This article analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the application of online comparative Focus Groups to understand and explain new phenomena in electoral behavior such as the dilemma of choosing between "honest but incompetent" "dishonest but competent" political leaders in Brazil and Mexico. The changes attitudes towards candidates for a popularly elected position are analyzed, based on the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral elements of the voters. The results suggest that cognitive aspects have limitations and that emotions play a more significant role in electoral decisions. Therefore, the "short-term factors" of the Voting Causality Funnel (contextual events, candidate characteristics, and campaigns) have a greater influence than the "long-term factors" (party loyalties and ideology). In addition to its contributions to voter theory, the innovations in this qualitative technique in its online format represent a valuable alternative, which are especially useful for comparative political research.
Interviews have been widely used as a research tool in the social sciences in general, and in migration studies in particular. There are important reflections on their limitations and potential for scientific research, as well as works that focus on the very nature of the interview, in order to problematize and guide or conduct social scientist's behavior. This article aims to specifically analyze the use of interviews within migration studies, critically reflecting on this methodological tool. On the one hand, interviews allow us to access the social agent's own perspectives on their project and their migratory experience, but, on the other hand, they imply epistemological and methodological practical issues involving their selection, from the elaboration of the script, the definition of the type and composition of the sample, the confrontation of the ethical aspects of doing science and the forms of analysis of the material.
This article follows a line of inquiry explored decades ago by Durkheim and Weber regarding the use of case studies as a way of producing sociological knowledge in the field of labor relations (Coller, 2005). Specifically, it focuses on the Chilean case, within the relatively unexplored area of Latin American social dialogue, extending beyond the collective bargaining processes. Based on the hypothesis that this phenomenon acquires forms of expression that are closely related to labor relations systems that institutional theory defines as non-uniform, the text presents a case study of the development of an operational concept of social dialogue for Chile.
In recent years, the phenomenological discussion has undergone a revision of its empirical research methods, facing challenges from two fields. From a methodological perspective, phenomenology has been assimilated into the general characteristics of qualitative methodologies, making it difficult to recognize its distinctive approach. The broad framework known as the "actor's perspective," "lived experience," or "first-person experience" is shared by different approaches, some of which are not strictly phenomenological. The phenomenological philosophy standpoint reinforces this assertion, indicating that considering only the "first-person" perspective does not guarantee a phenomenological orientation in empirical research. In this context, the importance of enriching qualitative research techniques with phenomenological notions to overcome reductionist interpretations of social reality is emphasized. This article aims to highlight that the subjective point of view is just the tip of the iceberg of a rich and complex conceptual framework. At the same time, it aims to rescue and emphasize the valuable contributions of street phenomenology for urban studies.
Photoethnography, which originated in anthropology, uses photographs as tools for investigation and cultural narrative. According to Archutti (1997), photoethnography is a method that involves using photography as a narrative of cultural information about the group being studied. This narrative, in an autonomous way, shows possibilities experienced through the photographer's gaze, who speaks and writes with the camera. The main objective of this research is to examine the use of photoethnography in applied social sciences, analyzing its application in qualitative studies. The methodological procedures adopted for this research were descriptive and exploratory in nature, with a qualitative approach. The method is based on documentary research with the analysis of 33 articles selected from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. The study identified the main methodological approaches, data collection and photographic analysis techniques, as well as the limitations of the method. The results highlight the interdisciplinarity of photoethnography and its potential for new organizational research, offering a sensitive and visually rich approach to understanding social and cultural contexts.
Motivation plays a predominant role in the learning process, but its evaluation poses significant challenges, which social scientists address from various perspectives. This article focuses on the analysis of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB), a psychological test battery developed by James Gardner, adapting it to Spanish and applying it to primary school children in Mexico. The adapted version of the instrument consists of 25 questions and was validated by a group of experts, including modifications to the original version. This final version evaluates social, behavioural, and other aspects related to early stimulation. The adaptations included the unification of the two original scales, replacing them with a single rating scale from 1 to 10. Upon application of the instrument in its final version, it obtained a high Cronbach's alpha coefficient of .92, indicating high reliability, especially in the context of the Social Sciences. Consequently, it can be concluded that the adaptation carried out is highly reliable and that the resulting questionnaire is a useful tool for making decisions that may influence the life trajectory of the subjects studied.
This article presents a qualitative methodology through the use of visual methods in research with young children. To this end, an instrument was designed based on social practices prevalent in digital culture, particularly the formats and narratives present in children's media ecosystem. Using a qualitative research design, the instrument was validated with early childhood educators who implemented it in real-world educational settings. The methodological adaptations employed reflect the diverse educational contexts resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing for greater flexibility in research practices and highlighting the value of visual methods in educational research. The findings suggest that the use of visual methods facilitates expression and encourages alternative ways of understanding and experiencing school, resulting in a unique learning environment in which children actively participate.
