Open data governance: civic hacking movement,topics and opinions in digital space

Quality & Quantity - The expression ‘open data’ relates to a system of informative and freely accessible databases that public administrations make generally available online in...     

Gender fluidity across the world: a Multilevel Item Response Theory approach

The concept of gender identity refers to the intrinsic self-identification of personal femaleness and maleness. Starting from 1970s, in the framework of gender studies, a theoretical and conceptual demarcation between sex and gender has been proposed. The term “gender” starts being referred to social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities, not to the state of being male or female. Recent studies on gender identity suggest that the binary notion of gender identity is changing, recognizing that there are different views on how gender may be performed or experienced. The purpose of our research is to provide accounts of gender code transformation around the world and identify differences in feelings, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors associated with gender across different identity profiles. Using a web-based survey, 1,600 respondents were recruited by a snowball sampling procedure. Based on the intersections of the responses given by participants on three basic dimensions (biological sex, gender self-identification and sexual orientation) the individuals have been categorized into nine groups. To comply with the aims of this study, a two-parameter Multilevel Item Response Theory model has been employed as an appropriate statistical tool for considering both person and item effects on the response data and assessing the effect of group membership on the overall variability.     

Acceptability of energy sources using an integration of the Delphi method and the analytic hierarchy process

The research presented in this paper is structured on the basis of the extensive literature on the world energy shift and, in particular, the dynamics of the political, social, market, and community acceptability of different energy sources. This study attempts to determine which sources of energy are most accepted or preferred by political systems, public opinion, and the market and the weights that these dynamics of acceptability have on the global energy shift. In this theoretical framework, we present an application and propose a methodology resulting from the integration of two methods: the Delphi method and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). While Delphi seeks a convergence of opinions among a group of experts, the AHP helps solve complex decision problems using a hierarchical structure. To integrate the Delphi and AHP methods, we propose an innovation in the way the feedbacks are circulated among the participants. The experts’ judgements are given in a box-plot using a slider, which simplifies the procedure because the respondents have all the most important information on the distribution of responses from the previous round. At the same time, our method eliminates the problem of the choice of one of the diverse methods of aggregation, which are necessary when the AHP is applied in a group setting. The application of this method to energy issues and the dynamics of the acceptability of the different sources in particular revealed the feasibility and advantages of the instrument and produced interesting results.