"What else are you worried about?" - Integrating textual responses into quantitative social science research

Open-ended questions have routinely been included in large-scale survey and panel studies, yet there is some perplexity about how to actually incorporate the answers to such questions into quantitative social science research. Tools developed recently in the domain of natural language processing offer a wide range of options for the automated analysis of such textual data, but their implementation has lagged behind. In this study, we demonstrate straightforward procedures that can be applied to process and analyze textual data for the purposes of quantitative social science research. Using more than 35,000 textual answers to the question “What else are you worried about?” from participants of the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP), we (1) analyzed characteristics of respondents that determined whether they answered the open-ended question, (2) used the textual data to detect relevant topics that were reported by the respondents, and (3) linked the features of the respondents to the worries they reported in their textual data. The potential uses as well as the limitations of the automated analysis of textual data are discussed.

Provoking misunderstanding: a comment on Black's defence of value-free sociology

This paper is a response to a recent article dealing with the concept of value-free sociology by Donald Black. It argues that while a defence of Weber's position on the role of values in sociological research is necessary and important, what is offered by Black is counter-productive in important respects. This is because it encourages some of the misunderstandings that it is aimed at remedying and, even more importantly, offers a simplistic discussion of what are complex issues.

Common sense and sociological explanations

Sociologists have long advocated a sociological approach to explanation by contrasting it with common sense. The argument of this article, however, is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize. Moreover, this unacknowledged reliance causes serious problems for their explanations of social action, that is, for why people do what they do. Many such explanations, it is argued, conflate understandability with causality in ways that are not valid by the standards of scientific explanation. It follows that if sociologists want their explanations to be scientifically valid, they must evaluate them specifically on those grounds--in particular, by forcing them to make predictions. In becoming more scientific, however, it is predicted that sociologists' explanations will also become less satisfying from an intuitive, sense-making perspective. Even as novel sources of data and improved methods open exciting new directions for sociological research, therefore, sociologists will increasingly have to choose between unsatisfying scientific explanations and satisfying but unscientific stories.

Committing Canadian sociology: developing a Canadian sociology and a sociology of Canada

This paper is a slightly revised version of the author's "Outstanding Career Award Lecture" presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association in Victoria, British Columbia on June 6, 2013. The paper distinguishes between Canadian Sociology and the Sociology of Canada. The former involves the explanatory stance that one takes to understanding Canada. The latter addresses the significant social dimensions that underlie Canadian social organization, culture, and behavior. I make a case for a Canadian Sociology that focuses on the unique features of Canadian society rather than adopting a comparative perspective. I also argue that there is a continuing need within the Sociology of Canada to address the issues of staples development. However, I argue that "new" staples analysis must have a directional change from that of the past, in that social processes now largely determine the pattern of staples development. Moreover, new staples analysis must include issues that were never part of earlier staples analysis, such as issues of environmental impacts and of staples depletion under conditions, such as climate change. The paper concludes by analyzing four factors that provide the dominant social contexts for analyzing modern staples development: (1) the rise of neoliberal government, (2) the implementation of globalization and its social consequences, (3) the assumption of aboriginal rights and entitlement, and (4) the rise of environmentalism. These factors were generally not considered in earlier staples approaches. They are critical to understanding the role of staples development and its impact on Canada in the present time.

Problems and issues in family medicine psychosocial research

The authors believe that, despite their complexity, psychosocial factors should be included with biological variables in family medicine research. To aid this process, this article reviews some problems and issues in selected areas of psychosocial research relevant to family medicine. Basic background material, dimensions, models, intra-individual, intra-familial physiological mechanisms of transmission, and factors related to stress, support and coping, are discussed. This is followed by methodological issues that include research design, psychometric properties of measures, data collection, quantitative and qualitative methods, family assessment problems and techniques, and analytic procedures. The latter includes scoring problems, global versus specific questions, and statistical analyses issues. Finally, a discussion of biological relationships and potential biological markers for psychosocial processes or variables concludes this review.