1,720,985 research outputs found
Choices, Boundaries, and Ideological Divides: A Study of Sex Work in Malta
Get PDFIn this thesis, I examine how sex workers and non-sex-working stakeholders in Malta interpret and navigate decision-making in the context of sex work. Positioned within wider debates about agency, victimhood, and the legal and moral dimensions of sex work, I ask how decisions to engage in sex work are experienced or framed through shifting configurations of agency, constraint, and coercion, shaped by intersecting structural, social, and personal conditions. I explore how these framings inform contested understandings of sex workers’ agency, vulnerability, and place within public and policy discourse.
Malta provides a setting where global debates about sex work unfold within a distinctive legal, cultural, and socio-political environment. Drawing on interviews with 17 sex workers and 35 other professional stakeholders, I identify patterns in how sex work is problematised, justified, or normalised. Stakeholders engaged with narratives of trauma, substance use, and third-party involvement in varied and sometimes conflicting ways, often framing sex workers as coerced or exploited – narratives that implicitly underpin criminalising approaches – depending on ideological commitments and perceived roles vis-à-vis sex workers. Sex workers, in turn, described navigating financial precarity, stigma, and legal ambiguity while attempting to maintain control over their work and relationships within structurally constrained environments. I draw on the concept of ‘satisficing’ to interpret how decisions are made when choices are limited, information incomplete, and outcomes uncertain – characteristic of human behaviour generally rather than unique to sex work.
This framework challenges binary framings of full agency versus coercion and questions the assumption that sex workers’ decisions must align with idealised rational models to be viewed as legitimate. Instead, it foregrounds how constrained and often mundane forms of decision-making shape both experience and perception, supporting policy approaches that move beyond punitive framings and are pragmatic, evidence-informed, and responsive to the realities of lived experience
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Offender and Victim Networks in Human Trafficking /
No full textMillions of pounds are spent every year trying to tackle human trafficking, modern slavery and child sexual exploitation. These are apparently threats perpetrated by 'criminal masterminds', spreading at a dizzying rate and approaching epidemic proportions - or so the story goes. Amid all the bold rhetoric and sweeping claims, there is very little robust research to help understand these problems and inform evidence-based policy and practice. In this book, readers are invited to delve inside the murky world of human trafficking. It focuses on the internal (domestic) trafficking of children for sexual exploitation. It is based on far-reaching analysis of six of the earliest and largest such investigations in the United Kingdom (UK), including the infamous Derby and Rochdale cases that sparked nationwide concerns about 'street grooming' and 'Asian sex gangs'. Innovative methods, analytical rigour and truly extraordinary data underpin the research: a nuanced and sometimes unsettling exploration of the offender and victim networks, their characteristics, structure, activity and dynamics and the problems they pose for investigation and prosecution. The results paint a picture of a sprawling and dynamic system of grooming and abuse that is deeply embedded in complex webs of social relations and interactions. This book challenges accepted wisdom, debunks myths and introduces new and fundamentally different ways of thinking about trafficking and its prevention. An accessible and compelling read, this book is for academics, policymakers, practitioners and others interested in serious and organised crime
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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