published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 627-642). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 627-642).

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-202).

Recent growth and co-optation of social reform programs into the structure of the State, and parallel development of public policymaking, have precipitated closer linkages between social research and the policy intervention process. Program evaluation refers to a variety of descriptive and analytical studies of program process and/or program impact. Two models of program evaluation research are relied upon in design and implementation of evaluation studies: (l) a conventional model derived from a positivist paradigm of social research and (2) an alternative model evolved from an interpretive paradigm. Critical review of these models suggests their complementarity for comprehensive evaluation studies, but emphasizes the extent to which they minimize the significance of larger political/ economic context of program development in shaping evaluation processes. The purpose of this dissertation has been to develop a wider selection of evaluation research models which specifically take into account construction of the research "product" and characteristics of the larger structural context in which such products are designed to be used. The theoretical strategy relies on aspects of Strauss' negotiated order paradigm and approaches to policy research taken by Rein and Wiseman, and involves an effort to relate more stable structural characteristics of the social, political, economic and organizational context of reform programs to a series of six basic areas of negotiation in the evaluation process. These include: (l) delineation of major actors; (2) organizational placement of program evaluation work; (3) choice of general research strategy; (k) selection of appropriate research model and methodology; (5) construction and content of research reports; and (6) planning for research utilization. This framework provided the theoretical perspective for description and analysis of four case studies: two in housing policy, one in private social service delivery and one in delivery of legal education services. Conclusions from case studies, and other research suggested four models of negotiated knowledge. New models include elements of positivist and interpretive models but are designed around the structural context of program planning and implementation and focus directly on the six basic areas of negotiation. This expanded repertoire of models of negotiated knowledge production and use have been labelled Experimental, Managerial, Collaborative, and Transformative. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation addresses the question of the creation of scientific knowledge, in the con- text of an online question-and-answer forum: Stack Overflow. The project starts from the claim advanced in the philosophy and sociology of science that Nature is not sufficient to settle disputes; for a fact to be created by being accepted as true, it must be justified in discourse. Actor-Network Theory claims that this justification occurs through the mo- bilisation of resources, which are marshalled to make a truth-claim unassailable without also defeating all the supporting resources. I adapt ANT’s claim to the methods of Social Network Analysis. In network terms, the facticity of a claim is measured by its indegree — the number of other claims which are justified by it — and its outdegree measures the count of the resources which justify it. I first consider answers to Stack Overflow questions, because they are the most straight- forward to describe, and the closest object to what previous analyses of citation networks of academic papers have considered. The central question is how an answer is made to be true, where I find that the more other answers an answer links to, the higher its indegree. In fact, when the measure of outdegree is expanded to include the resources which resources themselves link to, this association is higher still. While referring to users doesn’t matter in itself, referring to users’ posts does, as does having more code. The best predictor of indegree is the number of users linked to. I also find that although more modalised answers matter more, black-boxed answers which are not modalised at all matter the most. Finally, while more resources make an answer more likely to be edited, they do not make it more likely to be defeated and deleted entirely. But Stack Overflow is also (and primarily) made of questions to which these answers respond, and questions are less addressed by existing theory. The basic conflict is between whether questions are just transparent references to answers, or whether they make their own independent contributions to knowledge. Having established that the network of questions is structurally distinct from the network of answers, I find that questions’ indegree and outdegree are also correlated, but less so than for answers. I find that linking to answers matters, especially when the appropriateness of the answers to the question is taken into account. However, the contributions that questions make independently of their answers, topicality and uniqueness, do not generally matter. Like answers, questions can also be closed rather than answered, and I find that questions that are closed for different reasons have different patterns of answering. In the final chapter, I consider how the techno-social infrastructure of the site encourages the creation of knowledge. The chapter is spent studying the existence and nature of a Matthew Effect on Stack Overflow, going beyond the results for the distribution of reputation to examine the mechanisms involved in assigning reputation. Both the distributions of posts’ upvotes and the attachment kernel indicate a rich-get-richer effect, but they suggest that the effect is not proportional as in common models of the phenomenon. However, it also seems like the reason for attributing more upvotes to users with higher reputation is not solely due to their higher reputation: a regression discontinuity design on displayed user reputation produces a null result, suggesting that the reputation-rich are good, and the good get richer.

Thesis--Hamburg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-202).

Contained within the parameters of postmodern thought, particularly feminist critical perspectives on western epistemology, this thesis proceeds from the following arguments: that knowledge is political: that it possesses a reflexive and dialectical nature and that it is based upon interpretations of reality which are in potential, indeterminate in range. Within these boundaries, knowledge is viewed as a phenomenon subject to influence from social power structures. And western culture is observed to breed situations of epistemological inequality where knowers may become unjustly privileged or oppressed. / Focusing on arguments expounded by Lorraine Code, Patti Lather and Catherine Walsh, this thesis aims to explore how western culture may be observed to impose on consciousness and thereby lead to restriction of interpretive outcomes. Following this line of reasoning, the goal of this thesis is to consider how applications in deconstructionism may be used to emancipate the position of the oppressed knower.

Thesis (PhD) -- AUT University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print (2 v. leaves : ill. ; 30 cm.) in the Archive at the City Campus (T 306.42 GRE)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-152). Also available on the Internet.