Friendships with benefits? Examining the role of friendship in semi-structured interviews within music research

This article explores the ‘methodology of friendship’ and its wider potential within music research. Drawing on two research examples that made use of ‘friendship’ in distinct fashions – one that explores music listening practices in everyday life and the other, music as a site for racialisation – the article discusses how friendship can be incorporated within semi-structured interviews. The case studies act as examples of how to negotiate alterity in music research and how friendship represents a potential for gathering more detailed data. The notion of ‘alterity’, at the core of research relationships is critical to shift the conversation to an informal tone and improve the depth of the discourses gathered from informants. Consequently, this article addresses debates within qualitative (music) sociology by reconsidering friendship as an axis of power and examines the nature of the data gathered in semi-structured interviews through the methodology of friendship.     

马克思关于“科学”的三个维度

马克思通过对黑格尔的辩证法和国家学说、政治经济学的批判,以及对资本主义生产方式的考察,论证了科学的三个维度:即反黑格尔辩证法的科学概念,关于科学本质的社会本体论,以及关于科学存在的知识社会学。     

城市留守主妇的法社会学研究

对城市留守主妇这一非主流群体,社会多为漠视。她们生存于城市各个阶层,文化相对较高,精神隐避性较强,比较在意社会评价,人际关系宽泛,留守原因多样,问题横跨公私权利。于私,私事自治;于公,涉及家庭稳定、性社会和谐等问题。其特点:家境较殷实;受教育较高;防负扩散能力强;中青年居多;精神空虚,消遣方式异样;效仿与攀比率高,部分留守主妇华裔化。针对这一群体的法社会学思考是:政府干预,政府是社会秩序的值勤人,是社会机制"拾遗补缺"者;政府应为夫妻创造聚多疏少的条件,减少团聚的社会成本,完善探亲制。社区切实履行义务,加大对城市留守主妇工作的重视。"分居饥饿综合症"是城市留守主妇的社会病态,影响社会的稳定和发展。     

Organic Public Sociology in the Pragmatist Perspective: A Multifaceted Approach

This article argues that American pragmatism provides a model for organic public sociology, defined by Michael Burawoy as the sociologist's direct involvement with a group in a collaborative effort to bring about change, which permits and encourages a combined professional research and activist project. I use my project involving medical licensing and disciplinary boards to illustrate how those projects can be successfully combined. I served as a public member, conducted research, and was an advocate for change.     

Armor for Ethnographers

As its public readership has vastly increased, ethnography has entered a new world of social interaction, at once rewarding and dangerous. Among social researchers, ethnographic fieldworkers are unusually exposed to pressures to both make and break promises of confidentiality to subjects because they work to expose subjects to readers in a relatively transparent way. By showing individuals in their individuality, ethnographers draw the attention of nonacademic readers, which can be motivating but also terrifying because sources might be questioned and subjects sought out in ways the ethnographer may not be able to control. Tracking the schizophrenia that now threatens to pervade ethnographic work, I describe overlooked risks that all practitioners face and point to an as‐yet unexplored collective strategy for resisting pressures to breach promises of confidentiality. I then switch from a collective to an individual focus and review ethnography as a multiphased research act, suggesting ways to minimize personal and ethical risks at each stage.     

On gambling research,social science and the consequences of commercial gambling

Social, political, economic, geographic and cultural processes related to the significant growth of the gambling industries have, in recent years, been the subject of a growing body of research. This body of research has highlighted relationships between social class and gambling expenditure, as well as the design, marketing and location of gambling products and businesses. It has also demonstrated the regressive nature of much gambling revenue, illuminating the influence that large gambling businesses have had on government policy and on researchers, including research priorities, agendas and outcomes. Recently, critics have contended that although such scholarship has produced important insights about the operations and effects of gambling businesses, it is ideologically motivated and lacks scientific rigour. This response explains some basic theoretical and disciplinary concepts that such critique misunderstands, and argues for the value of social, political, economic, geographic and cultural perspectives to the broader, interdisciplinary field of gambling research.     

Ethnicity,inequality, and perceived electoral fairness

Establishing electoral legitimacy across the population is vital for democratic stability, yet in contrast to other measures of political support, perceived electoral fairness has received scant scholarly attention. Moreover, while research into other measures of political support has shown that they differ by both ethnicity and socio-economic status, no study examines both at once, potentially overlooking important interrelationships between the two variables. This paper combines data from the Ethnic Power Relations project and the World Value Survey to examine respondents’ perceptions of electoral fairness according to their ethnic group’s access to power, their individual socio-economic status, and the intersection of these two. It finds that one’s ethnic group’s political status does affect perceived fairness, but that the effect interacts strongly with one’s socio-economic status. Poorer members of non-represented ethnic groups have significantly lower perceptions of fairness, while richer members’ perceptions do not differ from those of represented groups. The results suggest a levelling effect of socio-economic status on ethnic inequalities.     

Critical appraisal of jointness concepts in Bayesian model averaging: evidence from life sciences,sociology, and other scientific fields

Jointness is a Bayesian approach to capturing dependence among regressors in multivariate data. It addresses the general issue of whether explanatory factors for a given empirical phenomenon are complements or substitutes. I ask a number of questions about existing jointness concepts: Are the patterns revealed stable across datasets? Are results robust to prior choice and do data characteristics affect results? And importantly: What do the answers imply from a practical vista? The present study takes an applied, interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, validating jointness concepts on datasets across scientific fields with focus on life sciences (Parkinson's disease) and sociology. Simulations complement the study of real-world data. My findings suggest that results depend on which jointness concept is used: Some concepts deliver jointness patterns remarkably uniform across datasets, while all concepts are fairly robust to the choice of prior structure. This can be interpreted as critique of jointness from a practical perspective, given that the patterns revealed are at times very different and no concept emerges as overall advantageous. The composite indicators approach to combining information across jointness concepts is also explored, suggesting an avenue to facilitate the application of the concepts in future research.     

世代分析:青年社会学的重要研究视角

世代分析是基于世代理论的一种研究视角，同时也具有研究方法的作用。世代理论是当代一个重要的学术领域，可以为探究人类世代的具体成因、演进规律以及代际关系性质、代际互动模式尤其是不同世代在社会变迁中的作用等问题提供观察角度和分析工具;在其中，青年世代的角色和地位一直受到特别的关注。作为青年社会学理论体系的一个组成部分，世代理论既从具体层面回答了青年世代与成年世代的关系性质、互动模式及其替代规律的问题，又从更深层面回答了青年与社会的关系问题，因此，在一定意义上，世代理论及其分析视角最能够体现青年社会学的学科特色及其蕴含的社会功能。