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This study investigated peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs) in three protracted conflicts in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel/Palestine. P/CROs are citizen‐initiated voluntary organizations that promote peace, reconciliation, and coexistence between parties to their conflicts, and the mutual recognition of the rights of each side. Comparative research on P/CROs faces theoretical and methodological challenges. They can be analyzed as elements of civil society, as social movement organizations, and as organizations focused on the resolution of conflict. P/CROs activities include service delivery, advocacy, dialog promotion, and consciousness raising. The study examined P/CRO characteristics such as membership, ideology, structure, financial and human resources, relations with other organizations, risks encountered, and impact on the conflict. Study methodology was evolutionary and iterative, and involved a three‐phase selection procedure, research by local teams, and oversight by an international advisory board.

The final chapter reiterates in summary fashion several key issues related to islanders' insularity and identity on prehistoric and early historic Cyprus. Following a discussion of island identities, aspects of insularity and identity on Cyprus are summarized, and suggestions are made about how some of the findings from the Cypriot case might be applied to comparative research in the wider Mediterranean. After further consideration of how insularity and connectivity in the Mediterranean has long served to link diverse peoples and cultures, it is argued that the rich and robust Mediterranean archaeological record demands not only a focused, contextual approach but also broader, comparative treatments that engage deeper research issues, problems, and priorities. To develop such a perspective, certain themes and crucial issues that might be involved in further, long‐term, comparative work in Mediterranean island archaeology and history are indicated. The chapter ends with some final, more general thoughts on islands and identities.

Species that exhibit genetic colour polymorphism are ideal for studying the micro-evolutionary forces that maintain genetic variation in nature. One very intriguing polymorphism is the coexistence of several discrete morphs within only one sex, with one morph often resembling the opposite sex in colour and sometimes behaviour. In males, this resemblance often allows access to receptive females, while in females the polymorphism appears related to avoiding excessive male sexual harassment. One might wonder why natural selection does not simply give rise to a single best male and female type for each species. The phenomenon of sex-limited polymorphisms provides an important opportunity to test contemporary ideas relating to sexual selection and sexual conflict, and the diversity of polymorphisms that have arisen in odonates clearly offers one of the best natural systems for among species and population comparative research.

This chapter addresses some of the key theoretical and methodological questions related to cross-national comparative research, focusing on the research field of (new) media and communication technologies. Following their presentation and some critical reflections in the first part of the chapter, these methodological considerations are applied to the topic of children's online behaviour and online risks and opportunities, taking the research conducted within the European Union (EU) Kids Online project as a concrete empirical example.

The Democrats gained control of Congress in 2007, and the debates about the CHAMP Act’s comparative effectiveness provisions had occurred against the party’s mobilization to win the White House. With the prospect of a Democratic president came the chance of comprehensive health care reform. In late2007 and early 2008 the US economy began its slide into the Great Recession and was in free-fall when Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008. Within 3 weeks the new administration was presenting its plans for fiscal stimulus. Many pieces of ready-to-go legislation were amalgamated to form the February 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, among them $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research. A cliff-hanger battle for health reform culminated in the March 2010 Affordable Care Act, one provision of which was a federal mandate for comparative effectiveness research modelled on a proposal of Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Kent Conrad (D-ND).

In the early 2000’s “comparative effectiveness research”—finding out what works best in medicine—took its place in the parade of legislative proposals aimed at controlling the nation’s unsustainable rise in health care costs. Though many policymakers believed that it was a new kind of research, all that was new was the label: comparative effectiveness research is simply a kind of clinical research. However, its intense appeal as a policy solution grew out of an idea that became a mantra during the 2000’s: that 30% of health care is wasted—wasted because it does not improve patients’ outcomes. If comparative effectiveness research could identify those ineffective or low-value health care items and services, the thinking went, then they could be eliminated without any harmful effects, objectionable alternatives like rationing could be avoided, and the value of the health care dollar would increase.

This chapter uses two examples—perceptual grouping and visual attention—to highlight the implications of comparative research for the vision sciences. In perceptual grouping, results from nonhuman animals suggest that vision scientists look beyond the perceptual cues for grouping and consider an organism's goals, its typical behavior, and its environment. In attentional control, a consideration of how a nonverbal, nonhuman animal might control attention has led to a novel application of learning mechanisms to attentional control. The chapters in this book represent more than merely looking at the human vision sciences literature for a paradigm that can be applied to pigeons, rats, or monkeys. The pigeons, rats, and monkeys can provide fresh insights and important new directions for thinking about the origins of visual behavior.

Although there have already been several studies that investigated how rhythm is integrated with the domains of both music and speech, there have rarely been comparative studies regarding musical rhythm and linguistic rhythm. The lack of such comparative research may be attributed to how researchers of one domain barely have time to look into the complexities of the other since each possesses its own large share of complexities, rather than lack of interest. As such research may enable us to gain a wider view on how rhythm plays a central part in human cognition, one of the goals of this chapter involves providing both empirical and conceptual tools for researchers to examine the links between musical and linguistic rhythm. This chapter clarifies the definition of “rhythm”, introduces the notion of rhythm in speech, and provides an account regarding cross-domain comparisons of rhythm.

