This article responds to the argued lack of clearly articulated, consistent, and agreed criteria that might be used by researchers for determining the adequacy of a given concept for a given task. It does so by describing the development of a framework of such criteria, presenting that framework, and illustratively applying it to the evaluation of…

The purpose of this theoretical paper is to provide a praxis oriented example of a qualitative methodology called portraiture for environmental justice and critical environmental education. The five essential elements for a portraiture study are context, voice, relationship, emergent themes, and aesthetic whole. Context is the frame, thus…

Quasi-experimental methods are a cornerstone of applied social science, providing critical answers to causal questions that inform policy and practice. Although open science principles have influenced experimental research norms across the social sciences, these practices are rarely implemented in quasi-experimental research. In this paper, we…

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a relatively young method of causal inference that continues to diffuse across the social sciences. However, recent methodological research has found the conservative (QCA-CS) and the intermediate solution type (QCA-IS) of QCA to fail fundamental tests of correctness. Even under conditions otherwise ideal…

Social scientists have frequently sought to understand the distinct effects of age, period, and cohort, but disaggregation of the three dimensions is difficult because cohort = period - age. We argue that this technical difficulty reflects a disconnection between how the cohort effect is conceptualized and how it is modeled in the traditional…

With growing social science interest in new materialist and posthuman ontologies, it is timely to explore how these may translate practically into social research methodologies. This task is complicated by differing interpretations of how new materialist precepts should shape research. This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature by setting out…

In this paper, I introduce the notion of participative epistemology and discuss how it can contribute to make social data science more accountable. I do so by offering the case of a project where ethnographic, computational and sequence analysis methods have been used in combination. By presenting here in greater detail research design and pilot…

Qualifying social work education is recognised as playing a critical role in equipping practitioners with the skills and interest to develop a 'research minded' approach to practice, yet in the UK context, the profession continues to grapple with questions about how to support practitioners to sustain and develop these skills post-qualification.…

Students in the social sciences are increasingly engaged in research on sensitive topics; however, little is known about the protection they receive from risks that can arise from conducting this type of research. For example, students may experience vicarious trauma from analyzing sensitive data or face harassment from people who disagree with…

The number and type of collaborations between researchers and stakeholders has increased significantly. This responds to the demand from policymakers, funders, and citizens that researchers should help to tackle important social issues (e.g. climate change, healthy aging). However, there is little knowledge about how collaboration processes are…

Missing observations are pervasive throughout empirical research, especially in the social sciences. Despite multiple approaches to dealing adequately with missing data, many scholars still fail to address this vital issue. In this article, we present a simple-to-use method for generating multiple imputations (MIs) using a Gaussian copula. The…

Interaction is the distinctive feature of focus groups, yet little attention has been devoted to understanding techniques for enhancing the quality of interactions. We argue that using a quantitative survey instrument with focus groups has specific benefits beyond traditional open-ended topic lists or questions. We describe particular features of…

Participatory modeling (PM) is an engaged research methodology for creating analog or computer-based models of complex systems, such as socio-environmental systems. Used across a range of fields, PM centers stakeholder knowledge and participation to create more internally valid models that can inform policy and increase engagement and trust…

Social scientists increasingly use video data, but large-scale analysis of its content is often constrained by scarce manual coding resources. Upscaling may be possible with the application of automated coding procedures, which are being developed in the field of computer vision. Here, we introduce computer vision to social scientists, review the…

The sociological imagination is widely considered essential to sociology and sociological scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning research. Still, sociologists have struggled to agree on precisely what it is and how to measure its development effectively. A content analysis of every article published in Teaching Sociology was conducted examining…