Path analysis provides social science researchers with a powerful tool for conducting theory guided empirical studies with multiple variables. This case presents a step-by-step description of how we used path analysis to examine immigrants' acculturation in multicultural societies. We describe a series of papers we published based on two distinct research studies that used a common instrument. The process of building a path analysis model is explained, specifying how to utilize a theory, build a questionnaire, and develop a model with your data. The case ends with a discussion of some of the lessons learned in our prior research and suggests how to continue this research in the future.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to refute See and Gorard’s paper published in this journal in 2015 which argues that parent-based interventions for school readiness are ineffective.

Design/methodology/approach

Methods and results from 107 studies that were cited in See and Gorard (2015a) and associated reports were reviewed. Evaluations were made based on comparing the original studies with the summaries of those studies in the publication.

Findings

In this rebuttal, the authors show how See and Gorard erred to correctly report methods, sample sizes, outcomes measured, and the actual results of prior research.

Practical implications

The authors suggest that See and Gorard do not provide solid evidence within their article to back up their claims about parent intervention programs. This rigorous review of See and Gorard’s primary sources reveals that the empirical evidence stands contrary to the claims being made. See and Gorard inaccurately reviewed publications which contradict their conclusions, and they relied on a vast amount of unpublished papers by students to support their claims.

Originality/value

The authors demonstrate how See and Gorard misapplied their own standards of evaluation; the authors claim that their source materials contradict the “finding” they purport to present; and the authors argue that they chose lesser known studies when more reputable ones were available.

The present paper extends Lotka’s theorem—which we rename as “the law of limited excellence”—while empirically modelling the scientific productivity of 46 Israel Prize laureates in the life and exact sciences—a group best described as ‘Star Scientists’. By focusing on this highly selective group we expose unequal scientific productivity even amongst Israel’s most prolific scientists. Specifically, we test the invariance of Lotka’s law by focusing attention on the extreme tail of publication distributions while empirically exploring the non-linearity of its seemingly “flat” tail. By exposing the rarity of excellence even in this extreme end of publication productivity we extend the generality of Lotka’s theorem and expose that—like a fractal—the tail of excellence behaves as the entire distribution. We end this empirical contribution by suggesting a few implications for research and policy.

Unsupervised, early adulthood behaviours affect young people’s preference for a political party. Quantitative analysis was conducted on a nationally representative survey with high school students in Israel. Data were collected following the 2009 legislative elections. Ordinal logistic regressions reveal how gender and religiosity, along with their interactions with objective social activities and substance use, impact party identification on a dovish-hawkish scale. A theory of youth independence and political opinions is outlined and tested. Religious students who refrain from extracurricular socializing are shown to be more apt to develop radical hawkish political opinions, while secular students who engage in more substance use are shown to be more apt to develop dovish political opinions. Discussion is provided for the multiparty political context of Israel. The results provide an understanding for the way that youth subcultures develop political ideologies that continue into adulthood.

Following its defeat in the Second World War, Germany began to reevaluate its cultural assets. Critiques of "black pedagogy" and its effects on child-rearing practices led to the liberalization of the German family. Parents and kindergarten teachers began to promote values such as responsibility and autonomy, and it appeared that "black pedagogy" would become a thing of the past. The present paper assesses this claim by engaging in a qualitative analysis of interviews with eighty Israelis who live in Germany, coupled with one hundred further responses to an online questionnaire. The findings suggest that, in contrast to the notion that child-rearing methods have changed, the troubling practices of the past have persisted. While confirming the presence of values such as autonomy, politeness and pacifism, respondents reported on the stubborn presence of blind obedience to disciplinary measures aimed at preserving order. After presenting those findings, the paper assesses the effects of this persistent pedagogy, finding both a lack of creativity and lack of empathy in German adults. In the child-rearing practices of the early 21st century, Israelis see characteristics that may have provided fertile ground for the Holocaust. They perceptively discern the character traits that allowed ordinary Germans to collaborate with the Nazi regime. It may be that the Israeli cultural trauma magnifies those perceptions, but the respondents insist that traces of black pedagogy can still be found in Germany today. Some even fear that if this pedagogy persists, it could once again lead to a repeat of what happened during the Third Reich; this time, in the seemingly multicultural and modern liberal country of Germany.

