In this eBook, Conceptual Categories and the Structure of Reality, the title very well describes the book's content. Within the book's pages a selection of academics from a variety of human behaviour, human/social science and humanities disciplines write about their research all of which can be typified by their consideration of how categories are used to structure understanding of phenomena. These authors have considered how reality may be understood through notions such as categorial and structural ontologies, part-whole relatoinships (mereology), the qualitative, quantitative and philosophical use of the facet theory approach to research, mapping sentences and declarative mapping sentence, hermeneutics, concepts and constructs, similarities and differences. The resulting collection presents the foregoing conceptual and empirical approaches to knowledge development in general (chapter 1&3 Hackett); Phillips and Wislons' review of compositional syntax in bird calls (chapter 2); neurobehavioral decision systems (chapter 4 Foxall); representations of human psychological processes (chapter 5 Juan-Miguel López-Gil; Rosa Gil; Roberto García); free associations mirroring and its relation to self- and world-related concepts (chapter 6 Martin Kuška; Radek Trnka; Aleš Antonín Kuběna; Jiří Růžička); local knowledge and going beyond the data (chapter 7 Steven Phillips); categorical etiologies of speech sound disorders (chapter 8 Kelly Farquharson); similarity of visual appearance (chapter 9 Nao Nakatsuji; Hisayasu Ihara; Takeharu Seno; Hiroshi Ito); and a consideration of the seminal writing of David Oderberg's on the categorial classification of reality (chapter 10 Hackett).

This book presents the facet theoretical framework as a tool for facilitating the conception of complex animal behaviour research and the design of research procedures through employing mapping sentences. Using the facet theoretical framework, this book takes a holistic view of bird behaviour. Components of bird behavior are identified and then reassembled to facilitate an understanding of the behaviour in the context of its natural occurrence. This provides new insight on both the parts of the behaviour and how these interact as a whole. The multi-faceted approach to designing, evaluating and understanding bird behavior presented offers a template that is adaptable for investigating a wide variety of avian species and different forms of behaviour. Behavioural biologists, animal and comparative psychologists, other natural and behavioural scientists, as well as students of these disciplines will find this book to be an interesting and enlightening read.

This handbook provides an up-to-date reference point for ethnography in healthcare research. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the chapters offer a holistic view of ethnography within medical contexts. This edited volume is organized around major methodological themes, such as ethics, interviews, narrative analysis and mixed methods. Through the use of case studies, it illustrates how methodological considerations for ethnographic healthcare research are distinct from those in other fields. It has detailed content on the methodological facets of undertaking ethnography for prospective researchers to help them to conduct research in both an ethical and safe manner. It also highlights important issues such as the role of the researcher as the key research instrument, exploring how one’s social behaviours enable the researcher to ‘get closer’ to his/her participants and thus uncover original phenomena. Furthermore, it invites critical discussion of applied methodological strategies within the global academic community by pushing forward the use of ethnography to enhance the body of knowledge in the field. The book offers an original guide for advanced students, prospective ethnographers, and healthcare professionals aiming to utilize this methodological approach.

This book is the second edition of Facet Theory and the Mapping Sentence: Evolving Philosophy, Use and Application (2014). It consolidates the qualitative and quantitative research positions of facet theory and delves deeper into their qualitative application in psychology, social and the behavioural sciences and in the humanities. In their traditional quantitative guise, facet theory and its mapping sentence incorporate multi-dimensional statistics. They are also a way of thinking systematically and thoroughly about the world. The book is particularly concerned with the development of the declarative mapping sentence as a tool and an approach to qualitative research. The evolution of the facet theory approach is presented along with many examples of its use in a wide variety of research domains. Since the first edition, the major advance in facet theory has been the formalization of the use of the declarative mapping sentence and this is given a prominent position in the new edition. The book will be compelling reading for students at all levels and for academics and research professionals from the humanities, social sciences and behavioural sciences.

In this book, Hackett introduces the traditional usage of the mapping sentence within quantitative research, reviews its philosophical underpinnings, and proposes the "declarative mapping sentence" as an instrument and approach to qualitative scholarship. With a helpful glossary and a range of illustrative tables, Hackett takes the reader through a straightforward introduction to mapping sentences and their construction, before discussing declarative mapping sentences and possible future research directions. This innovative direction for social research provides a flexible structure for research domain, and it allows qualitative research results to be uniformly sorted. Declarative Mapping Sentences in Qualitative Research will be essential reading for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of qualitative psychology and psychological methods, as well as philosophical psychology and social science research methods.

This book acts as an introductory guide to understanding and using the mapping sentence as a tool in social science and humanities research. The book fills the need for a concise text that simply instructs how and when to use a mapping sentence and provides practical examples. Mapping sentences are a major research component and tool of facet theory. The book begins by covering the background to mapping sentence, including the philosophy and theory underpinning it. The following chapter discuss what mapping sentence is, what different kinds of mapping sentences exist, and knowing when and which to use it in a given situation. The book then moves into describing how to write a mapping sentence and how to analyse the information gained from mapping sentence research. It ends with a consideration of the future developments of mapping sentences and their applications across the social sciences and humanities, including in particular psychology, marketing, behavioural biology, art and health.

Quantitative consumer research has long been the backbone of consumer psychology producing insights with peerless validity and reliability. This new book addresses a broad range of approaches to consumer psychology research along with developments in quantitative consumer research. Experts in their respective fields offer a perspective into this rapidly changing discipline of quantitative consumer research. The book focuses on new techniques as well as adaptations of traditional approaches and addresses ethics that relate to contemporary research approaches. The text is appropriate for use with university students at all academic levels. Each chapter provides both a theoretical grounding in its topic area and offers applied examples of the use of the approach in consumer settings. Exercises are provided at the end of each chapter to test student learning. Topics covered are quantitative research techniques, measurement theory and psychological scaling, mapping sentences for planning and managing research, using qualitative research to elucidate quantitative research findings, big data and its visualization, extracting insights from online data, modeling the consumer, social media and digital market analysis, connectionist modeling of consumer choice, market sensing and marketing research, preparing data for analysis;, and ethics. The book may be used on its own as a textbook and may also be used as a supplementary text in quantitative research courses.

How do listeners create meaning when hearing a sermon? In this cutting-edge homiletical study, Marianne Gaarden draws on sociological, psychological, and other empirical research to offer new perspectives and presents the notion of the Third Room of Preaching, the place where the preacher's words and the listener's prior experiences come together and new meaning emerges. The new research insights challenge conventional understandings of preaching and invite homileticians to reflect theologically on the implications for the sermon as an act of communication. In addition, the book includes an appendix that offers new perspectives on how to best educate and train preachers in light of that research.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Contemporary Computing, IC3 2010, held in Noida, India, in August 2011. The 42 revised full papers presented together with 7 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 162 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on: algorithm; applications; systems (hardware and software); biomedical informations; poster papers.

This volume advocates a shift from the social constructivism found in the work of Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, to a communicative constructivism that acknowledges communication as an embodied form of action in its own right, according to which social actors, in engaging in communicative action, construct a material social reality that guides, delimits, and enables actions. A study of the importance of understanding the role of communication in an age in which digitization and mediatization have extended the reach of communication to a global level and brought about the emergence of the communication society, The Communicative Construction of Reality shows how communication society does not merely replace modern society and its hierarchical institutions, but complements it in a manner that continually results in conflicts leading to the refiguration of society. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in the sociology of knowledge, communication, and social theory.