Bøger i SAGE Focus Editions serien

Covers the basic principles of when and how to use focus groups, the applicability of focus group interviews to survey research and other methods, general issues in the use of focus groups, the specific problems of focus groups with different populations or settings and an agenda for future development of the method.

Why do men batter their wives? How do women define their experiences of violence? Is wife abuse related to child abuse? How do medical authorities react to wife abuse? This volume brings together well-known academics, activists and clinicians who approach these questions from a distinctly feminist perspective.

This volume provides valuable insights into how researchers can successfully gain access to elite settings. Using their actual experiences, the contributors provide constructive advice as well as cautionary tales about how they learned to manoeuvre and become accepted in worlds otherwise closed to them.

By highlighting the commonalities across a range of disciplines, this volume provides a unique and broad-based perspective on communication and ageing. This integrative approach brings together the best of current research and theory from communication, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and medical sociology.Centring on three topics - cognition, language and relationships - the book explores the individual areas as well as the ways in which they intersect. It brings to light the implications of individual differences among members of the elderly population as they affect communication, and illustrates the positive as well as the negative effects of the ageing process on language production, relational satisfaction an

Until recently, race relations research has been an understudied and stigmatized area of the social sciences. This volume traces its emergence as a central topic, highlighting the major milestones that established it as a legitimate research domain.The contributors, key figures in the post-war development of United States race research, relate their own experiences with race and racism and the developing interest in the understanding of race as a social force, giving the reader an insider's view of the field.

How have local economic conditions been affected by the emergence of a global economy? What changes, if any, have local political authorities made to counterbalance the new emphasis on world interests? Comprehensive and timely, this book answers these and other vital questions by exploring local political restructuring in the face of massive global economic change.

Are there effective ways to support a family with problems (for example, neglect, abuse, HIV, terminal illness) in order to prevent it breaking up, and make a positive change possible? This book examines Intensive Family Preservation Services, tracing the history of these services, their success at solving family problems, how families respond to the services and how their effectiveness varies according to the type of problem a family is experiencing. Through an exploration of these issues, the contributors offer their own experience as a basis for tracing the evolution of IFPS and the advances that have been made in the field.

Explores the impact of retirement upon family relationships and functioning. This title includes topics that examined are: gender and ethnic differences; the roles of children and siblings; and the multiple changes retirement creates in marital interaction.

Explores the impact of retirement upon family relationships and functioning. This title includes topics that examined are: gender and ethnic differences; the roles of children and siblings; and the multiple changes retirement creates in marital interaction.

A group of educational scholars address topics and issues relating to teacher commitment and institutional performance and productivity. The various essays discuss working conditions, incentives, decision making and the role of the administrator.

Intended to increase understanding of the influences of mass communication on health issues, this book explores shared responsibilities among media and public health professionals. The discussions are centred around conflicts within various public health, media and academic communities.

As ever-increasing numbers of children live apart from their parents, how can policymakers and professionals who work with families address the emotional and financial needs of such children? The editors draw on research, policy and practice sources in order to identify a rich array of roles that nonresidential parents may play in the lives of their children. They also explore such issues as: variation in nonresidential parenting across ethnic groups; the financial implications of parenting separately; patterns of involvement of nonresidential parents; and implications for further research and social policy.

Considers important issues of what theory and research on human development can teach us about adolescents' vulnerability, how to reduce that vulnerability and under what circumstances parental consent does not protect children's rights.

The evaluation of social programmes for families and children that focus on keeping the family intact - rather than those that emphasize removing the child from the family - is discussed in this volume. Written primarily for evaluators and administrators involved in analyzing family services, chapters raise issues pertinent to the design of both comprehensive and special focus studies.

The evaluation of social programmes for families and children that focus on keeping the family intact - rather than those that emphasize removing the child from the family - is discussed in this volume. Written primarily for evaluators and administrators involved in analyzing family services, chapters raise issues pertinent to the design of both comprehensive and special focus studies.

Organizational surveys are becoming increasingly popular with social science researchers and are used for a wide range of purposes, such as measuring employees' needs, obtaining consumers' opinions about the goods and services they receive, and monitoring the effectiveness of organizational interventions. This book presents the latest tools, techniques and applications for conducting successful organizational surveys throughout a wide range of settings - private, governmental and military.

