scholarly journals concept of ethnicity and its operationalisation in cross-national social surveys

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik ◽  
Uwe Warner

This article describes the development of an instrument for the measurement of ethnicity in cross-national comparative survey research. First, we identify the data that must to be collected on ethnicity as a core variable . We then examine the way in which the national statistics offices of the European states and the major social science surveys handle this theme. And finally we present our own instrument for the measurement of ethnicity as a background variable.

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin Van Teijlingen ◽  
Cecilia Benoit ◽  
Ivy Bourgeault ◽  
Raymond DeVries ◽  
Jane Sandall ◽  
...  

It is widely accepted that policy-makers (in Nepal and elsewhere) can learn valuable lessons from the way other countries run their health and social services. We highlight some of the specific contributions the discipline of sociology can make to cross-national comparative research in the public health field. Sociologists call attention to often unnoticed social and cultural factors that influence the way national reproductive health care systems are created and operated. In this paper we address questions such as: ‘Why do these health services appear to be operating successfully in one country, but not another?’; ‘What is it in one country that makes a particular public health intervention successful and how is the cultural context different in a neighbouring country?’ The key examples in this paper focus on maternity care and sex education in the Netherlands and the UK, as examples to highlight the power of cross-national research. Our key messages are: a) Cross-national comparative research can help us to understand the design and running of health services in one country, say Nepal, by learning from a comparison with other countries, for example Sri Lanka or India. b) Cultural factors unique to a country affect the way that reproductive health care systems operate. c) Therefore,we need to understand why and how services work in a certain cultural context before we start trying to implement them in another cultural context.


Author(s):  
Tom W. Smith

Cross-national research is an absolute necessity if we are to understand contemporary human societies in general and the role of religion in particular. To be useful, comparative survey research needs to meet high scientific standards of reliability and validity and achieve functional equivalence across surveys. This chapter examines how well-designed and well-executed cross-national/cultural survey research can best minimize error and maximize equivalence. The chapter first introduces the concept of total survey error (TSE), including interactions among the error components, its application when multiple surveys are involved, and comparison error across cross-national surveys. Second, obtaining functional equivalence and similarity in cross-national surveys is discussed. Third, the challenges of doing cross-national surveys are considered, as well as how combining traditional approaches for maximizing functional equivalence with the utilization of TSE can minimize comparison error and maximize comparative reliability and validity. Fourth, attention is given to minimizing comparison error in question wordings in general. Special attention is given to dealing with differences in language, structure, and culture. Lastly, specific issues relating to studying religion cross-nationally are examined.


Author(s):  
Richard Swedberg

This chapter looks at the role of theory in theorizing. Knowing theory, in order to be good at theorizing in social science, is not the same as having a knowledge of the history of social theory. It is true that it is helpful to have some of the skills of an intellectual historian when one tries to figure out what a concept means, why a theory looks the way it does today, and similar issues. However, this is not the kind of knowledge that one basically needs to have in order to be good at theorizing. The two types of knowledge that are needed in order to theorize well are knowledge of the basics of social theory and knowledge of a number of concepts, mechanisms, and theories.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelena Lukić ◽  

The aim of this paperis to determine the quality of TV classes World around us and Nature and Social Science,which were broadcasted on Radio Television of Serbia during the pandemic in the school year 2019/20. Although the work was indirect, so the immediate interaction between the teacher and student is missed. Therefore, teacher's questions were the way of establishing some kind of interaction in such classes organized in this manner. For this reason, we wanted to establish the types of questions that teachers were asking to students through small screens. Considering that the achievements of learning are based on Bloom's Taxonomy, we were analyzing sixteen TV classes and classified the questions the teachers asked according to cognitive area, on six educational levels. The results indicate that the most common were question within lower cognitive levels were (knowledge, understanding and application), and that there are no statistically significant differences in cognitive levels on questions asked between lower (1st and 2nd grade) and higher grades (3rd and 4th grade), on the other hand, on the classes of determination of educational content teachers were asking statistically significant quality questions compared to the classes of interpretation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 13-42
Author(s):  
Wyatt Moss-Wellington

This chapter goes into greater detail regarding the history of humanist thought and the way a narrative-based humanism might be exhumed from humanism’s philosophical lineage. It looks at the differences between Renaissance, canonical, and contemporary secular humanisms and the set of values that are conjured when a narrative is described as “humanistic.” It makes a case for humanism as both a style of storytelling, and a reading method, and thus establishes a “humanist hermeneutics” that will be carried through the remainder of the book. In so doing, this chapter sets up some core values of narrative humanism: it describes the difference between narrative and character complexity, the use of social science as a hermeneutic tool, the value of incomplete striving for understanding rather than grand theories that totalise people’s worlds, and finally describes some of the alternatives to humanism before concluding.


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