Nicole Brown explains the way she uses creative methods, and why she designs studies with this approach.

Thinking about research in practice.

Find the entire collection of posts from the October 2020 series on action research!

Learn about grounded theory methodologies.

Institutions — rules that govern behavior — are among the most important social artifacts of society. So it should come as a great shock that we still understand them so poorly. How are institutions designed? What makes institutions work? Is there a way to systematically compare the language of different institutions? One recent advance is bringing us closer to making these questions quantitatively approachable. The Institutional Grammar (IG) 2.0 is an analytical approach, drawn directly from classic work by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, that is providing the foundation for computational representations of institutions. IG 2.0 is a formalism for translating between human-language outputs — policies, rules, laws, decisions, and the like. It defines abstract structures precisely enough to be manipulable by computer. Recent work, supported by the National Science Foundation (RCN: Coordinating and Advancing Analytical Approaches for Policy Design & GCR: Collaborative Research: Jumpstarting Successful Open-Source Software Projects With Evidence-Based Rules and Structures ), leveraging recent advances in natural language processing highlighted on this blog, is vastly accelerating the rate and quality of computational translations of written rules.

The authors of "Making Sense of Social Research Methodology: A Student and Practitioner Centered Approach" discuss their new text.

How do you choose a methodology for a qualitative study? See this collection of articles.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) Istanbul was originally conceived in Oxford and Helsinki. Our co-organizer, Akin Unver, and the principal data scientist tutor, Ahmet Kurnaz of SICSS-Istanbul met at Oxford University in 2017 during their joint research project on how best to use data science to gather data from hard-to-access regions such as disaster areas or war zones. From this project arose the need to launch a data science summer school in Istanbul. Our teaching assistant (Yunus Emre Tapan) was then a participant at the SICSS-Helsinki, run by our other co-organizer, Matti Nelimarkka, and also discussed the possibility of launching an Istanbul chapter. Later in 2018, Akin and Emre met at the International Studies Association annual meeting for the first time and agreed to launch SICSS-Istanbul.

What is case study methodology? It is unique given one characteristic: case studies draw from more than one data source. In this post find definitions and a collection of multidisciplinary examples.

Learn about experimental research designs and read open-access studies.

Why does Dr. Sharon Ravitch start a qualitative methods course with a unit on Black Lives Matter?

A new Summer Institute in Computational Social Science organized by Howard University and Mathematica promises to bring the power of computational social science to the issues of systemic racism and inequality in America. This marks the first time the successful SICSS model is being hosted by a Historically Black College or University.

Meet the collaborative team behind Making Sense of Social Research Methodology! They were our Mentors in Residence for February 2021.

Ethical research involves much more than a pre-study review or forms to explain how the study adheres to the institution’s rules about protection of human participants. This webinar features a cross-cultural conversation about critical ethics issues in research.

In this part of our phases of research series, we look at how Phenomenology (the reflective study of pre-reflective or lived experience) can be applied and can carry quite different meanings depending on theoretical and practical contexts.

Find all the posts from the January 2021 focus on research questions.

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Transformers have revolutionized language analysis. Never before has a new technology universally improved the benchmarks of nearly all language processing tasks: e.g., general language understanding, question - answering, and Web search. The transformer method itself, which probabilistically models words in their context (i.e. “language modeling”), was introduced in 2017 and the first large-scale pre-trained general purpose transformer, BERT, was released open source from Google in 2018. Since then, BERT has been followed by a wave of new transformer models including GPT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, XLNet, Transformer-XL, CamemBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, etc. The text package makes all of these language models and many more easily accessible to use for R-users; and includes functions optimized for human-level analyses tailored to social scientists.

Want to learn more about research questions? Find multidisciplinary articles and chapters, videos and cases, on SAGE Research Methods