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The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the confluence of data literacy with information literacy in an experimental one‐unit course taught in the UCLA Department of Sociology, and present the literature on, rationale for, and future of integrating these interrelated literacies into social science courses.

The course was co‐taught twice by a librarian and a data archivist using a syllabus and assignments that reflect sociological research problems and tools and information literacy competencies in the social sciences.

The need for information and data skills in sociology is well‐established, and their integration into a sociology course (rather than in a stand‐alone information literacy course) would produce more opportunities for students to apply what they learn and for the instructors to assess learning in the context of doing sociology coursework.

The class sizes were too small for full‐scale assessment and pre‐tests/post‐tests were not given. Assessment of student learning was based on work produced in and outside class and on course evaluations.

It is suggested that librarians and data archivists work with faculty to innovate curricular approaches based on recommendations and outcomes in key documents on learning sociology from professional library and sociology organizations. Attaching the lab to an existing course and promoting the data literacy modules for faculty to adopt in other courses are also suggested.

This paper invites social science librarians to examine the value to students and faculty of collaboration with professional data services staff to teach and merge information and data literacy within the social sciences curricula.

David P. Baker is a Professor of Education and Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also the associate director of the Social Science Research Institute. He publishes widely on the comparative analysis of education and stratification, and the global impact of education as an institution. Recent publications include “Student Victimization: National and School System Effects on School Violence in 37 Nations” (American Journal of Education Research, 2002) and “Socio-Economic Status, School Quality, and National Economic Development: A Cross-National Analysis of the ‘Heyneman-Loxley Effect’ on Mathematics and Science Achievement” (Comparative Education Review, 2002).Aaron Benavot is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Grounded in an institutional approach to education and development, his research has examined historical and cross-national patterns in official school curricula, the consequences of educational expansion on economic development and democratization, the economic impacts of curricular contents, and the origins and expansion of mass education. He is currently studying the diversification of educational knowledge in local Israeli schools and also the dynamics of transnational social science research projects in the European Union.Karen Bradley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University. Her research examines women’s participation in higher education cross-nationally. Recent publications include “Equal but Separate? A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education” (with Maria Charles, American Sociological Review, 2002) and “The Incorporation of Women into Higher Education: Paradoxical Outcomes?” (Sociology of Education, 2000). She is currently collaborating with Maria Charles on a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and the American Educational Research Association that examines factors underlying women’s underrepresentation in engineering and math/computer science programs in several countries.Wendy Cadge is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University. Her research focuses on the cultural aspects of globalization in the United States and Southeast Asia. Her first book, Heartwood: the First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.Maria Charles is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Her research explores how cultural ideologies and social structures affect the economic and social status of individuals and groups. Most recently, Charles is author of “Deciphering Sex Segregation: Vertical and Horizontal Inequalities in Ten Countries” (Acta Sociologica 46:265–286, 2003), and coauthor of Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (with David Grusky, Stanford University Press, in press) and “Equal but Separate: A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education” (with Karen Bradley, American Sociology Review 67: 573–599, 2002).Chang Y. Chung is a Statistical Programmer at the Office of Population Research, Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of South Carolina and M.S.E. in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He is involved in multiple research projects as statistical programmer, data manager, and co-author. A recent publication is “Employment and Earnings of Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers in U.S. Labor Markets” (with Thomas Espenshade and Margaret Usdansky, Population Research and Policy Review, 2001).Sara R. Curran is an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Sociology at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has research interests in demography, migration, gender, economic development, environment, aging and Southeast Asia. She is currently writing a book, Shifting Boundaries, Transforming Lives: Globalization, Gender, and Family in Thailand. Recent publications include: Ambio. Special Issue: Population, Consumption, and Environment, (with Tundi Agardy, 2002) and “Engendering Migrant Networks: The Case of Mexican Migration,” (with Estela Rivero Fuentes, Demography, 2003).Bruce Fuller is a Professor of Education and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the dilemmas around the decentering of public aims and institutions within the worlds of child care, family welfare, and school reform. Prior to becoming a full-time teacher, he worked for a state legislature, a governor, and then as a heretical sociologist at the World Bank. His most recent books are Inside Charter Schools: The Paradox of Radical Decentralization (Harvard, 2000), and Government Confronts Culture (Taylor & Francis, 1999).Emily Hannum is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on education, poverty, and social inequality, particularly in China. Recent publications include “Ethnic Differences in Basic Education in Reform-Era Rural China” (Demography, 2002) and “Education and Stratification in Developing Countries: A Review of Theories and Empirical Research” (with Claudia Buchmann, Annual Review of Sociology, 2001). