Social Science Space

Celia Robbins, a PhD student at the University of Exeter, spent 25 years working in environment and sustainability. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, she examines how wind energy has been playing out in Cornwall, and what that means for renewables beyond that bucolic county.

A new preprint was recently shared on PeerJ Preprints on the Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations. Alice Fleerackers, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Erin McKiernan discuss the investigation and the findings on how the flawed metric is currently used in tenure and promotion decisions in universities across North America.

Social anthropologist Chloë Place, a research student at the University of Sussex, had both worked for the National Health Service working with older people with dementia and spent a lot of time living in Andalusia when she became interested in studying approaches to aging in the Andalusian context. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she describes how her ethnographic look at kinship care in a rural Spanish setting influences her perspectives on care elsewhere.

A new survey of university faculty finds that the idea of altmetrics – using something aside from journal citations as the measure of scholarly impact – has made less headway among faculty than might be expected given the hoopla surrounding altmetrics. These new measures are the most familiar in the social science community (barely) and least familiar in the arts and humanities (dramatically so).

Sociologist Lauren O’Connell, a postgraduate research student at the University of Essex, holds a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council for her doctoral research exploring how clinical diagnosis and treatment shapes the experience of anorexia nervosa. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she details how her own experiences influenced her work.

Hashem ElAssad argues that the failure to appreciate the trade-off that comes with an espoused view is doing harm to the public. The specialization vs generalization debate is no exception to this. The aim of this article is to provide quality resources exploring whether or not specializing in a trade or generalizing in multiple is a better route.

Ranging from jurisprudence to autism, the loss of a baby to the growth of equality in science education, the work of the finalists in the seventh annual Celebrating Impact Prize competition—announced today — represent a broad cross-section of meaningful work from Britain’s social and behavioral researchers.

Niall McLoughlin is a PhD candidate in psychology and arts scholar at the University of Bath, as well as an associate with Climate Outreach. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, McLoughlin discusses the psychological catastrophe that accompanied the natural disaster of the 2015 Cumbrian floods and what that might teach us for addressing climate change.

The American Council of Learned Societies has named its 2019 ACLS Fellows and the inaugural recipients of the Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowship.

Alessandro Massazza, a PhD student in the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, at University College London has received money from the Economic and Social Research Council to research the psychiatric consequences of complex emergencies. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, he explores how the double-edged sword of memory affects us after a traumatic event.

The ability to work with digital research methods and data analysis is opening up a whole new world of research potential for social scientists. No one knows this better than Digital Sociologist Dr. James Allen-Robertson from the University of Essex. For him, these new techniques have enabled multiple interdisciplinary research collaborations and a whole new world of funding and professional opportunities.

Here, James tells us how computational social science has given him and his research output a new lease of life.

Psychologist Abby Dunn is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex whose work has focused on parenting, and in particular parenting for those with complex needs. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she examines how mental health practitioners interact with patients who are also parents.