Social Processes And Social Phenomena The Chosen Problems

The eagerly anticipated second edition of this popular textbook captures the excitement and relevance to everyday life of the fascinating and fast-moving field of social psychology. This book is a comprehensive and lively guide to the subject that extensively reappraises classic studies, highlights cutting-edge areas of research and provides fascinating examples of how social psychological theory and research apply to a wide range of real-world issues such as fake news, internet addiction and cyberbullying. Innovative interactive features, including 'exploring further' activities, 'applying social psychology' exercises and 'student project spotlights', place the student experience at the heart of this book. Its engaging and inclusive approach helps students to develop a strong and nuanced understanding of key topics in social psychology and also encourages broader skills that will help not only in their studies but their future careers. This is the ideal textbook for students studying social psychology. New to this Edition: - Thoroughly revised to highlight the most up-to-date research in the discipline and re-appraise classic studies, theories and perspectives on topics such as obedience, bystander intervention and the Stanford Prison Experiment. - The introductory chapter includes a new guide to critical thinking which outlines theory and research on what critical thinking involves and provides useful guidance for students on how to become effective critical thinkers. - Important coverage of the reproducibility of social psychological research. - More examples of how social psychological theory and research apply to current real-world issues such as fake news, internet addiction, human-animal relations, intergroup conflict, cyberbullying and politics. - Up-to-date coverage of the impact of online communication and social media on social psychological phenomena. - A distinctive final chapter summarising key points of wisdom in social psychology and skills that students can gain from their studies. Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/social-psychology-2e. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost.

Addresses current issues of research into socio-technical systems (STSs). Provides suggestions on how social knowledge can synergize with technical knowledge.

This book explores the epistemology and the methodology of political knowledge and social inquiry: what can we know, and how do we know? Contributing authors offer answers, addressing the purpose and methods of research and analyzing concepts, including the relationship of theory and evidence and the importance of medicine to social science.

Over the last decade, the study of shark biology has benefited from the development, refinement, and rapid expansion of novel techniques and advances in technology. These have given new insight into the fields of shark genetics, feeding, foraging, bioenergetics, imaging, age and growth, movement, migration, habitat preference, and habitat use. This pioneering book, written by experts in shark biology, examines technologies such as autonomous vehicle tracking, underwater video approaches, molecular genetics techniques, and accelerometry, among many others. Each detailed chapter offers new insights and promises for future studies of elasmobranch biology, provides an overview of appropriate uses of each technique, and can be readily extended to other aquatic fish and marine mammals and reptiles. Including chapter authors who were pioneers in developing some of the technologies discussed in the book, this book serves as the first single-source reference with in-depth coverage of techniques appropriate for the laboratory and field study of sharks, skates, and rays. It concludes with a unique section on Citizen Science and its application to studies of shark biology. This is a must-read for any marine biologist or scientist working in the field of shark biology, as well as marine biology students and graduates.

This volume examines all aspects of using agent or individual-based simulation. This approach represents systems as individual elements having their own set of differing states and internal processes. The interactions between elements in the simulation represent interactions in the target systems. What makes this "social" is that it can represent an observed society. Social systems include all those systems where the components have individual agency but also interact with each other. This includes human societies and groups, but also increasingly socio-technical systems where the internet-based devices form the substrate for interaction. These systems are central to our lives, but are among the most complex known. This poses particular problems for those who wish to understand them. The complexity often makes analytic approaches infeasible but, on the other hand, natural language approaches are also inadequate for relating intricate cause and effect. This is why individual and agent-based computational approaches hold out the possibility of new and deeper understanding of such systems. This handbook marks the maturation of this new field. It brings together summaries of the best thinking and practices in this area from leading researchers in the field and constitutes a reference point for standards against which future methodological advances can be judged. This second edition adds new chapters on different modelling purposes and applying software engineering methods to simulation development. Revised existing content will keep the book up-to-date with recent developments. This volume will help those new to the field avoid "reinventing the wheel" each time, and give them a solid and wide grounding in the essential issues. It will also help those already in the field by providing accessible overviews of current thought. The material is divided into four sections: Introduction, Methodology, Mechanisms, and Applications. Each chapter starts with a very brief section called ‘Why read this chapter?’ followed by an abstract, which summarizes the content of the chapter. Each chapter also ends with a section on ‘Further Reading’. Whilst sometimes covering technical aspects, this second edition of Simulating Social Complexity is designed to be accessible to a wide range of researchers, including both those from the social sciences as well as those with a more formal background. It will be of use as a standard reference text in the field and also be suitable for graduate level courses.

This open access publication deals with the operationalisation of the welfare state as an independent variable. To study how welfare states affect social inequality, individual behaviour, attitudes and more in different countries, an empirical operationalisation of the welfare state or specific elements of social policy is required. However, this operationalisation is fraught with some important problems. These problems essentially relate to one point: while there are a large number of contributions dealing with the measurement of differences between welfare states per se and as a dependent variable, there is a lack of feasible recommendations for a standardised operationalisation of welfare stateness as an independent variable. So far, there has been no systematic investigation of how such different approaches may affect the results and their comparability. Also missing is an in-depth conceptual discussion of which features of the welfare state are particularly relevant for explaining certain effects. This book fills both gaps. First, it exposes the pitfalls of existing approaches and shows how much empirical results can vary depending on the operationalisation chosen. Second, it proposes a framework for a standardised conceptualisation and operationalisation of social policies as independent variables that constrains operational decisions in a theoretically meaningful way.

Collective violence has played an important role throughout American history, though we have typically denied it. But it is not enough to repress violence or to suppress our knowledge of it. We must understand the phenomenon, and to do this, we must learn what violent groups are trying to say. Th at some choose violence tells us something about the perpetrators, inevitably, about ourselves and the society we have built. This collection of provocative contributions addresses theory and research on violence as a group phenomenon. The editors were co-directors of research for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in the 1960s, and many of the contributors to this volume were involved in that research. Collective Violence distills their findings as well as takes a later, harder look at the forms, sources, and meanings of riots and rebellion. Short and Wolfgang consider the political implications of collective violence, especially as it has appeared in the United States. Th e book includes essays on theory, comparative analyses based on anthropological and historical data, studies of the role of police and other social control agents, and summarizes discussions of U.S. public policy. The contributions range from anthropologists' descriptions of collective violence in primitive societies to general statements about the nature of collective violence. Collective Violence is intended for use in a wide range of courses in sociology, anthropology and political science. In addition its fi ndings will interest anyone wishing insight into the nature of group violence in American society.