Using Motion Detection to Measure Social Polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Bryce J. Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
Motion Detection ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Image Data ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Party Voting ◽  
The Many

Abstract Although previous scholars have used image data to answer important political science questions, less attention has been paid to video-based measures. In this study, I use motion detection to understand the extent to which members of Congress (MCs) literally cross the aisle, but motion detection can be used to study a wide range of political phenomena, like protests, political speeches, campaign events, or oral arguments. I find not only are Democrats and Republicans less willing to literally cross the aisle, but this behavior is also predictive of future party voting, even when previous party voting is included as a control. However, this is one of the many ways motion detection can be used by social scientists. In this way, the present study is not the end, but the beginning of an important new line of research in which video data is more actively used in social science research.

scholarly journals Promise Into Practice: Application of Computer Vision in Empirical Research on Social Distancing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wim Bernasco ◽  
Eveline Hoeben ◽  
Dennis Koelma ◽  
Lasse Suonperä Liebst ◽  
Josephine Thomas ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Computer Vision ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Automated Coding

Social scientists increasingly use video data, but large-scale analysis of its content is often constrained by scarce manual coding resources. Upscaling may be possible with the application of automated coding procedures, which are being developed in the field of computer vision. Here, we introduce computer vision to social scientists, review the state-of-the-art in relevant subfields, and provide a working example of how computer vision can be applied in empirical sociological work. Our application involves defining a ground truth by human coders, developing an algorithm for automated coding, testing the performance of the algorithm against the ground truth, and run the algorithm on a large-scale dataset of CCTV images. The working example concerns monitoring social distancing behavior in public space over more than a year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we discuss prospects for the use of computer vision in empirical social science research and address technical and ethical limitations.

Second Annual Conference of the “ASEAN Muslim Social Scientists’ Forum”

1988 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-306
Author(s):  
Hussain Mutalib
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Asian Region ◽  
Select Group ◽  
Islamic Resurgence ◽  
Closed Door

The Muslim Social Science Scholars’ Forum of ASEAN (Associationof Southeast Asian Nations) held its Second Meeting in Bangkok, Thailandfrom Mubrram 20-23, 1409lSeptember 1-4, 1988, under the auspices of theFoundation for Democracy and Development Studies. The theme for themeeting was “Muslim Scholars and Social Science Research,” aimed atdocumenting, discussing and analyzing the types of scholarship or researchthat have been done about Muslims in the Southeast Asian region, particularlywithin the ASEAN countries.A select group of Muslim social science scholars (together with someMuslim politicians) from the countries within ASEAN, except Brunei, wereinvited to the “Forum.” They included: Drs. Dawan Raharjo and NurcholisMajid, and Professor Moeslim (Indonesia), Drs. Surin Pitsuwan, SeneeMadmarn and Chaiwat (Thailand), Drs. Yusof Talib and Hussain Mutalib(Singapore), Professors Taib Osman and Wan Hashim and Umar Farouq(Malaysia), and Drs. Carmen Abubakar, Madale and Mastura (Philippines).All participants were either presenters of papers or discussants.Throughout the four-day deliberations, participants discussed the typesof studies and research that have been the focus of scholars studying Muslimcommunities in the ASEAN region. Some titles of papers included: “MuslimStudies in the Phillipines;” “Social Science Research in Thailand;” and “SocialScience Research in Malaysia: the Case of Islamic Resurgence.”Given the “closed-door” ‘nature of the meeting (participation was byinvitation only), there was adequate time for a more intensive, frank andthorough discussions of the papers. Problems and issues were aired and posed,and alternative options offered by participants. For every paper, there wasa discussant; hence, the issues that came out of the papers managed to beseen, discussed and appreciated from a more complete and balancedperspective.By and large, the Bangkok meeting was a successful one. Theapproximately twenty participants were generally pleased with the high qualityof papers presented and the sense of brotherhood that prevailed. The warmhospitality of the hosts from Thailand was also appreciated ...

ESRC Review

2020 ◽  
pp. 657-698
Author(s):  
Simeon J. Yates ◽  
Jordana Blejmar
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Levels Of Automation ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Technological World ◽  
Ways Of Being

Two workshops were part of the final steps in the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) commissioned Ways of Being in a Digital Age project that is the basis for this Handbook. The ESRC project team coordinated one with the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (ESRC-DSTL) Workshop, “The automation of future roles”; and one with the US National Science Foundation (ESRC-NSF) Workshop, “Changing work, changing lives in the new technological world.” Both workshops sought to explore the key future social science research questions arising for ever greater levels of automation, use of artificial intelligence, and the augmentation of human activity. Participants represented a wide range of disciplinary, professional, government, and nonprofit expertise. This chapter summarizes the separate and then integrated results. First, it summarizes the central social and economic context, the method and project context, and some basic definitional issues. It then identifies 11 priority areas needing further research work that emerged from the intense interactions, discussions, debates, clustering analyses, and integration activities during and after the two workshops. Throughout, it summarizes how subcategories of issues within each cluster relate to central issues (e.g., from users to global to methods) and levels of impacts (from wider social to community and organizational to individual experiences and understandings). Subsections briefly describe each of these 11 areas and their cross-cutting issues and levels. Finally, it provides a detailed Appendix of all the areas, subareas, and their specific questions.

scholarly journals Has the Credibility of the Social Sciences Been Credibly Destroyed? Reanalyzing the “Many Analysts, One Data Set” Project

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110244
Author(s):  
Katrin Auspurg ◽  
Josef Brüderl
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of

In 2018, Silberzahn, Uhlmann, Nosek, and colleagues published an article in which 29 teams analyzed the same research question with the same data: Are soccer referees more likely to give red cards to players with dark skin tone than light skin tone? The results obtained by the teams differed extensively. Many concluded from this widely noted exercise that the social sciences are not rigorous enough to provide definitive answers. In this article, we investigate why results diverged so much. We argue that the main reason was an unclear research question: Teams differed in their interpretation of the research question and therefore used diverse research designs and model specifications. We show by reanalyzing the data that with a clear research question, a precise definition of the parameter of interest, and theory-guided causal reasoning, results vary only within a narrow range. The broad conclusion of our reanalysis is that social science research needs to be more precise in its “estimands” to become credible.

