In the broadest sense, personality refers to stable inter-individual variability in behavioural organisation within a particular population. Researching personality in human as well as nonhuman species provides unique possibilities for comparisons across species with different phylogenies, ecologies and social systems. It also allows insights into mechanisms and processes of the evolution of po...

Shalev’s (2007) critique of the use of multiple regression in comparative research brings together and synthesizes a variety of previous critiques, ranging from those focusing on foundational issues (e.g., the persistent problem of limited diversity), to estimation issues (e.g., the unrealistic assumption of correct model specification), to narrow technical issues (e.g., the difficulty of deriv...

Varieties of the "new institutionalism" hold a promise of theoretical integration across several sub-disciplines of the social sciences and a wide range of research fields, including comparative politics, the study of European integration, comparative political economy, comparative industrial relations, or comparative industrial governance (Hall & Taylor 1996; Jupille & Caporaso 1999; Thelen 19...

Computational analysis of large musical corpora provides an approach that overcomes some of the limitations of manual analysis related to small sample sizes and subjectivity. The present paper aims to provide an overview of the computational approach to music research. It discusses the issues of music representation, musical feature extraction, digital music collections, and data mining techniq...

Social research is inherently comparative (Lieberson, 1985). Researchers compare the relative effects of variables across cases; they compare cases directly with one another; and they compare empirical cases with counterfactual cases. But the comparative method – sometimes referred to as ‘smallN comparison’ – constitutes a distinctive approach to understanding social phenomena. Frequently, comp...

1. Methodology Evaluating ubiquitous systems is hard, and has attracted the attention of others in the research community [5]. These investigators, like others in CSCW [3][6], argue there is a basic mismatch between traditional evaluation techniques and the needs posed by ubiquitous systems. Namely, these systems are embedded in a variety of complex real world environments that cannot be easily...