Brochures/Reviews/Reports

American Behavioral Scientist

Barry Wellman has recently co-edited two sets of two special issues of the American Behavioral Scientist journal. Each was a short edited book in length: Vincent Chua and Barry Wellman (editors), American Behavioral Scientist, 2015, 59(8) and 59(9), two special issues on Social Networks in East and Southeast Asia (http://m.abs.sagepub.com/content/early/recent). According to the Introduction of the first issue: “These are two special issues about social networks and social capital in East and Southeast Asia. The total of 18 articles, 9 per issue, is evidence that social network analysis, although having emerged in the West, is surging in importance in East Asia, including Southeast Asia. This is not a showcase of Asian exceptionalism. Indeed, claims about Asia’s distinctiveness have always been around. Many of these portray Asia as ‘exotic, romantic and subservient’ (Acharya, 2013: 64). Instead, we bring together a collection of essays based on systematically collected data on several countries in East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, we are proud that almost all of our authors are native to the countries being studied. We study Asian contexts theoretically – by using established concepts and frameworks for analyzing social networks – and empirically – by comparing Asian and non-Asian cases. Rather than one or the other, we underscore Asia’s ‘continuities and novelties’ with – and set against – current understandings of social networks and social capital.”

The second set is Dimitrina Dimitrova, Itzchak Hayat, Guang Ying Mo and Barry Wellman (editors), American Behavioral Scientist, 2015, 59(5), special issue on networked research, and Dimitrina Dimitrova, Tsahi Hayat, Guang Ying Mo and Barry Wellman (editors), American Behavioral Scientist, 2015, 59(4), special issue on networked work. According to the Introduction: “There has been more hype than evidence about networked work. The researchers in the Networked Work issue use survey, interview and sensor data to present systematic evidence about how networked work actually works. The first part of the issue presents four papers about how professionals network. The Networked Research focuses on a particular kind of networked work – scholarly networks – including studies of how such networks change over time. Taken together, these papers show that workers tend to network with similar others. Although they integrate digital media into their work lives, they nevertheless tend to work with near-by colleagues.”

Journal of Official Statistics

Martin Karlberg, as Guest Editor of the Journal of Official Statistics (2015, volume 31, number 2), stated in the “Preface”: “One of the fora exploring the state of the art regarding official statistics research is New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics (NTTS), which is an international scientific conference series. The NTTS conferences, which are organised by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, cover new techniques and methods for official statistics and the impact of new technologies on statistical collection, production, and dissemination systems.… The [NTTS2015] articles that were ultimately included in this special issue of JOS follow the remit of the JOS editorial board for research results about ‘survey methods, quality, applications, policy issues and other aspects of production of official statistics’ and each article contains relevant sections including an overview of the state of the art, the contribution of the article, a critical discussion of alternatives, a summary discussion with conclusions and future areas of research.”

The articles of this special NTTS2015 issue include: Melike Oguz Alper and Yves G. Berger, “Variance Estimation of Change in Poverty Rates - An Application to the Turkish EU-SILC Survey (pages 155-176); Diego Zardetto, “ReGenesees - An Advanced R System for Calibration, Estimation and Sampling Error Assessment in Complex Sample Surveys” (177-204); Larisa Fleishman, Yury Gubman and Aviad Tur-Sinai, “Dwelling Price Ranking versus Socioeconomic Clustering - Possibility of Imputation” (205-230); Matthias Schnetzer, Franz Astleithner, Predrag Cetkovic, Stefan Humer, Manuela Lenk and Mathias Moser, “Quality Assessment of Imputations in Administrative Data” (231-248); Piet J. H. Daas, Marco J. Puts, Bart Buelens and Paul A. M. van den Hurk, “Big Data as a Source for Official Statistics” (249-262, presented in the “Articles” section of this issue of the BMS); Stefano Marchetti, Caterina Giusti, Monica Pratesi, Nicola Salvati, Fosca Giannotti, Dino Pedreschi, Salvatore Rinzivillo, Luca Pappalardo and Lorenzo Gabrielli, “Small Area Model-Based Estimators Using Big Data Sources” (263-282); Vanessa Torres van Grinsven and Ger Snijkers, “Sentiments and Perceptions of Business Respondents on Social Media - An Exploratory Analysis” (283-304); Natalie Shlomo, Laszlo Antal and Mark Elliot, “Measuring Disclosure Risk and Data Utility for Flexible Table Generators” (305-324); and Marina Signore, Mauro Scanu and Giovanna Brancato, “Statistical Metadata - A Unified Approach to Management and Dissemination” (325–347).

