Ethnography, Data Transparency, and the Information Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra K. Murphy ◽  
Colin Jerolmack ◽  
DeAnna Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Share Data ◽  
Replication Crisis ◽  
Data Transparency

The conventions ethnographers follow to gather, write about, and store their data are increasingly out of sync with contemporary research expectations and social life. Despite technological advancements that allow ethnographers to observe their subjects digitally and record interactions, few follow subjects online and many still reconstruct quotes from memory. Amid calls for data transparency, ethnographers continue to conceal subjects’ identities and keep fieldnotes private. But things are changing. We review debates, dilemmas, and innovations in ethnography that have arisen over the past two decades in response to new technologies and calls for transparency. We focus on emerging conversations around how ethnographers record, collect, anonymize, verify, and share data. Considering the replication crisis in the social sciences, we ask how ethnographers can enable others to reanalyze their findings. We address ethical implications and offer suggestions for how ethnographers can develop standards for transparency that are consistent with their commitment to their subjects and interpretive scholarship. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Social Epidemiology: Past, Present, and Future

2022 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana V. Diez Roux
Keyword(s):  
Social Epidemiology ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Social Causes

In a context where epidemiologic research has been heavily influenced by a biomedical and individualistic approach, the naming of “social epidemiology” allowed explicit emphasis on the social production of disease as a powerful explanatory paradigm and as critically important for interventions to improve population health. This review briefly highlights key substantive areas of focus in social epidemiology over the past 30 years, reflects on major advances and insights, and identifies challenges and possible future directions. Future opportunities for social epidemiology include grounding research in theoretically based and systemic conceptual models of the fundamental social drivers of health; implementing a scientifically rigorous yet realistic approach to drawing conclusions about social causes; using complementary methods to generate valid explanations and identify effective actions; leveraging the power of harmonization, replication, and big data; extending interdisciplinarity and diversity; advancing emerging critical approaches to understanding the health impacts of systemic racism and its policy implications; going global; and embracing a broad approach to generating socially useful research. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 43 is April 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Role of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex in Moderating Neural Representations of Self and Other in Primates

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Masaki Isoda
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Medial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
The Social

As a frontal node in the primate social brain, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) plays a critical role in coordinating one's own behavior with respect to that of others. Current literature demonstrates that single neurons in the MPFC encode behavior-related variables such as intentions, actions, and rewards, specifically for self and other, and that the MPFC comes into play when reflecting upon oneself and others. The social moderator account of MPFC function can explain maladaptive social cognition in people with autism spectrum disorder, which tips the balance in favor of self-centered perspectives rather than taking into consideration the perspective of others. Several strands of evidence suggest a hypothesis that the MPFC represents different other mental models, depending on the context at hand, to better predict others’ emotions and behaviors. This hypothesis also accounts for aberrant MPFC activity in autistic individuals while they are mentalizing others. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Volume 44 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

scholarly journals Social Inequality and the Future of US Life Expectancy

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iliya Gutin ◽  
Robert A. Hummer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Expectancy ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Population Health ◽  
The United States ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Extreme Longevity

Despite decades of progress, the future of life expectancy in the United States is uncertain due to widening socioeconomic disparities in mortality, continued disparities in mortality across racial/ethnic groups, and an increase in extrinsic causes of death. These trends prompt us to scrutinize life expectancy in a high-income but enormously unequal society like the United States, where social factors determine who is most able to maximize their biological lifespan. After reviewing evidence for biodemographic perspectives on life expectancy, the uneven diffusion of health-enhancing innovations throughout the population, and the changing nature of threats to population health, we argue that sociology is optimally positioned to lead discourse on the future of life expectancy. Given recent trends, sociologists should emphasize the importance of the social determinants of life expectancy, redirecting research focus away from extending extreme longevity and toward research on social inequality with the goal of improving population health for all. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

scholarly journals A Critical Review of the Social and Behavioral Contributions to the Overdose Epidemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Cerdá ◽  
Noa Krawczyk ◽  
Leah Hamilton ◽  
Kara E. Rudolph ◽  
Samuel R. Friedman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Prescription Opioid ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Opioid Overdose ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Public Health

More than 750,000 people in the United States died from an overdose between 1999 and 2018; two-thirds of those deaths involved an opioid. In this review, we present trends in opioid overdose rates during this period and discuss how the proliferation of opioid prescribing to treat chronic pain, changes in the heroin and illegally manufactured opioid synthetics markets, and social factors, including deindustrialization and concentrated poverty, contributed to the rise of the overdose epidemic. We also examine how current policies implemented to address the overdose epidemic may have contributed to reducing prescription opioid overdoses but increased overdoses involving illegal opioids. Finally, we identify new directions for research to understand the causes and solutions to this critical public health problem, including research on heterogeneous policy effects across social groups, effective approaches to reduce overdoses of illegal opioids, and the role of social contexts in shaping policy implementation and impact. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 42 is April 1, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Putting People Down and Pushing Them Out: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilia M. Cortina ◽  
Maira A. Areguin
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Organizational Behavior ◽  
Organizational Context ◽  
Sexual Problem ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Work Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Organizational ◽  
Common Manifestation

Sexual harassment was once conceptualized solely as a sexual problem: coercive sexual advances that spring from natural feelings of sexual desire or romance. Research has since shown that by far the most common manifestation of sexual harassment is gender harassment, which has contempt at its core; this conduct aims to put people down and push them out, not pull them into sexual activity. With findings such as these, we have made many strides in the scientific study of sexual harassment. That body of scholarship is the focus of this article, which is organized around the following questions: What is sexual harassment, both behaviorally and legally? How common is this conduct in work organizations, and what are its consequences? What features of the social/organizational context raise the risk for sexual harassment? What are some promising (and not-so-promising) solutions to this pervasive problem? And finally, what are important directions for this area of research moving forward? Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Pscyhology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 8 is January 21, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

