Although left-right items are a standard tool of public opinion research, there remains some difference of opinion on the optimal response format. Two disputes can be identified in the literature: (a) whether to provide respondents with a small or large number of answer categories and (b) whether or not to administer the response scale including a midpoint. This study evaluates the performance ...

In 1994 Orlikowski and Gash articulated Technological Frames of Reference as a systematic theoretical lens to examine technological developments in organisations. A decade later, in 2004, Davidson and Pai expressed concern that while the lens was widely cited in academic discourse, the incidence and adoption of the model as an analytical framework for socio-cognitive analysis and interpretation...

We describe a general methodology, socio-cognitive engineering, for the design of human-centred technology. It integrates software, task, knowledge and organizational engineering and has been refined and tested through a series of projects to develop computer systems to support training and professional work. In this paper we describe the methodology and illustrate its use through a project to ...

This paper reports on the results of a research carried out during 1993-94 aiming at studying street sellers as an informal sector activity and a source of socio-economic problems in Shiraz, Iran. This study makes use of two Logit models in order to present a unified framework depiciting the factors that seem to affect the developmeht of informal sector activities. The first model looks at thos...

the celebrated poem of ahmad hatif of isfahn, known in persian as the hatef’s tarjiband is studied in the present paper from a historical point of view to reveal the status of this poet in persian poetry, as well as its mystical content. first a short history of tarjiband as a poetic form is revised, then the sixteen poets who have written a mystical tarjiband are presented. all of these tarj...

Social Deprivation and Exclusion of Immigrants in Germany This paper aims at providing empirical evidence on social exclusion of immigrants in Germany. We demonstrate that when using a conventional definition of the social inclusion index typically applied in the literature, immigrants appear to experience a significant degree of social deprivation and exclusion, confirming much of the economic...

The aim of this study was to investigate the specific contents of the social representations (SR) associated with men and women drivers and to examine the effects of the social insertions of individuals (i.e., age, sex and socio-economic status) on the content and the structure of these SR. A preliminary study with 414 French participants identified thematic content associated with men and wome...

Empirical studies on design have emphasised the role of memory of past solutions. Design involves the use of generic knowledge as well as episodic knowledge about past designs for analogous problems : in this way, it involves the reuse of past designs. We analyse this mechanism of reuse from a socio-cognitive viewpoint. According to a purely cognitive approach, reuse involves cognitive mechanis...

This study presents results of the validation of an ultra-short survey measure of patience included in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Survey responses predict intertemporal choice behavior in incentive-compatible decisions in a representative sample of the German adult population. JEL-classification: D01, D03, D91, C91