The recent shift in social science research toward philosophies of the more-than-human has pushed many scholars to question their understanding of units of analysis and agency. While many engage with agencies of the material, few have attempted to address what might be called the agency of ideas. Here, Alexander Pratt argues that engaging with the…

The estimation of RxC ecological inference contingency tables from aggregate data is one of the most salient and challenging problems in the field of quantitative social sciences, with major solutions proposed from both the ecological regression and the mathematical programming frameworks. In recent decades, there has been a drive to find…

Comparative analyses in education science have traditionally focused on the category of geographic location as the comparative unit. However, comparison may involve many other units of analysis, such as culture, politics, curricula, education systems, social phenomena, and other categories of the lives of societies. Still, categories are…

I argue that what-makes-it-possible questions are a distinct and important kind of sociological research question. What is social phenomenon "P" made possible or enabled by? Results won't be about "P's" causes and causal relationships, but about its enablers and enabling relationships. I examine the character of…

Reflexivity, defined as the critical analysis of how one's identity and values influence their scholarship, has been underscored as a crucial element of antioppressive scholarship. Despite its importance, reflexivity, and particularly its documentation, remains relatively uncommon in school psychology scholarship. In the following commentary, we…

This paper argues that methodological uncertainty, such as that experienced by the social research community through the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022) is, and has always been, a vital part of the research landscape. Whilst recognising the many damaging effects of the uncertainties of the pandemic on research and researchers, we home in on the…

Empirical studies on individual behaviour often, implicitly or explicitly, assume a single type of decision rule. Other studies do not specify behavioural assumptions at all. We advance sociological research by introducing (random) regret minimization, which is related to loss aversion, into the sociological literature and by testing it against…

The article refers to the problem of stigmatisation, generally understood as discrediting dignity and refusing to respect individuals and groups due to their attributes, such as appearance, race, nationality, gender, age, social status, sexual orientation or religion. The article aims to determine the extent to which the use of mobile methods in…

Purpose: In this paper, we outline a method for working with the long past materials of social research to forge a method for engaging and co-producing knowledge with new audiences in the present. Findings: Situated in a conceptual landscape of queer theory and feminist archive activism, through this paper we share what happened when a 30-year-old…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has shown incredible leaps in performance across data of a variety of modalities including texts, images, audio, and videos. This affords social scientists the ability to annotate variables of interest from unstructured media. While rapidly improving, these methods are far from perfect and, as we show, even…

Generative AI (GenAI) is quickly becoming a valuable tool for sociological research. Already, sociologists employ GenAI for tasks like classifying text and simulating human agents. We point to another major use case: the extraction of structured information from unstructured text. Information Extraction (IE) is an established branch of Natural…

As a crucial method in organizational and social behavior research, self-report surveys must manage method bias. Method biases are distorted scores in survey response, distorted variance in variables, and distorted relational estimates between variables caused by method designs. Studies on method bias have focused on "post hoc"…

Dominance analysis (DA) is a very useful tool for ordering independent variables in a regression model based on their relative importance in explaining variance in the dependent variable. This approach, which was originally described by Budescu, has recently been extended to use with structural equation models examining relationships among latent…

What explains why reductive explanations of social phenomena in the global South persist? This paper addresses this question by considering how researchers' assumptions of their positionality premised upon global North-South explanations of power shape "how" they collect and determine the scope of their data. Building upon standpoint…

Diversity is a vital concept when engaging with modern social science research and among higher education practitioners. Despite the pervasive discourse surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, quantification of diversity remains a challenge across the social sciences. This study proposes a new conceptual framework, applies…