An Improved Method for CT/MRI Image Fusion on Bandelets Transform Domain

2011 ◽  
Vol 103 ◽  
pp. 700-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui Min Lu ◽  
Shota Nakashima ◽  
Yu Jie Li ◽  
Li Feng Zhang ◽  
Shi Yuan Yang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Image Fusion ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Transform Domain ◽  
Local Energy ◽  
Well Performance ◽  
Improved Method ◽  
The Social

People living in the information age, are more and more attention to their own lives. It is also said, social life is more important in present and future. The social life contains three fields. In this paper, we will propose a new method for adjunctive therapy in social life. Recent years, as the bandelets transform has some benefits, many scholars are interested in this field. They proposed many methods to solve different problems in different fields. In this paper, we propose a new maximum local energy method to calculate the low coefficients of images. And then adopt the sum modified laplacian method to select the high coefficients of images. Later, we compare the results with wedgelets transform. In our experiments, we take wedgelets transform, bandelets transform, and LE-wedgelets transform for comparing the results. Beside the human vision, we also compare the results by quantitative analysis. The numerical experiments state clearly that the maximum local energy is an effect way for image fusion, which can get well performance in visual effect and quantitative analysis. During 100 clinic CT/MR fusion experiments in practice, compare with previous methods, the PSNR of our method is improved respectively 5.836, 5.337, 0.035.

scholarly journals Remembrances of a Honey Bee Biologist

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas D. Seeley
Keyword(s):  
Honey Bee ◽  
Honey Bees ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Bee Colony ◽  
Decision Making Unit ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Honey Bee Colony

Thomas Seeley's research has focused on analyzing the collective intelligence and natural lives of honey bees. This account describes how the author encountered honey bees as a boy and became a beekeeper; how he switched his career path from medicine to biology to study the behavior and social life of honey bees; and how he focuses on understanding how a honey bee colony functions when it lives in the wild, rather than in a beekeeper's hive. He has shown how a honey bee colony works as a single decision-making unit to adaptively allocate its foragers among flower patches and to choose its nesting site in a hollow tree. These findings buttress the view that, in some social insect species, the colony is a group-level vehicle of gene survival. Beyond his research, he has written three books to synthesize these findings for biologists and share these discoveries with beekeepers. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Entomology, Volume 67 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Influence of New Technologies on the Social Withdrawal (Hikikomori Syndrome) Among Developed Communities, Including Poland

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawid Adamski
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Real World ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Social Life ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Social Withdrawal ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The Social ◽  
Extreme Degree

Abstract Hikikomori social withdrawal syndrome was first diagnosed in Japan and means a person who has been isolated from society to an extreme degree. She/he does not attend school or go to work. They do not attend university, they constantly remain at home and most often keep contact with the outside world using new technologies. Hikikomori syndrome is most often recognized as a characteristic problem occurring among Asian societies. Meanwhile, the growing dependence on new technologies among Western societies, and in particular, on the Internet, has caused social withdrawal to become a global problem. Human relationships began to move from the real world to the virtual world, which nowadays is full of communication facilities and allows people to establish relationships with other people without leaving their homes with the help of social media, which are currently packed with advanced solutions connecting people of similar interests or views. All this means that nowadays it is easy to withdraw from physical social life without losing virtual contact with others.

Choice in Insurance Markets: A Pigouvian Approach to Social Insurance Design

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Hendren ◽  
Camille Landais ◽  
Johannes Spinnewijn
Keyword(s):  
Adverse Selection ◽  
Unemployment Insurance ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Insurance Markets ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Uncompensated Care ◽  
Regulatory Policies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Insurance Choice

Should choice be offered in social insurance programs? This review presents a conceptual framework that identifies the key forces determining the social value of offering choice. We show that the value of offering choice is higher the larger the variation in individual valuations for extra insurance is, but it gets reduced by both selection on risk and selection on moral hazard. Besides adverse selection, the implementation of choice-based policies is further challenged by the presence of choice frictions or the obligation to offer basic uncompensated care. All these inefficiencies can be seen as externalities that do not rationalize the absence of providing choice per se but point to the need for regulatory policies and suggest the potential value of corrective pricing à la Pigou. Applying this framework to the existing evidence on these forces in the context of unemployment insurance, we find that offering insurance choice can be valuable even in the presence of significant adverse selection. We conclude by showing how this framework can constitute a fruitful guide for further empirical research in different insurance domains. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Economics, Volume 13 is August 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Social Life of Evidence in Personalized Medicine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Prainsack
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Personalized Medicine ◽  
Cost Saving ◽  
Social Life ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cost Implications ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Deep Sense

Many studies look into the cost implications of digital tools and other new technologies, while only few explore the cost-saving potential of high-touch aspects in medicine. This chapter argues for an understanding of personalized medicine that focuses on the subjective needs and wishes of patients and on the importance of human relationships. It proposes that “social biomarkers” reflecting nonsomatic characteristics of patients that matter to them in connection with their health care should be included in technologies of personalization as a type of evidence in its own right. It discusses how social biomarkers, in conjunction with other initiatives that bring personal meaning to the table, could not only help to make medicine more “personal” in the deep sense of the word but could also help avoid waste and save cost.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document