Situation, context, and causality—On a core debate of violence research

The sociology of violence has undergone a tremendous change over the past 10 years, increasingly arguing that situational factors are key to violence emergence, rather than context factors. Yet, many key questions regarding this novel situational approach remain unanswered: How can situation and context be conceptually specified? Can context be integrated into a situational explanatory model? And what causal understanding underlies situational approaches? To answer these questions, the paper relies on my empirical studies of officer deadly use of force and of collective violence in protests, as well as other scholars’ empirical work. The article first proposes a specified definition of situation and context. Using these concepts, it then proposes a causal specification of the situational approach through necessary, sufficient, and INUS conditions, as well as context factors as risk factors to violence. Third, in an outlook, it argues that this causal relationship between situation, context, and violence can be theoretically framed through an elaborated symbolic interactionism that integrates context into a situational approach. It also discusses the relevance of the debate for violence avoidance and for other research fields

Once more with Feeling: Rezension zu "The Emotions of Protest" von James Jasper

James M. Jasper: The Emotions of Protest. Chicago, IL / London: University of Chicago Press 2018. 978022656178

YouTube, Google, Facebook: 21st Century Online Video Research and Research Ethics

Since the early 2000s, the proliferation of cameras in devices such as mobile phones, closed-circuit television (CCTV), or body cameras has led to a sharp increase in video recordings of human interaction and behavior. Through websites that employ user-generated content (e.g., YouTube) and live streaming sites (e.g., GeoCam), access to such videos virtually is at the fingertips of social science researchers. Online video data offer great potential for social science research to study an array of human interaction and behavior, but they also raise ethical questions to which existing guidelines and publications only provide partial answers. In our article we address this gap, drawing on existing ethical discussions and applying them to the use of online video data. We examine five areas in which online video research raises specific questions or promises unique potentials: informed consent, analytic opportunities, privacy, transparency, and minimizing harm to participants. We discuss their interplay and how these areas can inform practitioners, reviewers, and interested readers of online video studies when evaluating the ethical standing of a study. With this study, we contribute to an informed and transparent discussion about ethics in online video research

Video Data Analysis as a Tool for Studying Escalation Processes: The Case of Police Use of Force

This article explores the use of video data analysis to study escalation processes. Based on an in-depth study of officer-involved shootings in the United States, it first discusses the use of body-worn footage, CCTV camera, mobile phone, and dash cam footage for the analysis of escalation processes and the benefits of triangulating video data and document data for contextualizing situational analyses. The article then examines video data analysis as a fruitful tool to study police use of force and discusses two key aspects in such analyses: validity assessment and focus on specific analytic dimensions and lenses. Both aspects are illustrated by my study of officer use of force. Findings indicate that by triangulating various sources of ready-made videos available online with document data, the role of situational dynamics, as well as biases for officer use of force, can be studied systematically. Officer use of force is a striking and present example for how 21st century video data and video data analysis can allow novel insights into social phenomena. But such data and analysis also increasingly allow for examining other instances of escalation, as well as other types of extraordinary and everyday events

Analyzing 21st Century Video Data on Situational Dynamics—Issues and Challenges in Video Data Analysis

Since the turn of the millennium researchers have access to an ever-increasing pool of novel types of video recordings. People use camcorders, mobile phone cameras, and even drones to film and photograph social life, and many public spaces are under video surveillance. More and more sociologists, psychologists, education researchers, and criminologists rely on such visuals to observe and analyze social life as it happens. Based on qualitative or quantitative techniques, scholars trace situations or events step-by-step to explain a social process or outcome. Recently, a methodological framework has been formulated under the label Video Data Analysis (VDA) to provide a reference point for scholars across disciplines. Our paper aims to further contribute to this effort by detailing important issues and potential challenges along the VDA research process. The paper briefly introduces VDA and the value of 21st century visuals for understanding social phenomena. It then reflects on important issues and potential challenges in five steps of conducting VDA, and formulate guidelines on how to conduct a VDA: From setting up the research, to choosing data sources, assessing their validity, to analyzing the data and presenting the findings. These reflections aim to further methodological foundations for studying situational dynamics with 21st century video data

The Swarm Intelligence: Mapping Subterranean Politics in Germany

In a study of Europe’s “subterranean politics,” Mary Kaldor’s team at the London School of Economics and Political Science, working with partners across Europe, has examined both new political parties and public protests, finding that all of these phenomena share not only opposition to austerity, but also extensive frustration with politics as currently practised. This week, the team reported on their findings

Collective rule-breaking

Rules form an important part of our everyday lives. Here we explore the role of social influence in rule-breaking. In particular, we identify some of the cognitive mechanisms underlying rule-breaking and propose approaches for how they can be scaled up to the level of groups or crowds to better understand the emergence of collective rule-breaking. Social contagion plays an important role in such processes and different dynamics such as linear or rapid nonlinear spreading can have important consequences for interventions in rule-breaking. A closer integration of cognitive psychology, microsociology and mathematical modelling will be key to a deeper understanding of collective rule-breaking to turn this field of research into a predictive science