Dealing with heterogeneity in ordinal responses

Quality & Quantity - In sample surveys where people are asked to express their personal opinions it is conceivable to register a high level of indecision among respondents and this circumstance...     

Quality evaluation and preferences of healthcare services: the case of telemedicine in Sardinia

Quality & Quantity - This paper explores preferences towards cardiological e-health services, assessed on a representative quota sample of potential users in Sardinia, Italy. By a mixture model...     

Personal relationships in the digital age: three female academics’ qualitative research

This essay deals with the theme of personal relationships on social media, linked to the theme of online identity, bringing together the research and reflections of some of the most important academics of the internet. They are three Americans from different generations: Sherry Turkle, Nancy Baym and danah boyd, who are concerned with looking into interpersonal online relationships (the body is therefore absent) demonstrating particular sensitivity to emotional aspects which are brought into play at the point where humans and technology, online and offline and public and private spheres meet. If the first stage of internet history highlighted users’ freedom of identity expression, then the era of social networks is about the ease with which people can maintain and expand a network of contacts, while raising some doubts over the quality of such relationships. It is interesting to see how the three academics place not only the quality of the relationship, but also the quality of research at the centre of their reflections, demonstrating their passion for the work which is part of their lives.     

Some examples of classification and causal analysis

The aim of this essay is to point out how important a connection there is between the results of an analysis of the relations among variables (like that of a causal analysis) and a classification of subjects. The author presents two examples taken from research on electoral behavior in Italy: the first considers a case of typology derived from a causal scheme; in the second, the author analyzes the possibility of a classification of subjects based on the residual variable. The problem of a classification connected to a causal analysis becomes important, not only for the identification of all the subjects utilized in the research through “types,” but also for the grouping of more subjects into homogeneous groups in terms of the results of a causal analysis.     

The numbers of Intimate Partner Violence and femicide in Italy: methodological issues in Italian research

Quality & Quantity - The article reviews the research conducted in Italy on the issue of gender-based violence and in particular on femicide, a phenomenon that has become increasingly important...