While it is important to be able to read and interpret individual papers, the results of a single study are never going to provide the complete answer to a question. To move towards this, we need to review the literature more widely. There can be a number of reasons for doing this, some of which require a more comprehensive approach than others. If the aim is simply to increase our personal understanding of a new area, then a few papers might provide adequate background material. Traditional narrative reviews have value for exploring areas of uncertainty or novelty but give less emphasis to complete coverage of the literature and tend to be more qualitative, so it is harder to scrutinise them for flaws. Scoping reviews are more systematic but still exploratory. They are conducted to identify the breadth of evidence available on a particular topic, clarify key concepts and identify the knowledge gaps. In contrast, a major decision regarding policy or practice should be based on a systematic review and perhaps a meta-analysis of all the relevant literature, and it is this approach that we focus on here.

The overarching goal of public health is to maximise the health of the population, and to achieve this we need evidence about what works and what does not work. Good studies are difficult to design and implement, and interpretation of their results and conclusions is not always as straightforward as we might hope. How, then, can we make the best use of this information? In the next three chapters we look at ways to identify, appraise, integrate and interpret the literature to generate the evidence we need to inform policy and practice. In this chapter we focus on interpreting the results from a single study, because if they are not valid they will be of limited value. The central question we have to answer when we read a study report is, ‘Are the results of the study valid?’

This chapter responds to the questions raised in Chapter 1. It reiterates the need for variationist sociolinguistic analysis of heritage languages to increase our understanding of linguistic structures, variation, and change in multilingual contexts. Each variable is considered through the lens of the profiles corresponding to different sources of change. This allows us to consider whether certain profiles are more common for certain types of variables and of language (types), and whether covariation is more prevalent among any subset of variables. We reiterate how these analyses, based on spontaneous speech in an ecologically valid environment, give a picture of heritage language speakers that contrasts with what we have learned from experimental/psycholinguistic studies, highlighting their stability and consistency with homeland varieties in most cases. Suggestions are made for how this approach can be extended to other under-documented, endangered, and smaller languages, along with discussion of benefits of the HLVC methodology to community members, educators and students, and the field of linguistics. The chapter concludes by reporting on students’ positive responses to engagement with the project.

This chapter defines heritage languages and motivates their study to understand linguistic diversity, language acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics. It outlines the goals of Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto (HLVC), the first project investigating variation in many heritage languages, unifying methods to describe the languages and push variationist sociolinguistic research beyond its monolingually oriented core and majority-language focus. It shows how this promotes heritage language vitality through research, training, and dissemination. It lays out overarching research questions that motivate the project:

• Do variation and change operate the same way in heritage and majority languages?

• How do we distinguish contact-induced variation, identity-related variation, and internal change?

• Do heritage varieties continue to evolve? Do they evolve in parallel with their homeland variety?

• When does a heritage variety acquire its own name?

• What features and structures are malleable?

• How consistent are patterns across languages?

• Are some speakers more innovative?

• Can attitudes affect ethnolinguistic vitality?

• How can we compare language usage rates among communities and among speakers?

Productive scholars prioritize research and use productive research approaches. How else could some produce ten or more publications per year and hundreds over their career? Productive scholars spend about half their work days focused on research, usually preserving the morning hours for research and writing, because those are their top priority and scholars want to give them their full attention when they are most alert. Productive scholars rarely publish alone. They collaborate on nearly 90 percent of their publications. Benefits of collaboration include the division of labor, multiple viewpoints, quicker outputs, and working on several projects simultaneously. Productive scholars typically juggle a half-dozen projects or more, in various phases of completion. They often seek grants that help them do more and better research. They also find publication opportunities by occasionally mining existing data sets, conducting meta-analyses, and composing literature reviews and conceptual pieces. Their research is marked by good research questions that are feasible to carry out with simple but powerful research designs. Productive scholars are self-regulatory, carefully monitoring progress and adjusting their approach as needed. Still, they occasionally fail, as all do. They are not disheartened, knowing that failure is their catalyst and success guide.

