The goal of information is to inform, while the goal of propaganda is to influence or persuade. It is not the intent to persuade that makes something propaganda, but the use of deceptive and manipulative techniques. Some advertising and public relations campaigns employ propaganda techniques and other psychotechnologies of influence.Jeff Koob, a psychologist, provides examples of advertisers using propaganda and other invisible means of persuasion. He explores the history of advert...

Statistics for the Health Sciences is a highly readable and accessible textbook on understanding statistics for the health sciences, both conceptually and via the SPSS programme. The authors give clear explanations of the concepts underlying statistical analyses and descriptions of how these analyses are applied in health science research without complex maths formulae.The textbook takes students from the basics of research design, hypothesis testing and descriptiv...

The decline of the Christian churches in the West is undeniable but commentators differ in their understanding of what this represents. For some it shows a decline in interest in religion as such; for others, religion has not declined, it has only changed its shape. Possible candidates for Christianity's replacement are the new religious movements of the late 1960s and what is variously called New Age, alternative or contemporary spirituality. Secular Beats Spiritual offers a deta...

Bringing together one of the most important bodies of research into people's working practices, this volume outlines the specific character of the ethnomethodological approach to work, providing an introduction to the key conceptual resources ethnomethodology has drawn upon in its studies, and a set of substantive chapters that examine how people work from a foundational perspective. With contributions from leading experts in the field, including Graham Button, John Hughes and Wes Sharrock...

Sustainable Knowledge rethinks the nature of interdisciplinary research and the place of philosophy and the humanities in society and offers a new account of what is at stake in talk about 'interdisciplinarity'.

Collecting Qualitative Data: A Field Manual for Applied Research provides a very practical, step-by-step guide to collecting and managing qualitative data. The data collection chapters focus on the three most often used forms of qualitative data collection: Participant observation, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. The book also contains chapters on other practical aspects of qualitative field research often neglected in textbooks, including sampling,...

This book provides a practical, pedagogical perspective on conducting qualitative interviews with children and young people.From designing and choosing the type of interview through to planning, structuring, conducting, and analysing them this book is a complete toolkit. Drawing upon real-world examples and researchers′ anecdotes, the authors combine both theoretical background and practical advice to introduce common issues and procedures and to help you undertake your own intervie...

In this monograph on Educational Semiotics, Francois Tochon (along with a number of research colleagues) has produced a work that is truly groundbreaking on a number of fronts. First of all, in his concise but brilliant introductory comments, Tochon clearly debunks the potential notion that semiotics might provide yet another methodological tool in the toolkit of educational researchers. Drawing skillfully on the work of Peirce, Deely, Sebeok, Merrell, and others, Tochon shows us just how ...

This is the first book to deliver a comprehensive guide to research methods in all types of interpreting. It brings together the expertise of two world-recognized scholars in spoken and signed language interpreting to cover the full scope of the discipline.It features questions, prompts and exercises throughout to highlight key concepts, provoke thought and encourage reader interaction. It deals fully with research in both conference and community interpreting, offering a variety o...

This book presents the fundamental theory for non-standard diffusion problems in movement ecology. Lévy processes and anomalous diffusion have shown to be both powerful and useful tools for qualitatively and quantitatively describing a wide variety of spatial population ecological phenomena and dynamics, such as invasion fronts and search strategies.Adopting a self-contained, textbook-style approach, the authors provide the elements of statistical physics and stochastic processes o...

Surveys enjoy great ubiquity among data collection methods in social research: they are flexible in questioning techniques, in the amount of questions asked, in the topics covered, and in the various ways of interactions with respondents. Surveys are also the preferred method by many researchers in the social sciences due to their ability to provide quick profiles and results. Because they are so commonly used and fairly easy to administer, surveys are often thought to be easily thrown tog...

American Sociology has changed radically since 1945. This volume traces these changes to the present, with special emphasis on the feminization of sociology and the decline of the science ideal as well as the challenges sociology faces in the new environment for universities.