Contextual analysis, the study of the role of the group context on actions and attitudes of individuals, is a useful technique in the study of education, neighborhoods, census tracts, election districts, and the family. However, the effective use of contextual analysis has involved overcoming a number of issues, such as group boundaries, the mobility of the individuals within a group, overlapping groups, missing individual data, and the choice of statistical models. Contextual Analysis offers researchers a guide for selecting the best model to use. Written in a straightforward style, the book explores such topics as contextual analysis with absolute effects, with relative effects, and the choice between regression coefficients as fixed parameters or as random variables.
The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in the volume has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behavior. It shows that 'context matters' in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. By showcasing scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account.
This book presents the state-of-art research in ETS by illustrating useful corpus methodologies in the study of important translational genres such as political texts, literature and media translations. Empirical Translation Studies (ETS) represents one of the most exciting fields of research. It gives emphasis and priority to the exploration and identification of new textual and linguistic patterns in large amounts of translation data gathered in the form of translation data bases. A distinct feature of current ETS is the testing and development of useful quantitative methods in the study of translational corpora. In this book, Hannu Kemppanen explores the distribution of ideologically loaded keywords in early Finnish translation of Russian political genres which yielded insights into the complex political relation between Finland and Russia in the post-Soviet era. Adriana Pagano uses multivariate analysis in the study of a large-scale corpus of Brazilian fiction translations produced between 1930s-1950s which is known as the golden age of Latin American translation. The statistical analysis detected a number of translation strategies in Brazilian Portuguese fictional translations which point to deliberate efforts made by translators to re-frame original English texts within the Brazilian social and political context in the first three decades under investigation. Meng Ji uses exploratory statistical techniques in the study of recent Chinese media translation by focusing three important media genres, i.e. reportage, editorial and review. The statistical analysis effectively detected important variations among three news genres which are analysed in light of the social and communicative functions of these news genres in informing and mobilising the audience in specific periods of time in Mainland China.
Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed--spun--DDLas the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.
Contextual Transactional Analysis: The Inseparability of Self and World offers a novel and comprehensive reworking of key concepts in transactional analysis, offering insight into the causes of psychological distress and closing the gap between training and clinical practice. By providing a bigger picture – as much sociological as psychological – of what it means to be human, the book makes an essential contribution to current debates about how best to account for and work with the social and cultural dimensions of client experience. James M. Sedgwick captures the ongoing importance of what happens around us and the distinctive kinds of psychological distress that arise from persistent and pervasive environmental disadvantage. Beginning with a view of people as always situated and socialised, the book highlights the many ways that the world always and everywhere constrains or enables thought and action. Ranging through ideas about the kinds of contextual conditions which might make psychological distress more likely and illuminating the complex relationship between socialisation and autonomy, the book suggests what the implications of these conclusions might be for clinical understanding and practice. Sedgwick’s insightful and compassionate work revises the theoretical framework, fills a current gap in the clinical literature and points the way to greater practitioner efficacy. Contextual Transactional Analysis will be an insightful addition to the literature for transactional analysts in practice and in training, for professionals interested in the theory and practice of transactional analysis and anyone seeking to understand the contribution of context to psychological distress. See the below link for an interview about the book with Mark Head: https://vimeo.com/488738427
The core subject matter of bioarchaeology is the lives of past peoples, interpreted anthropologically. Human remains, contextualized archaeologically and historically, form the unit of study. Integrative and frequently inter-disciplinary, bioarchaeology draws methods and theoretical perspectives from across the sciences and the humanities. Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Study of Human Remains focuses upon the contemporary practice of bioarchaeology in North American contexts, its accomplishments and challenges. Appendixes, a glossary and 150 page bibliography make the volume extremely useful for research and teaching.