Practical ways of undertaking research into psychotherapy are explored in this unique volume, which surveys the latest developments in psychotherapy process research and examines their implications for clinical practice.Giving equal weight to both paradigmatic and narrative approaches to explanation of the therapeutic process, contributions exemplify both relatively `pure' uses of either approach and their joint application. Each mode is seen to be especially suited to explaining a particular aspect of the overall therapeutic process and the question arises of whether or not the two approaches can be integrated. This question is addressed in terms of the implicit assumptions supporting each approach.

As ever-increasing numbers of children live apart from their parents, how can policymakers and professionals who work with families address the emotional and financial needs of such children? The editors draw on research, policy and practice sources in order to identify a rich array of roles that nonresidential parents may play in the lives of their children. They also explore such issues as: variation in nonresidential parenting across ethnic groups; the financial implications of parenting separately; patterns of involvement of nonresidential parents; and implications for further research and social policy.

This volume provides valuable insights into how researchers can successfully gain access to elite settings. Using their actual experiences, the contributors provide constructive advice as well as cautionary tales about how they learned to manoeuvre and become accepted in worlds otherwise closed to them.

Are there effective ways to support a family with problems (for example, neglect, abuse, HIV, terminal illness) in order to prevent it breaking up, and make a positive change possible? This book examines Intensive Family Preservation Services, tracing the history of these services, their success at solving family problems, how families respond to the services and how their effectiveness varies according to the type of problem a family is experiencing. Through an exploration of these issues, the contributors offer their own experience as a basis for tracing the evolution of IFPS and the advances that have been made in the field.

In this book, leading methodologists address the issue of how effectively to apply the latest developments in social network analysis to behavioural and social science disciplines.Topics examined include: ways to specify the network contents to be studied; how to select the method for representing network structures; how social network analysis has been used to study interorganizational relations via the resource dependence model; how to use a contact matrix for studying the spread of disease in epidemiology; and how cohesion and structural equivalence network theories relate to studying social influence. The book also offers some statistical models for social support networks.

Conflict is a fact of organizational life, though much of it is expressed "behind-the-scenes". This book takes examples from a number of organizational settings, arguing that far from being an occasional occurrence, conflict is an embedded phenomena.

How do you gain entry into a research setting? What tricks are there to learning the rules of the community without alienating the people you came to study? How are good relations maintained with informants? What happens after you leave the field? This title addresses these questions.

This volume discusses a philosophy in which the researcher is involved in the process of organizational learning and change. The contributors outline the method behind participatory action research and present a series of cases where it was used in industry and agriculture in four continents.

By highlighting the commonalities across a range of disciplines, this volume provides a unique and broad-based perspective on communication and ageing. This integrative approach brings together the best of current research and theory from communication, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and medical sociology.Centring on three topics - cognition, language and relationships - the book explores the individual areas as well as the ways in which they intersect. It brings to light the implications of individual differences among members of the elderly population as they affect communication, and illustrates the positive as well as the negative effects of the ageing process on language production, relational satisfaction and other communication-related variables.

Studying across race and ethnic lines creates many problems for the researcher involving practical, strategic, ethical and epistemological questions alike. The contributors to this volume examine the array of methods used in quantitative, qualitative and comparative/historical research to show how ethnic-sensitive research can be carried out.Among the methodological traditions discussed are survey research, demography, testing and assessment, ethnography, discourse analysis, comparative methods and archival research.

Until recently, race relations research has been an understudied and stigmatized area of the social sciences. This volume traces its emergence as a central topic, highlighting the major milestones that established it as a legitimate research domain.The contributors, key figures in the post-war development of United States race research, relate their own experiences with race and racism and the developing interest in the understanding of race as a social force, giving the reader an insider's view of the field.

In the 1960s many sociologists proclaimed traditional religion to be in its death throes. But, just as secularization gained nearly universal acceptance among scholars, religious resurgence burst forth from many directions - new religious movements and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism for example. In A Future for Religion?, contributors ask whether, if such dynamic forces are at work, is religion really dying? They discuss issues usually excluded from books on the sociology of religion - including religious experience, emotional renewal, religion and the body.

What is the role of fit measures when respecifying a model? Should the means of the sampling distributions of a fit index be unrelated to the size of the sample? Is it better to estimate the statistical power of the chi-square test than to turn to fit indices? Exploring these and related questions, well-known scholars examine the methods of testing structural equation models (SEMS) with and without measurement error, as estimated by such programs as EQS, LISREL and CALIS.