Ce livre présente les concepts essentiels à maîtriser pour porter un jugement critique sur les écrits scientifiques et pour mener une recherche tant en psychologie que dans diverses disciplines des sciences sociales (psychoéducation, travail social, éducation, etc.). Tout en couvrant les thèmes traditionnels de la recherche scientifique, cette seconde édition se démarque de la précédente par la mise à jour de tous les chapitres ainsi que l'ajout d'un chapitre entier sur la recherche qualitative et des questions d'auto-apprentissage.

De conception multidisciplinaire, Recherche sociale couvre le processus de la recherche en sciences sociales, de l'établissement de la problématique jusqu'à la collecte des données. Les auteurs, chercheurs dans les universités et les entreprises privées, représentent un vaste éventail de disciplines; ils exposent, analysent et critiquent les tendances propres à leur champ d'activités méthodologiques dans une perspective globale et ouverte.

Experts from a range of disciplines offer practical advice for conducting social science research in racial and ethnic minority populations. Readers will learn how to choose appropriate methods—longitudinal studies, national surveys, quantitative analysis, personal interviews, and other qualitative approaches—and how best to employ them for research on specific demographic groups. The volume opens with a brief introduction to the difficulty of defining a population and designing a research program, then moves to illustrative examples drawn from the contributors' own studies of blacks in the United States, the Caribbean, and South Africa. Case studies cover research on the media, mental health, churches, work, marital relationships, education, and family roles.

In this provocative report on the study of risk, anthropologist Mary Douglas exposes a pervasive neglect of the social bases of risk perception. Researchers have concentrated on the individual's perceptions and choices, ignoring the social influences that direct them. The result is an inability to explore certain crucial questions—how standards of acceptable risk reflect moral judgments, for example, and how the acceptable distribution of risk is an aspect of social justice. Douglas' findings offer a challenge and a new agenda to all who are interested in the way risk is defined and managed in our society.   "An altogether brilliant piece of writing--far-reaching and a joy to read." —Amartya Sen, Oxford University

In this conceptual guided tour of contemporary public administration, Jong S. Jun challenges the limitations of the discipline which, he argues, make it inadequate for understanding today’s complex human phenomena. Drawing on examples and case studies from both Eastern and Western countries, he emphasizes critical and interpretive perspectives as a counterforce to the instrumental-technical rationality that reduces the field to structural and functionalist views of management. He also emphasizes the idea of democratic social construction to transcend the field’s reliance on conventional pluralist politics. Jun stresses that public administrators and institutions must create opportunities for sharing and learning among organizational members and must facilitate interactive processes between public administrators and citizens so that the latter can voice their problems and opinions. The future role of public administrators will be to transcend the limitations of the management and governing of modern public administration and to explore ways of constructing socially meaningful alternatives through communicative action and the participation of citizens.

Social Science History seeks to advance the study of the past by publishing research that appeals to its interdisciplinary readership of historians, sociologists, economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and geographers. The journal invites articles that blend empirical research with theoretical work, undertake comparisons across time and space, or contribute to the development of quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis.

Cet ouvrage, traitant de méthodologie de recherche, tend à préciser la nature et les enjeux de la recherche-création ainsi que le territoire qu'elle occupe en recherche systématique.