Health system spending, and the consequent impact on health are increasingly a focus of governments around the world. Given the strain on resources and systems, increasingly scarce resources require targeting more effectively. Measuring efficiency and productivity are increasingly the focus of government gepartments, both nationally and locally. Thus, assessing how efficiency is measured and how valid and robust results are is critical to those involved in policy and service delivery. This chapter presents revised guidelines as to how users should set up such studies to be as useful as possible and how end users can assess how useful they actually are to them in their specific setting. Conclusions are drawn as to how these can be used in a fast-changing world, and potential consequences of not following guidance are discussed.

The HLVC project applies consistent methods of data collection, analysis, and interpretation to a range of languages and dependent variables. This is meant to mitigate the pattern of diverse findings from diverse studies that may partially result from diverse methods. This chapter therefore describes how the corpus is constructed, focusing on the cross-linguistic, cross-generational, and multi-method design, and gives details about recruiting, recording, and transcription of the sociolinguistic interview, the ethnic orientation questionnaire, the picture description task, and the consent procedure. It then describes the workflow for data processing and metadata construction, describing both how the corpus is organized (to be useful to additional researchers) and how we have analyzed variation of a number of variables to date. These include prodrop, case-marking, VOT, and (r) across multiple languages, apocope and differential object marking in Italian, and tone mergers, classifiers, motion-even marking, denasalization (an element of so-called lazy pronunciation, 懶音 laan5 jam1), and vowel space in Cantonese. It details the methods of analyzing ethnic orientation and several proxies for fluency (speech rate, vocabulary size, language-switching measures). Finally, it describes the methods used for constructing and comparing mixed-effects models for cross-variety comparisons in order to distinguish contact-induced change, internal change, and identity-marking variation.

Mutual engagement between psycholinguistic and variationist sociolinguistic research is important: work to date shows quite different outcomes from these approaches. This chapter illustrates that, in general, heritage speakers maintain the grammatical structures and vocabulary of homeland varieties, in contradiction to widely held beliefs that language quickly “degrades” or is “bastardized” in immigrant communities, and in contradiction to many published studies about heritage languages. However, both approaches converge on finding change in one phonetic pattern in some of the languages analyzed. In this chapter, the potential sources of this apparent contradiction are explored, considering differences related to population, sample, methods of data collection, analysis, and predictors. This allows us to better understand whether, for example, reported “deficits” among heritage language speakers might be partly due to a deficit in test-taking and experience with formal contexts in the heritage language. It closes with a proposal for more coordinated work across methods.

Remarkably, the classification of science is only now being studied historically. The introduction specifies this book’s question: What made applied science seem such a potent economic, cultural, and political elixir in the United Kingdom for many decades and then saw it superseded? The book explores the meaning of the term that gave it such potency using five tools: institutions, narratives, sociotechnical imaginaries, concepts, and ideologies. The term has epistemic connotations; it has been promoted and blamed for its science policy implications, and cultural reality once weighed heavily. The book explores the relationship between ‘applied science’ and ‘technology’ with their different emphases to describe the space between pure science and the market. The argument has three parts: the nineteenth-century concern with pedagogy, the early twentieth century as attention shifted to research, and the period after World War Two in which the visibility of applied science first rose and then collapsed.

provides background material on the nature of human language and how it differs from animal communication, as well as a brief history of reading and how it differs from oral language. The chapter also reviews the methods that are being used to study the mental processes that support reading, including various behavioral tasks (e.g., lexical decision), eye tracking, and brain imaging. The chapter also reviews two influential computer models of reading that have been adapted to Chinese: the Interactive-Activation model of word identification, and the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading. The chapter closes with previews of the remaining chapters.

The concluding chapter takes stock of findings and trends in the field, identifies key challenges, and highlights directions and methods for research. It focuses on the imbalance between the three elements comprising the field of emotion regulation in parenting: how parents regulate their own emotions, how parents regulate their own emotions in the context of parenting, and how parents regulate the child’s emotions during parent–child interaction. The most documented of the three is the regulation of the child’s emotions by the parent and its effect on child development. The chapter highlights other shortcomings, such as the importance given to parent-driven effects over child-driven effects, the predominance of correlational studies, and a tendency to simplify by considering the relationships between emotion regulation, parenting, and child development as linear and homogeneous. This chapter proposes future directions focusing on content and methodological issues to overcome the current limitations. Although much work has been done at the intersection of emotion regulation and parenting, much remains to be done. The perspectives proposed should stimulate research in this area.

Narrative methods and analysis can take many forms. There are major disagreements in the literature. Here a straightforward approach is provided. One which will help the reader conduct their own analysis and also read and interpret the analyses of others. Narratives are often derived from narrative interviews and the data that emerges can be messy, partly because stories can be messy. A number of indicators of quality in narrative analysis is provided, from trustworthiness and the co-construction of meaning to the multi-layered nature of stories and contextuality. A straightforward guide to narrative analysis is provided, along with a consideration of narrative coherence, reliability and validity.

The Conclusion summarises pathways towards a wider theoretical trajectory for studying theatre anthropologically. What can public art institutions, especially theatres, tell us about the ethical relevance of art in German and European society today? How do artists in such institutions reflect on their practice, methods, and theories, and in doing so, what kinds of expertise do they develop? What methods and theoretical frameworks do we require to develop new approaches to professional public theatre today? The conclusion constitutes an outlook on the wider import and significance of this interdisciplinary study for anthropology, theatre, and performance theory.

The research methods we use to assess prosociality in young children are the ultimate arbiter for our understanding of prosocial development. The theoretical conclusions we base on empirical data are nested, if not entirely rooted, in the ways in which we measure and statistically model children’s prosociality. This chapter focuses on early ontogeny and systematizes the landscape of research methodologies currently used to study prosocial development. It offers a critical reflection on some of the methodological and statistical constraints under which current research on prosocial development is being conducted. The chapter closes by arguing that new technological advances have paved the way for a more inclusive and systematic study of prosociality in the early years of development. Embracing these ongoing efforts will require a new kind of discussion about the ways in which we statistically model development and how we draw inferences about “significant” effects in early ontogeny.