Variations in Fertility - a Consequense of Other Factors Besides Love?

The purpose of this paper is to discuss possible explanations for the variation in the Swedish fertility rate. We are primarily interested in economic and social conditions and their impact on the total fertility rate between 1965 and 2003. The results from the study support a positive e¤ect on fertility from the female labour market participation and child allowance while divorces report a negative e¤ect on fertility. The model including level as well as di¤erences in the variables has been found to give the best results.Total fertility rate; Economics; Sweden; Time-series

Interpretable Instance-Based Text Classification for Social Science Research Projects

In this study, two groups of respondents have evaluated explanations generated from an instance-based explanation method called WITE (Weighted Instance-based Text Explanations). One group consisted of 24 non-experts who answered a web survey about the words characterising the concepts of the classes and the other group consisted of three senior researchers and three respondents from a media house in Sweden who answered a questionnaire with open questions. The data used originates from one of the researchers’ project on media consumption in Sweden. The results from the non-experts indicate that WITE identified many words that corresponded to the human understanding but also included some insignificant or contrary words as important. In the results from the expert evaluation, there were indications that there is a risk that the explanations could persuade the users of the correctness of a prediction, even if it is incorrect. Consequently, the study indicates that an explanation method could be seen as a new actor which is able to persuade and interact with the humans and cause a change in the results of the classification of a text

Finländska gymnasieelevers reflektioner över historiska gottgörelser : Vilka implikationer ger det för historieundervisningen i Finland

The article discusses a study of what Finnish high school students think of the idea of reparing historical injustices. The philosophical and political aspects of historical reparations have been analyzed widely but there is a lack of research on how people actually ponder on such reparations. The topic is relevant for history teaching because people's reflections on historical reparations also tell about their historical consciousness more generally, e.g. regarding what they see as plausible explanations in history. The study is based on fourteen focus group interviews, made in 2008- 2009; the number of interviewed students was fifty-three. The article analyses the students’s reflections from the perspective of what the students think of the possibility of historical continuity in the context of transgenerational moral obligations and responsibilities. The article relates the findings to earlier studies of Finnish adolescents' historical consciousness and societal thinking, and it also ponders on the consequences of the analysis to the development of history teaching and history curricula in Finland.Peer reviewe

Mot interkulturella färdigheter? : De utomeuropeiska samhällenas historia i finländska gymnasiets läroplansgrunder, läroböcker och studentexamen

Peer reviewe

A Yhteiskuntaoppi: Social studies in Finland. A country report

Purpose: This country report aims to provide a view of the current state and recent developments of the school subject social studies in Finland. Approach: This report draws from research in social studies education that has been done in Finland in the last 20 years, and it also presents selected highlights from the national core curricula and the matriculation exam. Findings: Social studies has recently got the status of independent school subject and it has got more teaching resources which suggests decision-makers consider it important. It does not have a clear epistemological homebase, as school subjects like history or physics, for example, which poses challenges when defining what kind of academic studies are the most pertinent to a social studies teacher, for exampl

Kasvien sisältämät aineet tuholaistorjunnassa

vokKirjasto Aj-

Historical apologies as acts of symbolic inclusion – and exclusion? : Reflections on institutional apologies as politics of cultural citizenship

Institutional apologies for historical injustices can be conceived as acts of symbolic inclusion directed to people whose collective experiences and memories of the past have not been recognized in the hegemonic narratives of the past. However, in this article it is argued that such apologies also have exclusionary potential as vehicles of symbolic politics of citizenship in that they may designate the apologizing community, so that it effectively excludes cultural ‘aliens’, like migrants, from the community of ‘remedial’ citizens. The article suggests a crucial point is the rhetoric shifts when one is appealing to both cultural and political solidarity, as when apologizing in the name of the state but simultaneously invoking ‘our’ nation and ‘our’ history. Thus, the increasing number of institutional historical apologies is not necessarily incompatible with the trend of reinforcing the symbolic boundaries around ‘our’ historical–cultural communities that has been visible recently, e.g. in the demands for cultural canons and citizenship tests in many Western societies.Peer reviewe

Calibrated Explanations for Regression

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often an integral part of modern decision support systems (DSSs). The best-performing predictive models used in AI-based DSSs lack transparency. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to create AI systems that can explain their rationale to human users. Local explanations in XAI can provide information about the causes of individual predictions in terms of feature importance. However, a critical drawback of existing local explanation methods is their inability to quantify the uncertainty associated with a feature's importance. This paper introduces an extension of a feature importance explanation method, Calibrated Explanations (CE), previously only supporting classification, with support for standard regression and probabilistic regression, i.e., the probability that the target is above an arbitrary threshold. The extension for regression keeps all the benefits of CE, such as calibration of the prediction from the underlying model with confidence intervals, uncertainty quantification of feature importance, and allows both factual and counterfactual explanations. CE for standard regression provides fast, reliable, stable, and robust explanations. CE for probabilistic regression provides an entirely new way of creating probabilistic explanations from any ordinary regression model and with a dynamic selection of thresholds. The performance of CE for probabilistic regression regarding stability and speed is comparable to LIME. The method is model agnostic with easily understood conditional rules. An implementation in Python is freely available on GitHub and for installation using pip making the results in this paper easily replicable.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures (replaced due to omitted author, which is the only change made

Analysing adolescents’ reasoning about historical responsibility in dialogue between history education and social psychology

Peer reviewe