Documents Bulletin of Sociological Methodology / Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique 4 results

"This paper presents the most significant results of a study into the political communication of the Rome branch of the M5S, or Five Stars Movement, conducted through analysis of its blog, a big text corpus, comprising posts, comments and images, which brought together between the period immediately prior to the May 2013 administrative elections and the present day. This corpus was subjected to advanced statistical text analysis, and targeted hermeneutic and content analysis. Semiotic analyses of visual material were also performed, in addition to network analyses of blog contributors and analyses of communicational efficacy. Research team members from several disciplines and a variety of institutions, worked in constant collaboration, adopting a mixed-method approach."

"This article describes and discusses the new generation of methodological responses to measuring democracy and related issues generated by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). V-Dem is distinct in several regards in addition to its unique level of disaggregation, by the combination of: historical data extending back to 1900 and for a large selection among them to 1789 for many countries in the world; use of multiple, independent coders for each evaluative question; inter-coder reliability tests incorporated into a custom designed Bayesian item-response theory measurement model; provision of confidence bounds for all point estimates associated with expert-coded questions as well as for all indices; multiple indices reflecting varying theories of democracy; fully transparent aggregation procedures; and that all data are made freely available, including original coder-level judgments (exclusive of any personal identifying information)."

"Cet article s'appuie sur une intervention faite le 20 mai 2015 dans le cadre du séminaire « Les sciences sociales en question : grandes controverses épistémologiques et mé-thodologiques ». Il revient sur une enquête ethnographique effectuée entre 2013 et 2014 dans la gauche libertaire de Göttingen (Allemagne). A la fois militante et chercheuse sur son terrain, l'auteure s'intéresse aux apports, implications et problèmes de cette double casquette. Dans un contexte hostile aux chercheurs, souvent assimilés aux services secret, la casquette de militante s'est avérée être une condition même de l'accès aux enquêtés et a permis d'adopter une perspective singulière sur le militantisme libertaire. Elle a nécessité cependant la mise en place d'un certain nombre de procédés d'objectivation, permettant une distanciation vis-à-vis du terrain. Enfin, elle a posé un certain nombre de questions éthiques sur le rapport enquêtrice/enquêtés."

"Sociological practitioners often face considerable methodological uncertainty when undertaking a quantitative analysis. This methodological uncertainty encompasses both data construction (e.g. defining variables) and analysis (e.g. selecting and specifying a modelling procedure). Methodological uncertainty can lead to results that are fragile and arbitrary. Yet, many practitioners may be unaware of the potential scale of methodological uncertainty in quantitative analysis, and the recent emergence of techniques for addressing it. Recent proposals for ‘multi-strategy' approaches seek to identify and manage methodological uncertainty in quantitative analysis. We present a case-study of a multi-strategy analysis, applied to the problem of estimating the long-term impact of 1980s UK government-sponsored youth training. We use this case study to further highlight the problem of cumulative methodological fragilities in applied quantitative sociology and to discuss and help develop multi-strategy analysis as a tool to address them."