Lawyers, political scientists, and other social scientists share an interest in seeking to understand how complex social relationships and patterns of human interaction can be studied so as to increase our stockpile of social knowledge about law and the policy-making processes through which it is formulated. They are not agreed, however, as to how this goal best may be realized. Recollection of...

Critical realism is emerging as a viable philosophical paradigm for conducting social science research, and has been proposed as an alternative to the more prevalent paradigms of positivism and interpretivism. Few papers, however, have offered clear guidance for applying this philosophy to actual research methodologies. Under critical realism, a causal explanation for a given phenomenon is infe...

An epistemological and discursive divide separates critics of GIS and its researchers. An assumption exists among many users and developers of GIS that the technology models reality and can thus be used to predict and explain spatial processes. This realist position is not sanctioned by social science critics of GIS who have focused efforts on illustrating the social effects of technology as we...

In this paper we introduce a new spatio-temporal methodology for biosurveillance entitled the Repeated Two-sample Rank (RTR) procedure. It is designed to sequentially incorporate information from individual observations and thus can operate on data in real-time as it arrives into an automated biosurveillance system. In addition, upon a signal of a possible outbreak, the methodology suggests a w...

Summary Scapegoating is a ubiquitous, yet pernicious, phenomenon in today’s world. It manifests innumerable ways. Social work, line with its emancipatory value-base, seeks to engage various scapegoated groups challenge the experience. In this article, authors draw on critical realism and mimetic theory elucidate causative mechanisms fuelling scapegoating. This done order heighten social workers...

Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that autonomous artificial entities, so-called embodied conversational agents, elicit social behavior on the part of the human interlocutor. Various theoretical approaches have tried to explain this phenomenon: According to the Threshold Model of Social Influence (Blascovich et al., 2002), the social influence of real persons who are represented by avatar...

This research investigates the impact on social communication quality of using anonymous avatars during small-screen mobile audio/visual communications. Elements of behavioral and visual realism of avatars are defined, as is an elaborated three-component measure of communication quality called Social Copresence. Experimental results with 196 participants participating in a social interaction us...

This paper seeks to provide an extended critical overview of crucial issues and dilemmas within contemporary social thought, as well as within the wide field of social science theory and methodology. In this context, it offers some necessary theoretical stimulations and perspectives to re-think seriously and imaginatively and to re-decide about the persistent, complicated, ambiguous and highly ...