This chapter presents the conceptual framework of the book that builds upon several strands of literature: socio-technical systems, institutional and political change, and securitisation. Drawn from existing literature the authors argue that several key factors account for national climate and energy policies, and explain the extent of the region’s climate and energy policy homogeneity and heterogeneity. Such an approach enables the book to identify the differences between individual CEE countries – for instance, the role of ideas can be used to describe the different understandings of what constitutes energy security issues, and the solutions to these. Some but certainly not all countries in the region securitise this issue (e.g., Lithuania and Poland) and frame energy security as a national security challenge, highlighting the foreign policy implications of climate and energy policy and influencing both domestic and EU policy choices.

This chapter begins by exploring the methodological challenges encountered when conducting a teacher expertise study, particularly those challenges that become more prominent when researching in the global South. It then presents a set of minimum requirements for an appropriate, ethical study of expertise in the South, also discussing a continuum of participation from non-participatory to fully participatory research, rather than seeing these as dichotomous. The chapter then summarises the design solution adopted in my own PhD study, including one preparatory stage and seven main stages. As well as discussing participant selection criteria, data collection and analysis procedures, the details of the eight participant teachers and their teaching contexts are also provided. Towards the end of the chapter, full details are given on the quantity and type of data collected, the varied outputs of the study – including the publication co-authored by the eight participant teachers – and the research questions that were investigated. The chapter concludes with a revised and updated overview of participant selection criteria for teacher expertise studies in all contexts worldwide, based on a review of studies conducted to date, supporting Palmer et al.’s (2005) call for multiple criteria selection, yet recommending somewhat different criteria to theirs.

Social inquiry needs representations of social reality, and such representations involve ontological choices of how much to freeze history and geography. The freezing metaphor relates to how much social inquiry relaxes conditional independence and unit homogeneity, the two key assumptions of VBA. Unfreezing history and geography brings to light historical and geographic particularities, makes possible new inductive insights into updating theories, and generates new research questions. Comparisons help turn such explorations into discoveries by identifying patterns. CHA employs four comparisons: cross-sectional, serial, contextual, and historical. It thus differs from VBA, which uses comparison for the strictly methodological purpose of controlling for confounders. CHA goes back to the late nineteenth century and has explored four key themes: the evolution of capitalism, regime changes, the administrative transformation of states, and the changing nature of war. CHA does not have a monopoly on historical thinking. VBA employs historical thinking when exploring confounders and historical boundary conditions that might bias their test results.

This chapter highlights how the evolving field of implementation research is being used to address problems of implementation of health policies, programs, practices, and technologies in low and middle-income countries (L&MICs). Implementation research offers a way to understand and address implementation challenges and contribute to building stronger health systems within the realities of specific and changing contexts. It is used to assess how and why interventions work, including the feasibility, adoption, and acceptance of interventions and their coverage, quality, equity, efficiency, scale, and sustainability. A well-designed research question is critical to successful implementation research, and provides the basis for choosing the research methods and how likely the research will influence policy and practice. In describing the theories, frameworks and tools used in implementation research, they are shown to be well suited to address inter-dependent and complex problems around improving people’s wellbeing – a critical mandate for achieving Universal Health Coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Medical diagnoses and prognoses are often not clear-cut ‘facts’. Conveying these kinds of vague phenomena is a challenge to health professionals, but also a skill that they must master. This study analyses real-life medical data to generate communicative patterns and verified strategies that shape the ways in which professionals communicate uncertainty. The findings may help healthcare professionals to deliver medical information in ways more accessible to the public. Elasticity plays an integral role in imparting medical advice to patients effectively and affirming their choices. This study is the first to explore communication effectiveness in healthcare, paying special attention to the role of elasticity in language use and in an Australia–Taiwan comparison. This research adds a new dimension to the study of health communication and explores better ways to deliver medical information to the public, by challenging linear theories in linguistics and promoting non-linear concepts. Language cannot be totally held to a ‘correct’ standard, nor used just as one wishes. A ‘one size fits all’ rule for language use does not exist, and instead multiple standards guide our use of it.

