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Quality of life and children’s well-being: a review of four international research-studies
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Qualità della vita e well being infantile in quattro ricerche internazionali
No full textThe proposal of this contribution is a critical reading of some recent research studies concerning the measurement of children’s well-being in different local contexts. These studies belongb to the Childhood Sociology, characterised by a long interdisciplinary tradition. In this perspective the concept of well-being refers to the material and non-material (subjectively defined) conditions of children’s lives.The present paper describes some international research studies: three European and one American, comparing them on the basis of type of selected indicators, data sources and policy recommendations. These analyses are the outcome of an increasing attention on childhood, in terms not only of its protection, but of active promotion and acknowledgment of the rights of children.A first finding of my comparison is that there isn’t a shared concept, even at national level, of children’s quality of life, either inside the scientific community, or at institutional level. A decisive role in shaping the discourse on life quality is played by three factors differently affecting the choice of indicators and data sources: the age of children (every age is marked by different degrees of autonomy and social competence), the household models in which children live and finally the welfare systems and educational institutions.A second finding concerns the presence of two ways of representing and measuring the concept of children’s well-being. The Anglo-Saxon model focus on the dimensions of control and protection of children’s lives; the European model is based on promotion of participation and on support of the relationships among children and responsible adults.A third finding concerns the exclusive use of objective indicators, strongly limiting a complete understanding of the object; no research study has addressed the subjective aspect of children’s well-being by providing for interviews with the children themselves
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
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