducting a study into the phenomenon of self-harm.     

From bedside to bench: research in comorbidity and aging

As their patients age, clinicians are increasingly confronted with diseases, impairments, or conditions that complicate the diagnosis and treatment of index diseases and with the management challenge of the overall burden of morbidity in their patients. Nevertheless, there has been little applicable conceptual work and empirical research on the nature, impact, and management of comorbid and multiple morbid conditions. Advancing research in this area has been the goal of a recent National Institute on Aging Task Force on Comorbidity Research Issues, as well as a working conference of the American Geriatrics Society. Both efforts highlighted current knowledge and thinking about comorbidity in the context of caring for an aging population, in preparation for research ultimately leading to better understanding of comorbidity and improvement in clinical practice. This Perspective provides a brief overview of these developments.     

Unsettling research versus activism: how might critical disability studies disrupt traditional research boundaries?

Abstract

This article responds to the call for producing activist-oriented scholarship by engaging with theoretical and methodological approaches that explore the inclusion of women and girls with disabilities in Vietnam. We consider possibilities for connecting different forms of knowledge and activism by reflecting on research practices designed to foster social change. Specifically, we ask: how can critical disability studies be more reflexive about knowledge which privileges particular ways of knowing from the Global North? What alternative possibilities can exist to foster more inclusive and transformative knowledge that tackles systemic forms of oppressions in colonial and postcolonial contexts? Reflecting on an ongoing collaborative project in Vietnam, we argue that critical disability studies which engages with different forms of activism through critical reflections on our privileges can tackle exclusion by opening a new platform for debating social justice transnationally.     

Contemporary Philanthropy in the Spotlight: Pushing the Boundaries of Research on a Global and Contested Social Practice

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This article is intended as the leading article in a special issue devoted to the achievements, limitations, opportunities...