scholarly journals Critical Examinations of the Known and the Unknown in Social Science: Where Do We Go from Here?

Author(s):  
Cynthia Wallat ◽  
Carolyn Piazza

If the use of social science assumptions and beliefs is what helped set fields of professional practice on the quest for recognition in the academy, what does the recent outpouring of publications on the limits of science reveal about sociocultural research prospects at the dawn of the 21st century? The last few years alone have witnessed the publication of special journal issues on the "scientific wars" of the nineties, year long professional association debates on "the known and unknown," and new books and online data sources proclaiming "the end of social science." Cumulatively, research and commentary on the limits of science offer pessimistic and optimistic arguments about advances in understanding intractable sociocultural problems that center on understanding extraordinary complexity. We come down on the optimistic side, encouraged by possibilities for using heuristic tools to identify propositions and ideologies presented across a variety of interpretive texts written to accomplish the function of expressing interpretations on the known and unknown in sociocultural research.

Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman

This chapter begins by providing a historical context for the Millennial generation. Growing up is different in the 21st century than before; it takes much longer. Given how many years youth take to explore their identities before they emerge into adulthood with stable jobs and committed partners, the chapter reviews what we now about “emerging adulthood” as a stage of human development. The chapter also highlights a debate in social science as to whether Millennials are entitled narcissists or a new civically engaged generation that will re-energize America. The chapter concludes with an overview of another debate, whether Millennials are pushing the gender revolution forward or returning to more traditional beliefs.


2020 ◽  
pp. 193896552097358
Author(s):  
Saram Han ◽  
Christopher K. Anderson

As consumers increasingly research and purchase hospitality and travel services online, new research opportunities have become available to hospitality academics. There is a growing interest in understanding the online travel marketplace among hospitality researchers. Although many researchers have attempted to better understand the online travel market through the use of analytical models, experiments, or survey collection, these studies often fail to capture the full complexity of the market. Academics often rely upon survey data or experiments owing to their ease of collection or potentially to the difficulty in assembling online data. In this study, we hope to equip hospitality researchers with the tools and methods to augment their traditional data sources with the readily available data that consumers use to make their travel choices. In this article, we provide a guideline (and Python code) for how to best collect/scrape publicly available online hotel data. We focus on the collection of online data across numerous platforms, including online travel agents, review sites, and hotel brand sites. We outline some exciting possibilities regarding how these data sources might be utilized, as well as discuss some of the caveats that have to be considered when analyzing online data.


Data Mining ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 437-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Hsu

Every day, enormous amounts of information are generated from all sectors, whether it be business, education, the scientific community, the World Wide Web (WWW), or one of many readily available off-line and online data sources. From all of this, which represents a sizable repository of data and information, it is possible to generate worthwhile and usable knowledge. As a result, the field of Data Mining (DM) and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) has grown in leaps and bounds and has shown great potential for the future (Han & Kamber, 2001). The purpose of this chapter is to survey many of the critical and future trends in the field of DM, with a focus on those which are thought to have the most promise and applicability to future DM applications.


2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren B. Resnick

The 21st century will require knowledge and skill well beyond the basic levels of reading and arithmetic that American schools know how to produce more or less reliably. Delivering a “thinking curriculum” to all American students requires major reform in the ways schools and districts organize their work. The transformation of the institution of schooling that will be needed to make this aspirational goal a real achievement is daunting. This article examines cognitive science, systems engineering, and social science concepts that are pointing toward a new foundation for policies and practices that may radically improve the proportion of students who can achieve true 21st-century skills.


2020 ◽  
pp. injuryprev-2020-043677
Author(s):  
Anita Radovnikovic ◽  
Otmar Geiss ◽  
Stylianos Kephalopoulos ◽  
Vittorio Reina ◽  
Josefa Barrero ◽  
...  

The availability of data on consumer products-related accidents and injuries is of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, such as consumer product safety and injury prevention policymakers, market surveillance authorities, consumer organisations, standardisation organisations, manufacturers and the public. While the amount of information available and potentially of use for product safety is considerable in some European Union (EU) countries, its usability at EU level is difficult due to high fragmentation of the data sources, the diversity of data collection methods and increasing data protection concerns. To satisfy the policy need for more timely information on consumer product-related incidents, apart from injury data that have been historically collected by the public health sector, a number of 'alternative' data sources were assessed as potential sources of interest. This study explores the opportunities for enhancing the availability of data of consumer product-related injuries, arising from selected existing and 'alternative' data sources, widely present in Europe, such as firefighters’ and poison centres’ records, mortality statistics, consumer complaints, insurance companies’ registers, manufacturers’ incident registers and online news sources. These data sources, coupled with the use of IT technologies, such as interlinking by remote data access, could fill in the existing information gap. Strengths and weaknesses of selected data sources, with a view to support a common data platform, are evaluated and presented. Conducting the study relied on the literature review, extensive use of the surveys, interviews, workshops with experts and online data-mining pilot study.


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