Concept Construction

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
Louis Bélanger Pierre-Marc Daigneault
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Way

This chapter highlights concept construction. All social sciences research projects, be they qualitative or quantitative, are dependent on concepts. The chapter first explains what concepts are and why social scientists should be self-conscious in the way they use them. It then describes the methodology of concept construction and presents three different ways to structure a concept. Finally, the chapter provides criteria to evaluate the quality of the concepts we have built ourselves or borrowed from others. Concept construction involves two basic operations beyond choosing a term to designate the concept: identifying the fundamental characteristics of the phenomenon of interest, and logically connecting these characteristics.

scholarly journals EDITORIAL

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Sayyid M. Syeed
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Islamic Studies

With this fourth issue of 1993, we have completed ten years of publishingthe American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (MISS). Westarted our journey in 1984 with two issues published during the yearunder the title of American Journal of Islamic Studies. The next year itwas transformed into the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences(AJISS). The first decade has been quite a pioneering experience, and bynow we have been able to identify a growing pool of thinkers, writers,and social scientists who are participating in our endeavor to promote ascholarly forum on Islam.In this issue, Rosalind W. Gwynne's paper is part of a continuing discussionon sunnah. She demonstrates that, in Islamic texts, sunnah doesnot refer only to the Sunnah of the Prophet, of the local community, orof the Companions and the early community; it can refer to the "SunnatAll&" (the practice of God). She reviews the occurrence of the wordsunnah in the Qur'an and, by analyzing some tafair and early documents,shows that it also refers to the universal and unchanghg rules thatAllah has established and set into motion. She quotes Wensinck's Concordanceof Hadith, in which sunnah has been used in the context of"Sunnat Alliih alongside with "Sunnat a1 Nabi" and sunnah in othersenses. Social scientists must concentrate on the "Sunnat AllW in orderto understand the universal laws of Allah that govern social phenomena.Louay Safi provides a methodological approach that recognizes revelationas a primary source of knowledge and seeks to use both text andaction analysis techniques as necessary theory-building tools. He arguesthat scientific activity presupposes metaphysical knowledge and that, furthermore,it is even impossible without transcendental ptesuppositions. Healso contends that revelation's truth is rooted in empirical reality and thatthe quality of evidence supporting revealed truth is of no less caliber thanthat justifying empirical truth.Ebtihaj Al-A'ali presented her paper on "Assumptions Concerning theSocial Sciences: A Comparative Perspective" at a recent Toronto, Canada,confemce dealing with cross-cultural knowledge. She summarizes briefly ...

A Study of Catholicism: An Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar

Horizons ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-113
Author(s):  
James L. Heft
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTThis essay describes an intensive eight-month long interdisciplinary faculty seminar which brought together faculty from the social sciences and humanities to explore, with different methodologies, the nature and traditions of Catholicism. It describes the way in which the seminar was organized, the participants selected, the syllabus chosen and how the discussion unfolded. It concludes with an evaluation by the author of what was learned, and then provides a brief description of the research projects undertaken by the seminar participants.

scholarly journals Anthropocene in Friction. Dis-Encounters Between Geology and History

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-168
Author(s):  
German Alfonso Palacio Castañeda ◽  
Alberto Vargas ◽  
Elizabeth Hennessy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
Natural Scientists ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
The Way

This article brings attention to the need to introduce social sciences to the Global Environmental Change conversation in order to discuss the notion of the “Anthropocene” postulated by prominent natural scientists (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002). The focus of analysis concentrates on and the way the local and the global are put into friction (Tsing 2005). If natural scientists have achieved to show the dangers Earth currently confronts, what is not yet clear is if they understand how human societies, the main driver of this geological era, work. They tend to consider humans as a specie, so they make a reductionist idea of humans as a compact unity, taking away our knowledge that teaches that they are “social” (Moore 2015). This article starts with a discussion about the apparent common understanding on the “global,” by natural and social sciences. This article poses important challenges to social scientists, is critical toward the Anthropocene concept, and aspires to suggest critical thinking contributions on the global and its friction with the local. This article illustrates how, through the idea of the Anthropocene, Geology meets History in ways that are not easy to accept for social scientists because, they are right when they argue that the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene cannot be reduced to a “specie” because he/she is a socio-ecological entity.

Expert Testimony in the Social Sciences: A Historical Overview of Contemporary Issues

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Lawrence Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Expert Testimony ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

In this brief reconsideration of the roles experts may play in legal proceedings - and concentrating on the role of social scientists in particular - it may, therefore, be useful to revisit some very familiar issues and to address some seemingly peripheral matters that are nevertheless quite central to the way we think about the involvement of experts in legal cases. For purposes of introducing some of these issues it may be helpful to focus on three interrelated concerns: the ascertaining of expert qualifications, the role of evidentiary procedure, and the extra-judicial use of social information.

