HELPING PEOPLE'S

Dr. Nicos Rossides is the CEO of Medochemie, an international pharmaceutical company with more than 100 operations worldwide. Nicos is also the Chairman of DigitalMR's Advisory Board. This post originally appeared on the Digital MR blog www.digital-mr.com/blog/ Nobel laureate Kahneman has written a seminal book on the different types of thinking processes we humans deploy. In “Thinking, Fast and Slow” he argues that cognitive biases profoundly affect our daily decisions - from which toothpaste to buy, to where we should go on holiday. He goes on to claim that our decision processes can be understood only by knowing how two different thinking systems shape the way we judge and decide: "System 1" is fast, instinctive, subconscious and emotional;   "System 2" is slower, deliberative, logical.   The book delineates cognitive biases, such as how we frame choices, loss aversion, and our tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events . .  All th...

There have been lots of interesting discussions and topics floating around about new social media in the social scienes. What better way to share than to host some tweet chats! See below for the dates and the topic we will cover for each tweet chat. All times are London time. Tuesday 7th October, 2014 at 5pm: Representativeness of online samples Including: What are the geographical inequalities in contributions across different social media platforms? What approaches can we take to address this? How can we weight twitter data? How can we learn about demographics of people on social media, such as age, gender, employment? Monday 17th November at 5pm: Ready, set, research!: accessing funds and data Including: You have an idea for a study, how do you go about funding it? What funding streams are available? What are the regulations/restrictions of accessing different streams? How do we get our hands on big data sets from the likes of Google and Twitter? Tuesday 9th December at 5pm: The ch...

Mark Carrigan is a sociologist and academic technologist and first wrote this blog post for his blog http://markcarrigan.net/ . Contact Mark on Twitter @mark_carrigan Earlier this week, NatCen Social Research hosted a meeting between myself, Chris Gilson ( USApp , @ ChrisHJGilson ), Cristina Costa and Mark Murphy ( Social Theory Applied , @christinacost & @ socialtrampos ), Donna Peach ( PhD Forum ,Donna_Peach) and Kelsey Beninger ( NSMNSS , @KBeninger) to discuss possible collaborations between social science bloggers in the UK and share experiences about developing and sustaining social science blogs over time. We didn’t do as much of the latter as I expected, though I personally found it valuable simply to voice a few concerns I’d had in mind about the direction of academic blogging that I’d heretofore been keeping to myself for a variety of reasons. The manner in which the audience for Sociological Imagination seems to have stopped growing over the las...

Ivett Ayodele is an undergraduate student at the University of Salford studying BSc (Hons) Psychology and Counselling. She tweets as @ivettayo and @salfordpcy1 and blogs here .   I have accepted the challenge to review Qualitative Online Interviews by Dr Janet Salmons (2015) because I believe that as part of the next generation of psychologists, it is a great opportunity to familiarise myself   with the emerging methods of online interviews, which will surely become popular in the future. It is also a great chance to extend my knowledge of qualitative methods generally, while writing this post helps to develop my academic writing skills. My task is to give a student perspective on the book since a lecturer’s perspective has already been explored (see here ). Qualitative Online Interviews by Dr Janet Salmons (2015) guides researchers and students through the process of extending their research into various online settings and it gives guidance on ethical issues that can arise d...