Politics and Research: Epistemological Moments

1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (01) ◽  
pp. 149-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adelaide H. Villmoare
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

In reading the essays by David M. Trubek and John Esser and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I thought about what I call epistemological moments that have provided contexts within which to understand the relationship between social science research and politics. I will sketch four moments and suggest that I find one of them more compelling than the others because it speaks particularly to social scientists with critical, democratic ambitions and to Trubek and Esser's concerns about politics and the intellectual vitality of the law and society movement.

scholarly journals The Inference Engine: A Grand Challenge to Address the Context Sensitivity Problem in Social Science Research

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel L. Goroff ◽  
Neil Anthony Lewis ◽  
Anne M. Scheel ◽  
Laura Danielle Scherer ◽  
Joshua A Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Inference Engine ◽  
Context Sensitivity ◽  
Grand Challenge ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The People ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Sensitivity Problem

Social science has a ‘context sensitivity’ problem: the people that we study, and the situations they engage in, are so complex and variable that predicting how they will think, feel, and behave in a given situation is very challenging. Even when we are able to make such predictions, it is often unclear how accurate they will be if some feature of the studied subjects and/or situation changes. This limits the utility of our research for application and policy, as the ‘contextual factors’ that might change our conclusions are often unknown. It is time to address this context sensitivity problem in social science research. While do not yet know how to solve it, we believe social scientists can make great progress by working together to build an inference engine.

Legacies of the 1960s: The American “Rights Revolution” in an Era of Divided Governance

1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Davis Graham
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Science Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Temporal Perspective ◽  
The 1960S

Scholarship on the political development of the United States since the 1960s is dominated, not surprisingly, by social scientists. Such recent events fall within the penumbra of “contemporary history,” the standard research domain of social scientists but treacherous terrain for historians. Social scientists studying American government and society generally enjoy prompt access to evidence of the policy-making process–documents from the elected and judicial branches of government, interviews with policy elites, voting returns, survey research. Historians of the recent past, on the other hand, generally lack two crucial ingredients–temporal perspective and archival evidence–that distinguish historical analysis from social science research. For these reasons, social scientists (and journalists) customarily define the initial terms of policy debate and shape the conventional wisdom. Historians weigh in later, when memories fade, archives open, and the clock adds a relentless and inherently revisionist accumulation of hindsight.

Social Science in the Courtroom

2021 ◽  
pp. 240-243
Author(s):  
Michael J. Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
White Children ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Many

Chapter 18 describes social science research of the 1940s and 1950s that showed how segregation harmed both minority and majority populations and thereby played a role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Between 1896, when the Supreme Court endorsed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson to 1954, when the Supreme Court rejected segregation, social science had built a consensus about the many harms and costs that racial segregation imposed on Black and on White children. Like school desegregation, marriage equality’s victories in the courts were built on a social science consensus, specifically the social science consensus that children raised by same-sex couples have good outcomes.

scholarly journals Institutional Review Board and International Field Research in Conflict Zones

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (04) ◽  
pp. 840-844 ◽  
Author(s):  
Srobana Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Human Subjects ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Institutional Review Board ◽  
Biomedical Sciences ◽  
Conflict Zones ◽  
Institutional Review ◽  
The Many

ABSTRACTResearch on political conflict can benefit immensely from fieldwork. However, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process is elaborate and daunting that discourages rather than encourages this type of research. Existing policies often are insensitive to the many uncertainties related to field research abroad, especially in conflict zones. Three reasons for this are identified in this article. First, the federal regulations to protect human subjects of social science research are most suitable for biomedical sciences. Second, there is huge gap between “procedural ethics” and “ethics in practice.” Third, there is a lack of communication or dialogue between researchers and IRBs. After discussing these reasons, I offer the following suggestions: bridging the gap between the researcher and the IRB; reducing delays in the IRB approval and revision process; encouraging collaboration and dialogue among researchers; and advocating a proactive stance by academic associations.

scholarly journals Mapping Progress : Human Rights and International Students in Australia

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Andrew Jakubowicz ◽  
Devaki Monani
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Students ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
International Student ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Wide Range

The rapid growth in international student numbers in Australia in the first decade of the  2000s was accompanied by a series of public crises. The most important of these was the outbreak in Melbourne Victoria and elsewhere of physical attacks on the students. Investigations at the time also pointed to cases of gross exploitation, an array of threats that severely compromised their human rights. This paper reviews and pursues the outcomes of a report prepared by the authors in 2010 for Universities Australia and the Human Rights Commission. The report reviewed social science research and proposed a series of priorities for human rights interventions that were part of the Human Rights Commission’s considerations.  New activity, following the innovation of having international students specifically considered by the Human Rights Commission, points to initiatives that have not fully addressed the wide range of questions at state.

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