scholarly journals The visual vernacular: embracing photographs in research

Author(s):  
Jennifer Cleland ◽  
Anna MacLeod

AbstractThe increasing use of digital images for communication and interaction in everyday life can give a new lease of life to photographs in research. In contexts where smartphones are ubiquitous and many people are “digital natives”, asking participants to share and engage with photographs aligns with their everyday activities and norms more than textual or analogue approaches to data collection. Thus, it is time to consider fully the opportunities afforded by digital images and photographs for research purposes. This paper joins a long-standing conversation in the social science literature to move beyond the “linguistic imperialism” of text and embrace visual methodologies. Our aim is to explain the photograph as qualitative data and introduce different ways of using still images/photographs for qualitative research purposes in health professions education (HPE) research: photo-documentation, photo-elicitation and photovoice, as well as use of existing images. We discuss the strengths of photographs in research, particularly in participatory research inquiry. We consider ethical and philosophical challenges associated with photography research, specifically issues of power, informed consent, confidentiality, dignity, ambiguity and censorship. We outline approaches to analysing photographs. We propose some applications and opportunities for photographs in HPE, before concluding that using photographs opens up new vistas of research possibilities.

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 410-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yêên Lêê Espiritu

This review of the field of Vietnamese refugee studies in the United States first assesses the social science literature that dominated Vietnamese studies during the 1970s and 1980s, showing how this scholarship produces Vietnamese Americans as the desperate-turned-successful. Then it reviews the current range of Vietnamese American scholarship, foregrounding the promising studies that situate the diversity and vibrancy of Vietnamese lives within a critical global context. The paper concludes by suggesting that we imbue the term "refugee" with social and political critiques that call into question the relationship between war, race, and violence, then and now.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Dalsgaard

This article refers to carbon valuation as the practice of ascribing value to, and assessing the value of, actions and objects in terms of carbon emissions. Due to the pervasiveness of carbon emissions in the actions and objects of everyday lives of human beings, the making of carbon offsets and credits offers almost unlimited repertoires of alternatives to be included in contemporary carbon valuation schemes. Consequently, the article unpacks how discussions of carbon valuation are interpreted through different registers of alternatives - as the commensuration and substitution of variants on the one hand, and the confrontational comparison of radical difference on the other. Through the reading of a wide selection of the social science literature on carbon markets and trading, the article argues that the value of carbon emissions itself depends on the construction of alternative, hypothetical scenarios, and that emissions have become both a moral and a virtual measure pitting diverse forms of actualised actions or objects against each other or against corresponding nonactions and non-objects as alternatives.


Author(s):  
George W. Breslauer

Strategies of modernization are legion within the social science literature. Stalin’s Revolution from Above—but not the Great Terror—is set within this literature as a revolutionary, as opposed to a reformist, strategy. Features of the revolutionary strategy may have been considered necessary to urgently create the capacity to defend the country in a hostile world. But the extent of revolutionary violence against the peasantry cannot be justified in those terms.


2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsey Joseph ◽  
Kate Emmett ◽  
Joha Louw-Potgieter

Orientation: Pay-for-performance (PFP) systems emerged during the 1980s as performance improvement tools. However, research findings have shown contradictory evidence as to whether these systems motivate employees to improve their performance. Research purpose: The main aim of this evaluation was to assess whether a PFP system, which a South African university introduced for administrative employees, improved their performance. A secondary aim was to examine whether the university implemented the system as it intended to.Motivation for the evaluation: The motivation for this evaluation was to add to the social science literature on the effectiveness of PFP systems. There are many contradictions in the literature and further exploration of whether these systems deliver their intended outcomes seemed overdue.Research design, approach and method: The evaluators used a descriptive design. They administered a customised questionnaire, to which 391 university staff members responded. Of these, 129 were line managers and 262 were administrative staff.Main findings: The administrative staff, whose working lives the PFP system affected, thought that it did not improve their performance. Both line managers and administrative staff indicated that the pay aspect of the system did not differentiate between poor and excellent performance.Practical/managerial implications: The evaluators made practical recommendations for improving the implementation of the system.Contribution/value-add: This evaluation contributed to the social science literature on the effectiveness of PFP systems by showing that poor implementation rather than poor design often lies at the root of a system that does not deliver its intended outcomes.


Daedalus ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 143 (3) ◽  
pp. 140-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan S. Silbey

In American public imagination, courts are powerful but also impotent. They are guardians of citizens' rights but also agents of corporate wealth; simultaneously the least dangerous branch and the ultimate arbiters of fairness and justice. After recounting the social science literature on the mixed reception of courts in American public culture, this essay explains how the contradictory embrace of courts and law by Americans is not a weakness or flaw, nor a mark of confusion or naïveté. Rather, Americans' paradoxical interpretations of courts and judges sustain rather than undermine our legal institutions. These opposing accounts are a source of institutional durability and power because they combine the historical and widespread aspirations for the rule of law with a pragmatic recognition of the limits of institutional practice; these sundry accounts balance an appreciation for the discipline of legal reasoning with desires for responsive, humane judgment.


1962 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Stuckert ◽  
Irwin D. Rinder

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen E. Hanson

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR naturally provokes us to reflect on the course of Eurasian and world history in the post-communist era. Upon closer examination, however, it is not clear what significance the precise time span of two and a half decades has for the scientific study of political and institutional change. A review of the social science literature indicates that we are very far from having any consensual understanding of how long processes of regime evolution typically take—and thus, how to establish the relevant time span for judging the scientific accuracy of initial predictions about the outcomes of post-communist “transitions.” I argue that the first step in assessing the lessons of post-Soviet political change to date, from a social-scientific point of view, lies in defining the term “regime” more precisely, so that scholars can at least agree when one regime has ended and another begun. In this respect, Weberian sociological theory provides useful conceptual materials for a more general theory of “regime evolution” within which the empirical results of the first twenty-five years of post-Soviet change can be situated.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. p39
Author(s):  
Leehu Zysberg

In the popular media and from time to time in the social science literature, voices are heard describing a process of social disintegration and the deterioration of common values in western societies. What may account for this fragmentation? This article uses the theoretical framework of the prisoner’s dilemma to conceptualize the phenomenon, analyze its causes and processes, and to try and outline directions for dealing with it, using processes and data regarding the Israeli society in recent years.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Hoogeveen ◽  
Alexandra Sarafoglou ◽  
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

Large-scale collaborative projects recently demonstrated that several key findings from the social-science literature could not be replicated successfully. Here we assess the extent to which a finding’s replication success relates to its intuitive plausibility. Each of 27 high-profile social science findings was evaluated by 233 people without a PhD in psychology. Results showed that these laypeople predicted replication success with above-chance accuracy (i.e., 59%). In addition, when participants were informed about the strength of evidence from the original studies, this boosted their prediction performance to 67%. We discuss the prediction patterns and apply signal detection theory to disentangle detection ability from response bias. Our study suggests that laypeople’s predictions contain useful information for assessing the probability that a given finding will replicate successfully.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document