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and National Institutes of Health that investigates factors in the family, school, and community that support rural children’s education and healthy development in Northwest China.Nabil Khattab completed his Ph.D. at the University of Jerusalem. He is currently a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester. His main areas of interest are sociology of education, the ethnic and gender aspects of the labor market, and social inequality. His most recent publication is “Segregation, Ethnic Labor Market, and the Occupational Expectations of Palestinian Students in Israel” (The British Journal of Sociology, 2003). In his current project, he is looking at the labor market prospects for Pakistani-Bangladeshi women in the U.K. and Muslim women in Israel.Patricia McManus is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research centers on gender and family inequality under advanced capitalism. She will spend 2003–2004 in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute’s Center for the Study of Sociology and the Life Course, where she will study welfare state policy and married women’s work careers in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Current projects also include a study of the impact of residential mobility on gender inequality within households (with Claudia Geist), and a cross-national comparison of the wage penalties for motherhood in the United States and Germany (with Markus Gangl).Stephen L. Morgan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. His main areas of interest are social stratification, sociology of education, and methodology. Recent publications include “Modeling Preparatory Commitment and Non-Repeatable Decisions: Information Processing, Preference Formation and Educational Attainment” (Rationality and Society, 2002) and “Counterfactuals, Causal Effect Heterogeneity, and the Catholic School Effect on Learning” (Sociology of Education, 2001). His current projects include studies of black-white differences in educational achievement and changes in labor market inequality in the 1980s and 1990s.William R. Morgan is a Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. He has been studying and developing education in northern Nigeria over a period of 25 years. In Cleveland, he recently completed data collection for a seven-year study of the impact of the treatment and recovery process for cocaine-addicted women on their children’s development, sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. His new project is a pilot study of the peer recruitment method to deliver HIV/AIDS education to networks of high-risk adolescents and young women.Hiroshi Ono is an Assistant Professor at the European Institute of Japanese Studies, Stockholm School of Economics. He is interested in social stratification and inequality, and the sociology and economics of education, family, and work. Currently he is working on two projects. The first is examining Internet inequality in five countries, and the second is comparing human resource practices between foreign-owned versus domestic firms in Japan. His recent publications include “College Quality and Earnings in the Japanese Labor Market” (forthcoming, Industrial Relations), and “Gender and the Internet” (with Madeline Zavodny, Social Science Quarterly, 2003).Hyunjoon Park, a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is interested in social stratification, education, and health inequality with a particular focus on East Asian countries. His current project examines the process of the transition to adulthood among Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese young people across several dimensions, including educational and occupational attainment, and family formation. Two forthcoming publications include “Intergenerational Social Mobility among Korean Men: In Comparative Perspective” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2003), and “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Voluntary and Involuntary Job Mobility among Young Men” (with Gary Sandefur, Social Science Research, 2003).Susan E. Short is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She specializes in family sociology, social demography, and social inequality. Recent coauthored publications include “Use of Maternity Services in Rural China” (Population Studies, forthcoming); “Maternal Work and Time Spent in Child Care in China: A Multimethod Approach” (Population and Development Review, 2002); “China’s One-Child Policy and the Care of Children: An Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data” (Social Forces, 2001); and “Birth Planning and Sterilization in China” (Population Studies, 2000). In on-going research, funded by the NICHD, she examines the consequences of China’s one-child policy for child well-being.Rongjun Sun is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. His research focuses on population aging, and family relations in both the United States and China. Recent publications include “Old Age Support in Urban China from both Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives” (Research on Aging, 2002) and “Community-Acquired Pneumonia in Older Veterans: Does the Pneumonia Prognosis Index Help?” (with Lona Mody and Suzanne Bradley, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2002). He is currently studying the mortality of the oldest-old in China.Anchalee Varangrat is a Lecturer at the Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Thailand. Her research focuses on family formation, population, and development. She is the author of Population Projection for Thailand, 2000–2025 (Thailand Ministry of Public Health and Mahidol University, 2003). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the Wellcome Trust on factors affecting Thai marriage patterns.Regina E. Werum is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Her research focuses on educational inequality from comparative historical and international perspectives. Recent publications include “Warehousing the Unemployed? Federal Job Training Programs in the Depression-Era South” (American Journal of Education, 2001), and a forthcoming chapter with B. Powell and L. Steelman titled, “Macro Causes, Micro Effects: Linking Public Policy, Family Structure, and Educational Outcomes” (in After the Bell: Educational Solutions Outside of School, edited by D. Conley). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the NAE/Spencer Foundation and NSF that investigates cross-cultural differences in how social capital affects academic outcomes.Raymond Sin-Kwok Wong is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include inequality and stratification, sociology of education, quantitative methodology, urban poverty, and economic sociology, particularly Chinese entrepreneurship in East Asia. His recent publications include “Multidimensional Association Models: A Multilinear Approach” (Sociological Methods & Research, 2001), “Occupational Attainment in Eastern Europe Under Socialism” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2002), and “Chinese Business Firms and Business Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong” (De-Essentializing Capitalism: Chinese Enterprise, Transnationalism, and Identity, edited by Edmund Terence Gomez and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, 2003).Gad Yair is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include the sociology of schools and schooling, organizational theory, the sociology of learning, sociological theory and its history, and the theory-methodology nexus. Recent relevant publications are “Educational Battlefields in America: The Tug-of-War over Students’ Engagement With Instruction” (Sociology of Education, 2000) and “Decisive Moments and Key Experiences: Expanding Paradigmatic Boundaries in the Study of School Effects” in The International Handbook on the Sociology of Education: An International Assessment of New Research and Theory, 2003).

