Advances in Social Sciences Research
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2013 Advances in Social Sciences Research ADVANCES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES RESEARCH Edited by ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 Dr Yvette Yun Yue i Australian International Cultural and Educational Institute (AICEI) Advances in Social Sciences Research Advances in Social Sciences Research Dr Yvette Yun Yue (Ed.) Australian International Cultural and Education Institute (AICEI) Sydney, Australia June 2013 ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 ii Advances in Social Sciences Research Copyright © 2013 Australian International Cultural and Educational Institute (AICEI), Australia All rights reserved. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted components of this work in other works must be obtained from the Australian International Cultural and Educational Institute. Australia International Cultural and Educational Institute (AICEI) Sydney, Australia Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.auaicei.com Advances in Social Sciences Research Edited by Yvette Yun Yue ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 iii Advances in Social Sciences Research Preface On behalf of our AICEI committee, I would like to express my sincerest appreciation of the contribution of the conference delegates to the 2013 Online Conference on Multidisciplinary Social Sciences. Online conference is an innovative conferencing which has brought a series of revolutionary changes to the traditional conference. Traditional conference requires participants to travel and stay in a particular place. It is a time- consuming and costly process. Online conference uses the Internet as a conference "venue" in which participants can access the conference from anywhere at any time via Internet. It will become the most economical way of sharing your insights and publishing your research outputs in the near future. AICEI aims to build an open and accessible platform for all scholars, researchers, and professionals who are interested in sharing their studies from various perspectives in the field of social sciences. This year, we successfully have attracted a number of delegates from different parts of world (America, Europe, Asia, Middle East, Oceania, etc.), with different research background (professors, lecturers, researchers, professionals, research students, etc.), and working in the different disciplinary fields (linguistics, politics, education, history, psychology, cultural studies, sociology, etc.) to showcase their latest research outcomes on this platform. It is your participation makes the event multicultural and multidisciplinary. We are delightful to see the harmonious communication beyond the cultural, racial and linguistic limitations on this platform. The book, as a collection of peer-reviewed papers which present the key issues in social sciences around the world, aims to promote diversity and unity in research on a multidisciplinary basis. Yvette Yun Yue ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 iv Advances in Social Sciences Research CONTENTS Academic Alchemy: The Social Construction of Social Scientific Knowledge Richard Heyman ......................................................................................................... 1 Visualizing Semiotic Unity: The American-Soviet Cultural and Educational Mission of the Late 1980s in the International Association of Astronomical Artists Kornelia Boczkowska ................................................................................................ 13 Irregular Migration as a Global Phenomenon: A View from Spain Miryam de la Concepción González‐Rabanal ........................................................ 29 The Interconnected Communities: A Socio-Literary Communication in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Mina Soleiman Nejad and Leila Baradaran Jamili ................................................... 48 New Technologies and Changing Roles within Research, Culture and Education Andrea Cerroni and Elisa Di Biase ............................................................................ 61 Teachers’ Feedback and the Social-Psychological Injustice Hamideh Baggali Basmenj ....................................................................................... 74 National and Cultural Specificity of Metaphorical Nicknames Tsepkova Anna ......................................................................................................... 89 Translation in Ethnographic Research Francesco Bravin ...................................................................................................... 99 Learning Generators: English Teaching and Learning Innovation through Computer Education Eva Zanuy ............................................................................................................... 111 ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 v Advances in Social Sciences Research The Role of Creative and Global Thinking in ELT Classes Ozlem Yagcioglu ..................................................................................................... 118 Cross-cultural Inclusion in a Program for Men Who Batter Ann Marie Dewhurst1 and Karen M. Nielsen2 ........................................................ 132 Comics and Literature in a Multivalent and Multidimensional Interplay: Debunking Cultural Stereotypes and Redefining Literariness Moula Evangelia ..................................................................................................... 141 Infinity of Reality in Wallace Stevens's 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' Elmira Javadi Doodran and Bahman Zarrinjooee .................................................. 157 Culture of Consumption: Poles’ Consumer Attitudes Aneta Duda ............................................................................................................ 171 Online Games for the English and Spanish Language Learners Ozlem Yagcioglu ..................................................................................................... 187 ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 vi Advances in Social Sciences Research ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 vii Advances in Social Sciences Research Academic Alchemy: The Social Construction of Social Scientific Knowledge Richard Heyman University of Calgary, Canada Abstract: Newspapers, magazines and all the electronic media, as well as respected academic journals report the latest scientific findings in sociology, political science, economics and psychology. But how many people ask the question: is this really scientific knowledge that we're seeing? Or are the social science claims to scientific knowledge really no different than the medieval alchemists claim to making gold from base metals. Alfred Schutz observed that the world of nature, as explored by the natural scientist, does not “mean” anything to molecules, atoms and electrons. However, the things of the social world have specific meaning and relevance for the human beings living, acting, and thinking about them. Using our common-sense experience and understanding we literally think our world into existence by creating these thought objects which then reflexively create our understanding and talk about this world. In other words, although physical and social reality are meaningful to the observer, physical reality exists apart from the meanings we give it. Social reality exists only in the meanings we give it. The issue of meaning lies at the root of evaluating knowledge claims about the social world because there is no way we can separate the communicated meaning of social things from the things themselves. Social objects are created by our interpretive work and communication about them. The argument of this paper is that because the social world exists in and as the meanings we give to our encounters and experience of everyday life, we cannot study it using the methods of the physical sciences. Social scientific knowledge can therefore be best understood as a social construction and, as such, consists principally in tautological propositions and value statements. Key words: science, social science, knowledge, ontology, epistemology Introduction How should we assess social science knowledge claims? Are they science? Are they social fact or social fiction? John Searle, in Mind, Brain and Science (1983: 11) wrote that a good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that anything that calls itself ‘science’ probably isn’t. He had in mind, he said, things like Christian Science, military science, cognitive science and even social science. The common understanding of science is that it is about two things: cause and effect in the material world. Social science research often seeks cause/effect explanations ISBN: 978-0-9875862-0-9 1 Advances in Social Sciences Research by asking people questions about their behavior and assuming that their answers explain that behavior (Byrne 2010). Social scientists ask people questions and then used their answers to stand for some objectively real action, or feeling, or motivation, which psychologists translate into personality types or other variables. Questionnaires, surveys, polls, and interviews, are all normal research tools social scientists use in order to know and understand social behavior. And all these methods are fundamentally flawed. For the past fifty years there have been a series of unheralded advances in understanding the nature of social things that have shed important light on what we can and can’t know about the social world, and the differences between social things and