As part of a study on the incidence of information and communication technologies on the quality of life of young university students from an epistemological approach, it was decided to form discussion groups for data gathering. 12 groups were held through the Google Meet platform, consisting of 66 students from six Mexican universities from 4 areas of knowledge. Both, the frequency analysis, and consistency of content were used, while considering the insider view of the students for categorization. The results demonstrate that the online audiovisual format is effective for ensuring robust group participation, facilitating rich data collection, and verifying the consistency between external and internal perspectives. It is concluded that this online audiovisual format is suitable for this type of research. This study is valuable because, by including the students' perspectives in the data categorization, a deeper understanding of the participants' cultural and generational viewpoints was achieved.
The objective of this work is to reflect and discuss which journalistic discourse analysis methodologies are most useful for examining complex and large sociopolitical events and phenomena, and enable studies that go beyond the strictly descriptive and advance their understanding. To achieve this purpose, the article exposes the developments of two investigations carried out through the application of discourse analysis methodologies: one from the perspective of social semiosis, by Eliseo Ver & oacute;n, and the other, from the archaeological approach, by Michel Foucault. The results of these studies indicate: 1 The application of discourse analysis methodologies, grounded in socio-historical and processual approaches, not only allows for description, but also facilitates the understanding of complex socio-political processes, occurring in different contexts and involving diverse political, social, and citizen actors, in their multiplicity and particularities. 2 The use of Veronian and Foucaultian methods facilitated the analysis of extensive textual corpora, by providing unifying concepts such as the device of enunciation, in the first case, and discursive formation in the second.
This article aims to review the use of GPT chatbots as support for researchers who conduct literature reviews under the SALSA protocol in the field of educational research, from a critical perspective on the use of generative artificial intelligence. The usefulness of the GPT-3 chatbot in the first phase of the protocol (search) is explored, articulating the interaction with the tool based on "student autonomy" as a keyword or term in the design of this process. The methodology involved reviewing academic sources that report similar processes and implementing the use of the chatbot in the design phase of search equations for the case. The results indicate that the GPT-3 chatbot improved efficiency by providing accurate results, coinciding with previous studies. In conclusion, this tool can be valuable in conducting this research, but the importance of addressing its use with a critical approach and considering ethical aspects in educational research is highlighted. It is suggested to explore more the potentialities of these generative tools, as well as their limitations, in future studies.
The article presents a methodological reflection on the following categories used to investigate the self-perception of social class in a survey study (PI-Clases, 2016): "Upper", "Upper Middle", "Middle", "Working", and "Lower". In the first section, we present a statistical analysis of our results compared to other recent surveys, showing some stability in subjective preferences. In the second part, we analyze the responses to an open question in our survey: "Why do you think you belong to that social class?" This resulted in a corpus of 10.146 words, which were processed using a mixed quantitative (with different R programming language packages) and qualitative (using Atlas.ti) methodological strategy. The results indicate that respondents expressed distinct narrative justifications for their selection of different class categories. Those who chose "Middle" and "Upper-Middle" referred to quality of life, education, and income; those who selected "Working" class primarily spoke of dignity and hard work; and finally, those who perceived themselves as "Low" class justified their choice by a lack of income and various deficiencies in material living conditions.
This article reviews the usefulness of using Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the analysis of open responses given to a public opinion survey. Data from a survey about the perception of the Costa Rican population regarding various migrant groups are used to test algorithms to identify which performs a better classification of the data. It is concluded that the random forest algorithm performs a better automatic classification of the answers, helping to reduce the ambiguity of the classification. The work seeks to highlight the usefulness of the PNL for research in Social Sciences and, especially, for the analysis of data from open questions applied in studies of public opinion, since it facilitates the classification and analysis of a large amount of unstructured information.
An idea that is quite widespread in research, mainly quantitative, is that the samples must be very large, assuming that the larger the size lower the chances of error in the data, and a better statistical representativeness of the inferential analyses. The objective of this work is to emphasize that this principle does not apply to all research since in some cases such as pilot studies, the sample size, in addition to statistical representativeness, requires considering other criteria that may be relevant for a particular study. Therefore, two general rules are analyzed when determining the sample size in pilot studies: those that establish a fixed number of participants; and those that suggest delimiting the sample size through a series of steps, designed based on the characteristics of the research to be carried out. After all, none of these rules is better than the other, because the size of a sample must be a widely reasoned and critical decision made by the researcher(s), related to the characteristics and purposes of their research.
