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Author: Charles C. Ragin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2000-08
Total Pages: 374
ISBN-13: 9780226702773
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this innovative approach to the practice of social scienceÇharles Ragin explores the use of fuzzy sets to bridge the divide between quantitive and qualitative methods. He argues that fuzzy sets allow a far richer dialogue between ideas and evidence in social research than previously possible.
Author: Charles C. Ragin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-05-15
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 0226702790
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →For over twenty years Charles C. Ragin has been at the forefront of the development of innovative methods for social scientists. In Redesigning Social Inquiry, he continues his campaign to revitalize the field, challenging major aspects of the conventional template for social science research while offering a clear alternative. Redesigning Social Inquiry provides a substantive critique of the standard approach to social research—namely, assessing the relative importance of causal variables drawn from competing theories. Instead, Ragin proposes the use of set-theoretic methods to find a middle path between quantitative and qualitative research. Through a series of contrasts between fuzzy-set analysis and conventional quantitative research, Ragin demonstrates the capacity for set-theoretic methods to strengthen connections between qualitative researchers’ deep knowledge of their cases and quantitative researchers’ elaboration of cross-case patterns. Packed with useful examples, Redesigning Social Inquiry will be indispensable to experienced professionals and to budding scholars about to embark on their first project.
Author: Michael Smithson
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2006-02-17
Total Pages: 116
ISBN-13: 9780761929864
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book introduces fuzzy set theory to social science researchers. Fuzzy sets are categories with blurred boundaries. With classical sets, objects are either in the set or not, but objects can belong partially to more than one fuzzy set at a time. Many concepts in the social sciences have this characteristic, and fuzzy set theory provides methods for systematically dealing with them. A primary reason for not going beyond programmatic statements and rather unsophisticated uses of fuzzy set theory has been the lack of practical methods for combining fuzzy set concepts with statistical methods. This monograph takes that topic as its major focus, and provides explicit guides for researchers who would like to harness fuzzy set concepts while being able to make statistical inferences and test their models. Real examples and data-sets from several disciplines illustrate the techniques and applications, demonstrating how a combination of fuzzy sets and statistics enable researchers to analyze their data in new ways.
Author: Badredine Arfi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2010-06-17
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 3642133428
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The book, titled “Linguistic Fuzzy-Logic Methods in Social Sciences,” is a first in its kind. Linguistic fuzzy logic theory deals with sets or categories whose boundaries are blurry or, in other words, “fuzzy,” and which are expressed in a formalism that uses “words” to compute, not numbers, termed in engineering as “soft computing.” This book presents an accessible introduction to this linguistic fuzzy logic methodology, focusing on its applicability to social sciences. Specifically, this is the first book to propose an approach based on linguistic fuzzy-logic and the method of computing with words to the analysis of decision making processes, strategic interactions, causality, and data analysis in social sciences. The project consists of systematic, theoretical and practical discussions and developments of these new methods as well as their applications to various substantive issues of interest to international relations scholars, political scientists, and social scientists in general.
Author: Charles C. Ragin
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2018-03-30
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1544322445
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Constructing Social Research answers the question: What is social science? Updated throughout with new references and examples, the Third Edition of this innovative text by Charles C. Ragin and Lisa M. Amoroso shows the unity within the diversity of activities called social research to help students understand how all social researchers construct representations of social life using theories, systematic data collection, and careful examination of that data.
Author: Benoît Rihoux
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 1412942357
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This new addition to the Applied Social Research Methods series is unrivalled, it is written by leaders in the growing field of rigorous, comparative techniques.
Author: Carsten Q. Schneider
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-08-30
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1107013526
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A 'user's guide' to Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and the methodological family of set-theoretic methods in social science.
Author: Charles C. Ragin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2014-07-18
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 0520957350
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Charles C. Ragin’s The Comparative Method proposes a synthetic strategy, based on an application of Boolean algebra, that combines the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative sociology. Elegantly accessible and germane to the work of all the social sciences, and now updated with a new introduction, this book will continue to garner interest, debate, and praise.
Author: Rudolf Seising
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2011-11-05
Total Pages: 516
ISBN-13: 3642246710
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The field of Soft Computing in Humanities and Social Sciences is at a turning point. The strong distinction between “science” and “humanities” has been criticized from many fronts and, at the same time, an increasing cooperation between the so-called “hard sciences” and “soft sciences” is taking place in a wide range of scientific projects dealing with very complex and interdisciplinary topics. In the last fifteen years the area of Soft Computing has also experienced a gradual rapprochement to disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and also in the field of Medicine, Biology and even the Arts, a phenomenon that did not occur much in the previous years. The collection of this book presents a generous sampling of the new and burgeoning field of Soft Computing in Humanities and Social Sciences, bringing together a wide array of authors and subject matters from different disciplines. Some of the contributors of the book belong to the scientific and technical areas of Soft Computing while others come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences such as Philosophy, History, Sociology or Economics. Rudolf Seising received a Ph.D. degree in philosophy of science and a postdoctoral lecture qualification (PD) in history of science from the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. He is an Adjoint Researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing in Mieres (Asturias), Spain. Veronica Sanz earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). At the moment she is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Science, Technology and Society Center in the University of California at Berkeley. Veronica Sanz earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). At the moment she is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Science, Technology and Society Center in the University of California at Berkeley.
Author: Michael Lewis-Beck
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 460
ISBN-13: 9780761923633
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Featuring over 900 entries, this resource covers all disciplines within the social sciences with both concise definitions & in-depth essays.