The quest for soul-touching research in the social sciences and humanities

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quan-Hoang Vuong
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Interesting Part ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Statement ◽  
The Way

This short personal statement represents a kind of memory aid regarding the way forward for me to pursue what I call “soul-touching research projects.” With this statement, I also aim to help my research team understand an interesting part of research life.

J. S. Mill's Political Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 47 (182) ◽  
pp. 334-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hollis
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Strong Version ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

That freedom involves a power (or right) to choose is a natural idea. But it requires a model of man which English philosophers have usually rejected. It requires an agent equipped with a will, who is faced with genuine alternatives and is, in some sense, autonomous. So it is rejected both by those, like Hobbes, who hold a strong version of determinism and by those, like Hume, who deny the existence of an autonomous self. The will, says Hobbes, is simply ‘the last appetite in deliberating’. A mind, says Hume, is ‘nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations’. The way is then apparently open for a denial that men ever act freely at all and so for a thoroughly deterministic basis for the social sciences. But this is not the usual conclusion. Hobbes and Hume both agree that there is no conflict between freedom and determinism, once ‘freeedom’ is properly understood. A man is free when he can get what he wants. As Hobbes puts it, ‘liberty is the absence of all impediments to action which are not contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent’. In other words freedom does not involve choice but consists instead in the power to satisfy desire.

The ‘internationalization’ of social sciences as an ‘obstacle’ to understanding the ongoing Arab revolts†

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques E. Kabbanji
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Global South ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Western Hegemony ◽  
The Way

This paper addresses two main topics. First, the ways in and extent to which scholars from, or originated from, the ‘Global South’ have avoided succumbing to the appeal of dominant ‘Western’ perspectives when practising their vocation as social scientists. Second, the price paid for lack of appropriate knowledge when social scientists adopt dominant paradigms in studying ‘undisciplined’ societies, i.e. the ones that do not ‘correspond’ to dominant ideal types. Approaches based on the Weberian paradigm will be specifically considered in this regard. Jacques Kabbanji concedes that there has indeed been a shift from the colonial era, which produced the Orientalism that Edward Said and others so effectively exposed as subjective and instrumental to Western hegemony. Yet, he argues, in the post-colonial era the way in which many Arab scholars have responded to the Orientalist critique, together with other critiques of mainstream social science by scholars from the Global South, has ended up endorsing a newly hegemonic social science that actually reinvents ‘Arab exceptionalism’. This poses a problem for would-be analysts of the Arab revolts that began in 2010.

Strategic threats to energy security as risks of quality of people's life

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 730-744
Author(s):  
V.I. Loktionov
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Energy Security ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Analysis And Synthesis ◽  
General Scientific ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Economic Well Being ◽  
The Way

Subject. The article reviews the way strategic threats to energy security influence the quality of people's life. Objectives. The study unfolds the theory of analyzing strategic threats to energy security by covering the matter of quality of people's life. Methods. To analyze the way strategic threats to energy security spread across cross-sectoral commodity and production chains and influences quality of people's living, I applied the factor analysis and general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis. Results. I suggest interpreting strategic threats to energy security as risks of people's quality of life due to a reduction in the volume of energy supply. I identified mechanisms reflecting how the fuel and energy complex and its development influence the quality of people's life. The article sets out the method to assess such quality-of-life risks arising from strategic threats to energy security. Conclusions and Relevance. In the current geopolitical situation, strategic threats to energy security cause long-standing adverse consequences for the quality of people's life. If strategic threats to energy security are further construed as risk of quality of people's life, this will facilitate the preparation and performance of a more effective governmental policy on energy, which will subsequently raise the economic well-being of people.

DISTANCE EDUCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION: PROBLEMS, SEARCH FOR A SOLUTION// Social Sciences: Achievements and Prospects Journal 4(12), 2019/ OEAPS Inc.(Open European Academy of Public Sciences); Chief Editor Mark Freeman - Barcelona, Spain. 16.05.2019: OEAPS Inc., 2019. - pp. 29-33.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhanna Borisovna Erzhanova ◽  
Olga Alexandrovna Manankova
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Distance Education ◽  
Chief Editor ◽  
Learning System ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
European Academy ◽  
Distance Learning System ◽  
Teachers And Students

The article deals with the analysis of distance education in the modern globalization, as well as the problems and difficulties faced by teachers and students in the process of this form of training. Distance learning system provides an excellent opportunity for higher education to those who did not have or want to get a second education with the aim of improving the quality of life, as well as their material and spiritual needs. This article, highlighting some of the difficulties and problems of training in modern globalization, can help teachers to allow and overcome some of these new problems.

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