1,720,979 research outputs found
The teaching and learning of social research methods online
Full text linkSocial research methods (SRM) enable social scientists to undertake research. These methods, along with research design, include quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods, research ethics and data interpretation. In the UK, advanced SRM training is funded primarily through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), with the aims of building research capacity and facilitating methodological innovation. The teaching and learning of SRM is therefore of strategic importance, yet it has often been overlooked. This research, funded by the ESRC, formed part of a wider pedagogy of methodological learning project which aimed to address this gap by better understanding the pedagogical demands of teaching SRM, and how those with more advanced methodological knowhow communicate their knowledge in ways that allow others to understand and make use of it. This study was concerned with these questions in the online context, and additionally sought to understand the roles played by digital technologies. There is limited literature in relation to these questions, particularly in the UK context.This research focused on two UK case studies of online SRM courses: an entirely online, asynchronous quantitative methods short course run by a private company; and a university master’s level introductory SRM course, offered as a hybrid (place-based and online) or as online-only. Case study findings were generated from an analysis of course documents and forum posts, observations, semi-structured interviews and conversations with teachers, learners, and other stakeholders. Interviews included document-stimulated reflection. In addition, seven online SRM teachers, who taught a range of methods in different formats were interviewed. Fieldwork took place prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (2017 -2019) when the teaching of SRM online was less common. The research drew on the concepts of Pedagogic Content Knowledge (PCK) and Pedagogical Technological Content Knowledge (TPCK), and the conceptual-empirical typology of social science research methods pedagogy (the typology).Building on what is already known about the challenges of teaching and learning SRM, the online dimension brings additional challenges, particularly when teacher and students are temporally and physically separated. This influences the ways in which teachers plan and teach SRM online. Planning becomes the focus of teacher activity, often becoming a group activity involving online education support staff in which pedagogic decision-making may be distributed. This runs counter to the TPCK framework and the typology. SRM online pedagogy can be characterised as the combination of teachers’ knowledge of the subject, the technological support available to teachers, and online support staff’s knowledge of the technologies and how these can support teachers’ SRM pedagogy. The concept of PCK is helpful in understanding how teachers respond to the challenges of teaching SRM online, with teachers (starting to) transform their pedagogy: how they plan to teach; the content they will teach; how they teach in-situ; and the activities they get students to do. Change involves teachers letting go of the ways they taught (and were taught) in place-based classrooms and embracing the online space and being supported in learning through experience. The digital technologies of the online teaching environment can support SRM teachers’ pedagogic goals by: distributing content; connecting students with each other, the teacher and content; providing students with a sandpit practice environment and collaboration opportunities; and providing a means by which teachers can provide students with immediate feedback on their learning.Online SRM teaching presents opportunities for teaching innovation and the further development of an SRM pedagogic culture. However, to realise these opportunities will require investment by teachers in reflecting on and evaluation of their online teaching experiences, and by institutions in digital learning support staff, and a pushing back against the deficit narrative that casts online SRM teaching as of secondary value to place-based teaching. Further research is needed to provide a wider range of exemplars, to explore in more detail the planning of online SRM courses, and to understand how teachers and learners make use of the functionality and affordances of digital technologies in support of their teaching and learning
How Mobile Device Screen Size Affects Data Collected in Web Surveys
No full textMore and more respondents answer web surveys using mobile devices. Different authors argue that the smaller screen size (particularly for smartphones) could lead to lower data quality. However, only a few studies have taken into consideration the screen size as a factor that can affect data quality. In this frame, this chapter aims at evaluating the effect of screen size for mobile respondents on four indicators: completion times, rate of failures in answering an Instructional Manipulation Check (IMC), answer consistency across waves, and survey experience. We use data from a cross-over experiment implemented in 2015 by means of a two-wave web survey that involved panelists of the Netquest online access panel in Spain. In each wave, respondents were randomly assigned to one survey condition: participation through PCs; participation through smartphones with a mobile-optimized version of the questionnaire; or participation through smartphones with a non-optimized version of the questionnaire. In this chapter, we use a subset of the entire dataset, since our interest is exclusively respondents who participated using smartphones. Overall, our findings suggest that screen size affects completion times, mostly if devices have very small screens. However, optimization of the questionnaire helps in reducing this effect. Moreover, screen size does not significantly affect failure in answering an IMC, whereas optimization of the questionnaire plays a key role in these terms. In addition, the level of answer consistency observed between the two waves is not affected by screen size, nor by changes in size across waves, nor by questionnaire optimization. However, both screen size and optimization affect the survey experience
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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