This methodological article aims to expose the Pareto distribution in a clear and exemplified way for its understanding among social researchers. This continuous distribution with an inverted J shape, skewness, and a heavy tail to the right constitutes a good probability model for various social variables, such as wealth and income, and for behaviors that are highly frequent in a few people and infrequent in the majority. The type-I distribution is developed, which has a scale parameter xm and another of shape alpha. It begins with a brief historical review. The density, cumulative distribution, tail, moment, and characteristic functions are shown. It continues with the descriptive measures, estimators by the methods of moments and maximum likelihood, its relationship with other distributions, and the goodness-of-fit tests. All this material is applied with two examples: one of calculating probabilities and descriptive measures and the other of parameter estimation and fit testing. Finally, suggestions for its use are made.
Based on our practices as teachers of the subject Methodology of Social Research, members of academic research teams and study groups, this article aims to review the experiences and practices of teaching research "outside the classroom". We refer to extramural experiences as those constituted from practices linked to seminars and/or workshops for the completion of the so-called research hours -as is the case in the Sociology degree at UBA- but also as part of the research initiation scholarships that take place in some universities. To do so, the author's notes on the activities carried out with the student groups, the students' field notes and semi- structured interviews carried out with them at the end of the activity were taken as material for analysis. These three elements together allow us to outline some questions about teaching methodology as a subject and research practices. The article concludes by identifying some of the students' emotions in their first approaches to research and fieldwork. It affirms the importance of promoting the classroom space and insertion into formed research groups.
This paper deals with the construction of the state of knowledge based on the research project developed in the Professional Master's course in Public Policies and Educational Management at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM). The objective was to map the scientific production on student assistance in higher education, from 2010 to 2021, in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD/IBICT). This is a qualitative, bibliographic and documentary research, which has as descriptors: "public policy", "higher education" and "student assistance". The Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD)/IBICT was defined as the database. From this research, 26 productions were found, including theses and dissertations. The high number of productions in the Northeast region (49%), and also in the period from 2017 to 2019 stands out. All works used dialectics as a method of analysis and were authored by technical-administrative employees of federal educational institutions. No works were found specifically dealing with student participation in the construction, implementation and evaluation of institutional policies within the scope of student assistance.
In this article, we examine the perceptions of students of Methodology and Techniques of Social Research (Sociology Degree-University of Buenos Aires) about the teaching strategies implemented during the remote emergency education due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, as well as their assessments of the skills acquired for exercising social research. These practices are framed within a teaching project aimed at developing a research habitus that seeks to promote foster active, reflective and collaborative participation between students and teachers. The information we analyzed comes from a voluntary and anonymous online survey of students who completed the three levels of the subject in 2021. The findings show a positive assessment of teaching practices that place students in the role of apprentices in the research profession. Specifically, the most highly regarded teaching resources were those that involved monitoring the students' group productions (progress tutorials) and those that replaced the work carried out in the classroom context (synchronous classes).
This paper outlines preliminary reflections within the framework of a doctoral research project: "Socio-educational trajectories of youth. A study in secondary schools in the south of the province of C & oacute;rdoba". Specifically, here, the emphasis is placed on educational trajectories as transversal problems that clearly transcend classical dimensions and are presented as a highly relevant topic for reconstructing current agendas for educational research. The focus of the article is to highlight the importance of reflections on the objects of knowledge in the field of educational research, recognizing the possible impacts of studies on educational transformation processes. In short, educational trajectories as an object of knowledge are not presented as a simple subject, but rather a complex one, where multiple dimensions intervene in its construction: epistemological, ethical, methodological, intersubjective, contextual, among others. Therefore, an object of study -educational trajectories- is dynamic, in permanent construction, and needs to be constantly revisited in the light of these movements.
The free and ecumenical provision of basic education plays a fundamental role in the progress and development of Latin American peoples. Therefore, governments in this region have been committed to ensuring that this occurs satisfactorily. In this sense, we researchers, through scientific findings, can significantly contribute to this improvement process to continue occurring. To this end, the use of research methods such as Education Data Mining (EDM) -which combines knowledge from computing, education, and statistics- can be a strong alternative. Given the possibilities of applying EDM, this study proposes a framework to assist in the development of research that uses EDM as a methodological strategy. The framework was developed following Design Science Research (DSR) practices, resulting in an objective and easy-to-understand model, organized in 4 stages. We hope that the framework will help you formulate a good research question and choose the appropriate paths that will lead you to answer it satisfactorily.
