PRACTICAL RESEARCH I

Week 18

Name: Teachers:

Grade & Section:

ACTIVITY 1: TOPIC TO TITLE

1. Broad Topic: Social Science

Specific Title: Integrating Social Science into conservation planning

2. Broad Topic: Social Science & Humanities

Specific Title: Investigating the trends in arctic research: The increasing role of social
sciences and humanities

3. Broad Topic: Social Science

Specific Title: A constructive role for social science in the development of automated
vehicles

ACTIVITY 2: BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

1. Integrating Social Science into conservation planning

Background of the study

This study focuses on providing specific ways in which the social sciences can
be integrated into four fundamental stages of conservation planning processes: 1)
Defining the problem and project team; 2) Defining goals; 3) Identifying impact
pathways and designing interventions (e.g., policies, programs, projects); and 4)
Defining and monitoring indicators of success (or failure). We focus on these four
stages of planning processes as they are relevant and applicable to a diversity of
rational planning approaches (Bright et al., 2000; Schwartz et al., 2018), including
adaptive management and Theory of Change (ToC; Biggs et al., 2017), which are
 both fundamental components of the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation
(i.e., Conservation Standards (CS); Conservation Measures Partnership, 2013).
Below, we describe how each stage fits within these existing planning frameworks.
While we present the four stages in a specific order, we recognize that planning often
does not occur linearly, and that the different stages may inform one another in an
iterative and adaptive fashion, as we later illustrate with our case study.

2. Investigating the trends in arctic research: The increasing role of social sciences and
humanities

Background of the study

These studies commonly utilized experiments as methodological tools. By the early
1990s, there was a notable increase in Arctic related studies in SSH disciplines (e.g.
Yates et al., 1995; Honneland, 1998; Joyner, 1998; Brubaker and Ostreng, 1999;
Wallace, 2000; Yevdokimov, 2000). At this time, these studies were fewer than
Natural Sciences publications, and were categorized under particular SSH research
areas including international relations, transportation, political science, environmental
studies, economics, and government and law. The research methodology in this study
involves three main tools: bibliometric analysis, semantic clustering and content
analysis. Bibliometric analysis is generally carried out using VOSviewer software in
order to identify the key terms and parameters, based primarily on occurrence
frequencies, in the body of literature under consideration (Pauna et al., 2019; Donthu
et al., 2020). It is also utilized to identify clusters of key terms and parameters that co-
occur in the corpus, and hence, are closely linked. As output, the software provides a
network representation that demonstrates multiple characteristics of the data and its
contents.

3. A constructive role for social science in the development of automated vehicles

Background of the study

 This study about constructive social science means moving beyond the
conventional and restrictive division of labour between the development of
technology on one hand and assessment of it on the other. Practically speaking, this
should entail new modes of collaboration with those involved in the development of
the technologies. For example, an underappreciated benefit of the social sciences is in
generating concepts that can, when built into use scenarios, help technologists and
system architects increase the resilience and robustness of their thinking and
planning. Models exist for this in other areas of technology development and
implementation. For example, the regulation of water usage (Floress et al., 2015) has
benefitted from such an involvement of social scientists. In a similar way, rather than
only playing a role downstream in the assessment of impacts, implications and
unintended consequences, we seek to make a contribution upstream, in the design and
governance of sociotechnical systems and the transitions towards them.