The genesis of evil. The book of Genesis recites the beginnings of the cosmos and its inhabitants. It also reveals the beginning of evil. Before long, evil infests God's good creation. From there, good and evil coexist and drive the plot of Genesis. In Evil in Genesis, Ingrid Faro uncovers how the Bible's first book presents the meaning of evil. Faro conducts a thorough examination of evil on lexical, exegetical, conceptual, and theological levels. This focused analysis allows the Hebrew terminology to be nuanced and permits Genesis' own distinct voice to be heard. Genesis presents evil as the taking of something good and twisting it for one's own purposes rather than enjoying it how God intended. Faro illuminates the perspective of Genesis on a range of themes, including humanity's participation in evil, evil's consequences, and God's responses to evil.
This is the second edition of Professor Tushnet's short critical introduction to the history and current meaning of the United States' Constitution. It is organised around wo themes: first, the US Constitution is old, short, and difficult to amend. Second, the Constitution creates a structure of political opportunities that allows political actors, icluding political parties, to pursue the preferred policy goals even to the point of altering the very structure of politics. Deploying these themes to examine the structure f the national government, federalism, judicial review, and individual rights, the book provides basic information about, and deeper insights into, the way he US constitutional system has developed and what it means today.
Video context analysis is an active and vibrant research area, which provides means for extracting, analyzing and understanding behavior of a single target and multiple targets. Over the last few decades, computer vision researchers have been working to improve the accuracy and robustness of algorithms to analyse the context of a video automatically. In general, the research work in this area can be categorized into three major topics: 1) counting number of people in the scene 2) tracking individuals in a crowd and 3) understanding behavior of a single target or multiple targets in the scene. This book focusses on tracking individual targets and detecting abnormal behavior of a crowd in a complex scene. Firstly, this book surveys the state-of-the-art methods for tracking multiple targets in a complex scene and describes the authors' approach for tracking multiple targets. The proposed approach is to formulate the problem of multi-target tracking as an optimization problem of finding dynamic optima (pedestrians) where these optima interact frequently. A novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm that uses a set of multiple swarms is presented. Through particles and swarms diversification, motion prediction is introduced into the standard PSO, constraining swarm members to the most likely region in the search space. The social interaction among swarm and the output from pedestrians-detector are also incorporated into the velocity-updating equation. This allows the proposed approach to track multiple targets in a crowded scene with severe occlusion and heavy interactions among targets. The second part of this book discusses the problem of detecting and localising abnormal activities in crowded scenes. We present a spatio-temporal Laplacian Eigenmap method for extracting different crowd activities from videos. This method learns the spatial and temporal variations of local motions in an embedded space and employs representatives of different activities to construct the model which characterises the regular behavior of a crowd. This model of regular crowd behavior allows for the detection of abnormal crowd activities both in local and global context and the localization of regions which show abnormal behavior.
This book offers a refreshing new approach to mental health by showing how 'mental health' behaviours, lived experiences, and our interventions arise from our social worlds and not from our neurophysiology gone wrong. It is part of a trilogy which offers a new way of doing psychology focusing on people's social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions. 'Mental health' behaviours are carefully analysed as ordinary behaviours which have become exaggerated and chronic because of the bad life situations people are forced to endure, especially as children. This shifts mental health treatments away from the dominance of psychology and psychiatry to show that social action is needed because many of these bad life situations are produced by our modern society itself. By providing new ways for readers to rethink everything they thought they knew about mental health issues and how to change them, Bernard Guerin also explores how by changing our environmental contexts (our local, societal, and discursive worlds), we can improve mental health interventions. This book reframes 'mental health' into a much wider social context to show how societal structures restrict our opportunities and pathways to produce bad life situations, and how we can also learn from those who manage to deal with the very same bad life situations through crime, bullying, exploitation, and dropping out of mainstream society, rather than through the 'mental health' behaviours. By merging psychology and psychiatry into the social sciences, Guerin seeks to better understand how humans operate in their social, cultural, economic, patriarchal, discursive and societal worlds, rather than being isolated inside their heads with a 'faulty brain', and this will provide fascinating reading for academics and students in psychology and the social sciences, and counsellors and therapists.