Organizational demography research tends to invoke multi-level concepts that require multi-level theories and analysis. Scholars originally paid little attention to this multi-level work. However, the complex issues involved in studying multi-level demographic phenomena are receiving increasing scrutiny. Three historical oppositions in social science have contributed to current limitations: the disciplinary differences between psychology and sociology; the analytical antagonism between quantitative and qualitative analysis; and the rhetorical distinctions between deductive and inductive discussion. These oppositions suggest that a more qualitative, inductive approach may uncover new directions for multi-level demographic theory. Two possibilities are discussed. One is to refocus on the phenomena themselves instead of their outcomes. Another is to explore how demographic misperceptions influence individual behavior.

The aim of this chapter is to consider the importance of the Chicago School in urban sociology today, both theoretically and methodologically. I will start by showing some indicators and reflections on its importance in American urban sociology. I will then focus on how this heritage has been used and adapted in Italy. In particular, I will present some theoretical and empirical studies implemented in the Bologna metropolitan area by a group of sociologists who, in the Italian context are probably using the Chicago School tools to study urban change and urban problems most explicitly. My contribution is based on bibliographic research carried out both in Italy and in the United States, as well as on some interviews conducted with American urban sociologists. The main findings show the persistent importance of several key elements of the Chicago School, both in Italy and in the United States: the general theoretical approach (space and place affect people), some specific concepts (community, neighborhood, and natural area), and methodology (combination of qualitative and quantitative tools).

The purpose of the paper is to discuss the “Q-Step in the Community” programme, part of the Q-Step Centre based in the Sociology Department at Manchester Metropolitan University, designed to help address the skills gap in quantitative methods (QM) that is evident across parts of the UK higher-education sector. “Q-Step in the Community” is a data-driven work-based learning programme that works in partnership with local organisations to provide placement opportunities for final year undergraduates and postgraduates. Students conduct a quantitative research project, which is typically identified by the placement provider.