Femicide—the killing of a female because of her gender—is becoming an increased object of sociological enquiry, rectifying years of invisibility. The article presents results from ethnographic interviews with three migrant women who survived “failed femicides.” A “failed femicide” is defined as an attempted femicide where the medical examination of the victim confirmed a life-threatening event, the victim had been hospitalized in emergency, and she or the perpetrator had described the event as an attempted murder. It is argued that failed femicides should be added to the growing literature on domestic violence, on the one hand, and femicide, on the other. The article presents narratives from three survivors of failed femicide attempts among Ethiopian female migrants in Israel. They present an interesting contrast to large-scale, quantitative, ethnocentric, male-oriented studies of femicide focusing on Western women. Since few women actually survive femicide attempts, the nature of the small sample should not deter the scholar from the depth of migrant women’s plights.

The survivor narratives were analyzed by means of thematic analysis. The analysis produced five key categories: village society in Ethiopia; cycle of domestic violence; motive; weapon; and recourse to authorities. The themes provided understanding into these migrant women’s subjective experiences and the ways they understood events. While no generalizations can be made, the article may encourage comparisons with other failed femicide survivor narratives from other migrant women originating and residing in different settings. With the increase of migrants the world over, non-Western survivor narratives may become an increasingly important tool for policy-makers and for academics to understand how femicides occur, how migrant women perceive them, and how they can be combated

Almost four decades have passed since the term femicide was coined in 1976. This new word had a political purpose, in that it intended to produce changes in the social order which tolerated the violent death of women. Since that time, the word has generated a theoretical concept that encompasses the killing of a woman as a specific social phenomenon. Femicide is an effort in sociological imagination that has been successful in transforming conventional perception, public awareness, scientific research and policy making. This article undertakes to review how femicide has evolved in social research. It analyses the most important theories explaining femicide: the feminist, sociological, criminological, human rights and decolonial research approaches and their theoretical significance. It discusses Mexico as a case study, exemplifying how a new English term was then translated into another language and applied in a very specific socio-political context, so that it became instrumental in changing reality and improving the lives of women. Finally, the article proposes a framework where femicide is understood as a social phenomenon that demands an interdisciplinary approach. The authors recommend a systemic, multifaceted model in order to improve both scientific analysis and prevention.

The sociological literature on femicide, compared to intimate partner and other forms of gender violence, is scarce. While feminist sociology has addressed the inaudibility of women, femicide remains invisible. Femicide rates are social facts worthy of sociological attention. Like suicide, femicide has to be defined and analysed according to type. The article postulates possible reasons for the invisibility of the phenomenon, such as the unpleasantness of the subject, scope, its conception as a radical feminist idea, fuzziness, its identification with other concepts like genocide, and methodological difficulties in researching it because of the impossibility of researching dead women first-hand, missing data and the difficulties in comparing data cross-nationally. None of the seven posited hypotheses could account for the dearth of sociological literature on the subject. Suggestions for enhancing the visibility of femicide are made, with a call to unearth the phenomenon and remove its invisibility in sociology.

This study provides insights about attitudes toward heroes and role models in German and Israel. We expected German and Israeli school textbooks and teachers to provide varying renditions for the traumatic effects of World War II and the Holocaust, and for students to express different attitudes about the role of heroes in their lives. In contrast, the study found that German and Israeli adolescents share perceptions about heroes and role models, suggesting that either there are no such models today or that heroes and role models are overblown and dangerous for democracy. In doing so they reflect a broader consensus among their teachers and the school textbooks they use.

This article applies the theory of “key educational experiences” to argue that while German memorials and documentation centers provide visitors with ample information about the Third Reich, their tone of neutral objectivity and their strategies of identity dissociation prevent German visitors from identifying with the German past. The sites’ declared educational goals are thus undermined. The author concludes that a post-traumatic pedagogy of repression and evasion is unlikely to create key experiences that will have long-term effects on visitors’ identities.