Bart F. M. Bakker, Peter G. M. van der Heijden and Sander Scholtus were the Guest Editors of the following issue of the Journal of Official Statistics (2015, volume 31, number 3) in whose “Preface - Introduction to the Special Issue on Coverage Problems in Administrative Sources” (pages 349-355), they wrote: “Administrative data are being used more and more in official statistics and academic research as an alternative to interviewing, in particular for census taking. An important issue with the use of administrative sources for statistical purposes is that they often suffer from under- and over-coverage with respect to the population of interest. The articles in this special issue focus on methodologies for dealing with these coverage problems. A common theme in many of the articles is that they address the assumptions behind the dual system capture-recapture methodology that is often used to correct for under-coverage in censuses – either by evaluating the robustness of this method to violations of certain assumptions or by proposing new methods that relax some of these assumptions. Nine studies are presented, each dealing with specific aspects of the methods for estimating under- or over-coverage. All studies deal with under-coverage, and several deal with over-coverage as well.”

The articles of this special NTTS2015 issue include: Susanna C. Gerritse, Peter G. M. van der Heijden and Bart F. M. Bakker, “Sensitivity of Population Size Estimation for Violating Parametric Assumptions in Log-linear Models” (357-380); Li-Chun Zhang, “On Modelling Register Coverage Errors” (381-398); James O. Chipperfield and Raymond L. Chambers, “Using the Bootstrap to Account for Linkage Errors when Analysing Probabilistically Linked Categorical Data” (397-414); Loredana Di Consiglio and Tiziana Tuoto, “Coverage Evaluation on Probabilistically Linked Data” (415-430); Dilek Yildiz and Peter W. F. Smith, “Models for Combining Aggregate-Level Administrative Data in the Absence of a Traditional Census” (431-452); Louisa Blackwell, Andrew Charlesworth and Nicola Jane Rogers, “Linkage of Census and Administrative Data to Quality Assure the 2011 Census for England and Wales” (453-474); John R. Bryant and Patrick Graham, “A Bayesian Approach to Population Estimation with Administrative Data” (475-488); Joep Burger, Arnout van Delden and Sander Scholtus, “Sensitivity of Mixed-Source Statistics to Classification Errors” (489-506); Ray Chambers, “Discussion” (507-514); Anders Holmberg, “Discussion” (515-526); and Stephen E. Fienberg, “Discussion” (527–535).

Sociological Methodology

The August 2014 issue of Sociological Methodology (2014, 44), included a major section titled “Symposium - Qualitative Comparative Analysis” which included the following articles: Samuel R. Lucas and Alisa Szatrowski, “Qualitative Comparative Analysis in Critical Perspective” (1-79); Charles C. Ragin, “Comment - Lucas and Szatrowski in Critical Perspective” (80-94); Peer C. Fiss, Axel Marx and Benoît Rihoux, “Comment - Getting QCA Right” (95-100); Wendy Olsen, “Comment - The Usefulness of QCA under Realist Assumptions” (101-107); Stephen Vaisey, “Comment - QCA Works - When Used with Care (108-112); Jake Bowers, “Comment - Method Games - A Proposal for Assessing and Learning about Methods” (112-117); Jason Seawright, “Comment - Limited Diversity and the Unreliability of QCA” (118-121); David Collier, “Comment - QCA Should Set Aside the Algorithms” (122-126); Samuel R. Lucas, “Rejoinder - Taking Heat and Giving Light - Reflections on the Early Reception of ‘Qualitative Comparative Analysis in Critical Perspective’” (127-158).

The August 2015 issue of Sociological Methodology (2015, 45), included a major section titled “Symposium - Life-course Sequence Analysis” and included the following articles: Nicolas Robette, Xavier Bry, and Éva Lelièvre, “A ‘Global Interdependence’ Approach to Multidimensional Sequence Analysis” (1-44); Cees H. Elzinga, “Comment - On the Association between Sequences in GIMSA” (45-51); Wen Fan and Phyllis Moen, “Comment - Capturing Linked Lives - Promising New Method” (51-56); Anette Eva Fasang, “Comment - What’s the Added Value?” (56-70); Jacques-Antoine Gauthier, “Comment - How to Make a Long Story Short” (70-73); Eliza K. Pavalko, “Comment - Bridging the Gap between Life-course Concepts and Methods” (73-76); Raffaella Piccarreta, “Comment - Implying Sequences Using Scores - Some Considerations” (76-81); Matthias Studer, “Comment - On the Use of Globally Interdependent Multiple Sequence Analysis” (81-88); Nicolas Robette, Xavier Bry and Éva Lelièvre, “Rejoinder - Positivism and Big-game Fishing” (88-100).