English as a university subject covers a very wide range of topics, with variation around the world both in scope and in how programmes are organized. Work in English is often more or less formally divided into sub-disciplines. In the UK, language, literature, and creative writing are the three most common subdivisions. In Europe, different divisions are made and students on English programmes often look at two or more of these areas. In the USA, divisions are stronger, with very little work in universities that combines or connects linguistic and literary perspectives. This chapter focuses on undergraduate research on language, literature and creative writing, without presupposing that this encompasses all that can be covered by English or that these areas should be sharply distinguished. It highlights higher education in the UK, partly because there is little data on international practice and anecdotal evidence often relates to particular institutions.

Chapter 1 provides a short introduction to the historical setting in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, as well as a rationale for the chronological boundaries chosen in my research work, i.e. 1500 and 1700. The introductory chapter also provides a comprehensive review of previous, relevant work in Early Modern English orthography. The final part of the introduction outlines three research questions: (1) How can we develop a more systematic empirical method for gleaning insights into the linguistic mechanisms in English spelling? (2) Can new insights into linguistic developments tell us to what extent early printing was relevant to the large-scale standardisation of Early Modern English spelling? and (3) How do the Early Modern English printers’ attitudes towards regularising spelling instruct our understanding of the process of standardisation in English spelling?

The Introduction frames the issue of war economies regulation from an international law perspective and defines the key concepts and frameworks used in the book. It describes the issues that arise at the nexus of economic activity and war, including the militarization of economic activity and the risk of predation, and identifies two kinds of economies as relevant: economic activity for the war and economic activity in the war zone. The chapter concludes by outlining the chapters in the rest of the book.

Chapter 1 introduces the central puzzle the book seeks to solve. We start from the proposition that limited statehood is not a historical accident or some deplorable deficit of most Third World and transition countries that has to be overcome by the relentless forces of economic and political modernization in an era of globalization. We suggest that “limited statehood” is here to stay. Governance research has to account for limited statehood. Accordingly, we ask how effective and legitimate governance is possible under anarchy. How can political rule as well as security and other collective goods be provided when the state is weak or even absent? Areas of limited statehood are neither ungoverned nor ungovernable. We find great variation with regard to effective and legitimate governance, pertaining to both rule-making and the provision of public goods and services. The chapter goes on to discuss the book’s theoretical contributions in addressing this puzzle, as well as its normative, political, and world order implications. We conclude with a roadmap of the book.

The present volume is the fruit of a small conference held in Vienna in late April 2016 under the title ‘Italy and Its Rulers in the Ninth Century: Was There a Carolingian Italy?’. It was the last event sponsored by the ERC Advanced Grant Project ‘Social Cohesion, Identity and Religion in the Early Middle Ages’ (SCIRE)1 which very successfully ran in Vienna between 2011 and 2016. Its specific aim was to bring together researchers working on Italy in the times between the death of Charlemagne in 814 and the death of Berengar I in 924, the last emperor to be crowned until 962. The scope was widened to include the period since King Pippin of Italy, Charlemagne’s second-oldest son, who was responsible for Italy until his premature death in summer 810. The ninth-century kingdom of Italy still lacks an in-depth study that avoids dealing with it merely as a time of transition. This is quite surprising, as, for example, the tenth century has received more studies that are comprehensive. The present volume aims to fill parts of this gap.

The introduction explains the rationale of the book and presents its key research questions, while offering a detailed literature review. It discusses the book's methodology and structure and ends with a thoughtful note on the use of historical sources in this and related research monographs.

A clearly formulated research question is vital in science because it determines the data we need to collect, the methods we use, and, ultimately, the success of a project. Developing a research question is an iterative process of reading and thinking, as we define a problem and specify the contribution we hope to make to resolving it. This is not easy, and we learn through experience, and (if we’re lucky) from our mentors. In this chapter I first explain research questions and the case studies we use to address them, then look at where questions come from. I examine what makes a good research question and end with why reading is essential to the development of research ideas