The authors use quantitative and qualitative feedback from students and placement providers, along with our own reflections on the process to evaluate the placement programme. Data were collected through a focus group and email interviews with placement providers, along with a questionnaire, which was distributed to “Q-Step in the Community” alumni.

Data-driven work-based learning opportunities allow students to develop and demonstrate their quantitative skills and support networking opportunities whilst also developing valuable soft-skills experience of the workplace that develops their career-readiness. In addition, those opportunities provide valuable research for placement providers, which support their sustainability and enhance their service delivery.

The research focusses solely on one programme at one university offering quantitative data driven work-based learning opportunities at undergraduate and post-graduate level. It is not possible to make valid comparisons between those who do a placement with those who do not.

Views of key stakeholders in the process have been sought for this research, which can be useful to consider for others considering developing similar programmes for their students.

Constructivist grounded theory method (GTM) as outlined by Kathy Charmaz has its explicit roots in the American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism primarily developed at the University of Chicago during the early and mid-twentieth century. Symbolic interactionism considers people as active and interpretative agents who co-construct selves, identities, meanings, social actions, social worlds, and societies through interactions. Charmaz argues that symbolic interactionism is an open-ended theoretical perspective that fosters studying action, process, and meanings, with a focus on how people co-construct and negotiate meanings, orders, and actions in their everyday lives. In this chapter, I argue that constructivist GTM, including its theory-method package built upon symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School tradition, can be further combined with the new sociology of childhood to study children's social worlds and negotiated meanings, orders, and actions.

The current crisis of sociological theory is due to our failure to do sociology as a positive science‐our failure to accept both explanation and prediction as the goal of theorizing, and to use predictive power as the primary criterion for assessing theories. It is argued that sociology as a positive science can advance sociological theory. It is also argued that a positive science of sociology is possible by correcting four major fallacies‐i.e., fallacies concerning controlled experiments, realism of assumptions, subjectivity, and complexity.

In social sciences, after having witnessed several “turns” (cognitive, linguistic, pragmatic, interactional), the authors observe the rise of the “qualitative turn”. Therefore quantitative research methods are not mainstream anymore. One effect of this rebalance between quality and quantity is the recent “resurgence” of mixed methods. However, a new challenge presses social research: creating new methods, which could combine both qualitative and quantitative approaches in a single instrument, squeezing the advantages of both in a single technique. With the benefit of lowering the costs and making more consistent the findings. Some “merged” methods already exist and QROM could be a visionary laboratory. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An overview of recent research on the spread and use of social research methods in different countries.

In social sciences quantitative methods are not mainstream anymore.

The time has come for a further step in the direction of a full integration of qualitative and quantitative methods.

Envisioning the future needs for creating new methods, which could combine both qualitative and quantitative approaches in a single instrument, squeezing the advantages of both in a single technique. With the benefit of lowering the costs and making more consistent the research findings. Some “merged” methods already exist and QROM could be a visionary laboratory.

The rise of “qualitative turn” in social sciences will change the power relations in academy and in the market research. New generations of researchers will bring social research back to the times of Chicago School, where qualitative research was dominated. Only posterity will know if this will be good or not.

This brief paper envisions the need to go beyond the current “mixed” methods fashion in favour of full “merged” methods research.

The paper argues for a comprehensive method of sociological deconstruction and reconstruction that includes: (i) de-subjectifying interpretation, (ii) re-subjectifying explanation, (iii) de-objectifying understanding, and (iv) re-objectifying conceptualization.

Both methodological and substantive arguments are guided by the constructive principle of mediating interpenetration of polar opposites.

Status groups and class interests are conceived as major categories of sociological differentiation mediating between the abstractions of individuals and society. Three types of class formation are discovered in Weber’s legacy beyond Marx’s property one. Sorokin’s work in a two-dimensional social stratification and mobility is found to have major significance for developing the concept of social classes and for reconciling divergent ideas of social stratification. The principle of concept formation by mediation of interpenetrating polar opposites is found to be of greater complexity and effectiveness than Hegel’s logical principle of transcendental supersession.

The comprehensive method of sociological deconstruction and reconstruction seamlessly integrates qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology as well as concept formation and research.