This chapter reviews the research contained in this book. The chapter points to the value of cross-national research efforts in providing the opportunity for those interested in social policy in an individual country to learn that indeed most countries face similar challenges. Although uniform policy responses across countries are unrealistic, the work contained in the volume demonstrates that it is possible to organize the different approaches into conceptual groups that have evolved for the most part independently of each other. Finally, the opportunity that comparative work on social policy now provides for all countries is noted. Whereas each country may have developed its own network of social programs largely on an independent basis, an innovative policy developed in an individual country may resonate with others, leading to more widespread adoption. This opportunity to learn from each other about approaches to common problems is the greatest benefit from comparative research on social policy.

This chapter introduces the reader to comparative historical analysis (CHA), one of the oldest methods in the social science repertoire. CHA is characterized by its emphasis on historically contextualized comparisons explicitly aimed at producing causal arguments about the macro-sociological phenomena. After a theoretical overview that discusses the method’s nature, logic, and central concepts, the chapter turns its attention to practical matters. Thus, rather than an extended scientific discussion of what CHA is, the chapter seeks to encourage interested students by providing them with a series of tools and techniques that can be used when doing comparative historical research on social movements and revolutions. More specifically, the chapter offers a five-step approach: research design and puzzle formulation; data identification; the use of data; data analysis; and the writing process. A discussion on the use of technology in the research process is present throughout the practical part of the chapter.

The significance of ‘corruption’ in Europe is recognised a priority area for both social science research and state and non-state organisations seeking to reshape anti-corruption policy and practice within individual nation-states and the European Union more generally. Corruption is variously defined, but the European Commission (EC) suggests corruption takes many forms including bribery, trading in influence, abuse of functions alongside nepotism, conflicts of interest, or revolving doors between the public and the private sectors. However, the EC is not in a position to impose a common legal definition on what (other than fraud against the EU) remains a national issue for each Member and non-Member State. Given the cultural and legal diversity across the European region, this essay poses the question: how and what do we know about ‘corruption’, domestically and transnationally, across Europe? The essay outlines what four main research traditions in criminological research in Europe (surveys and experiments; qualitative studies; national case studies; and analysis of specific cases) before arguing for the need to cultivate theoretically-driven comparative methods of research that can stimulate interactive dialogue, deliberation and argument across European countries, regions and localities with a view to establishing robust empirical and theoretical insights.

This chapter explores how sexual liberalisation values differ between young people with an immigrant background and their majority peers in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and England. It focuses in particular on cultural aspects of immigrant integration, including acculturative change associated with immigrant generations, as well as youth’s varying ethno-cultural heritages and religious affiliations. Analyses document the tendency to more-conservative attitudes among minorities with a more traditional background, in terms of both religious affiliation and country of origin. That cultural imprints are resilient towards acculturative tendencies is also sustained by our findings of no significant differences between first- and second-generation immigrants. Consistently across all four CILS4EU countries, the more religious individuals displayed lower levels of sexual liberalism, other things being equal. Parents are proved to be influential in young people’s value formation, with the congruence of values between parents and children being significantly stronger in more-religious families. Finally, the study highlights the assimilative role of interethnic mixing in terms of either intermarriages or young people’s interethnic friendship ties.

Language does not necessarily support all human cognition. Comparative research continues to uncover the links between the cognitive abilities of humans and other animal species that lack language. Representing and manipulating numbers are important for most aspects of human life, and much of this involves abstract symbolic representations. Given this perspective, the authors illustrate how the comparative approach has been used in the domain of numbers to identify the origins of mathematical thinking. The authors in this chapter found out that a system for representing numbers nonverbally is shared by both humans and many nonhuman animal species. A host of behavioral parallels between human and animal numerical cognition such as ratio dependence, semantic congruity, cross-modal matching, and nonverbal arithmetic are revealed in this chapter. The homologous brain structures appear to support numerical representations in humans and macaque monkeys.

What has been put on the table and how to go on from here? With this question leading, this chapter has two main sections. The first of the two concerns the specification of issues, questions and findings arising out of the chapters in this book, against the background of the street-level bureaucracy literature in general. It proposes a transversal view on the variety arising from the chapters, addressing convergent and divergent trends in terms of findings. The section will conclude by identifying substantive issues to be researched in a future research agenda. Then, building on the latter, section Three develops a more prospective view aiming at drafting how the study of street-level bureaucracy should look like in the future. Three issues will be explored. How can future studies deal with the issue of generalization? Then we suggest that this implies both better specification of the dimensions of variety and contextualized comparison. Finally we explore how the future study of street-level bureaucracy can be made properly comparative.

Cooperation may be a human hallmark, but its evolutionary basis can be found in both chimpanzees and bonobos. This chapter discusses the evolution of cooperation by comparing data from chimpanzees and bonobos both in the wild and in captivity. Much research has previously focused on dyadic cooperation, such as sharing, helping, and reciprocity between two individuals. These studies have revealed that chimpanzees are reluctant to help proactively, even though they have the cognitive ability to understand others’ desires. Bonobos appear to be somewhat different from chimpanzees. They are more spontaneous, tolerant of others, and, like humans, better at collaborative activities. Such comparisons of dyadic cooperation between chimpanzees and bonobos may lead to the hypothesis that cooperative society has evolved primarily in stable environments with large food patches (i.e. “rich” environments) like those in which most bonobos inhabit. However, in the context of group cooperation, wherein chimpanzees sometimes outperform bonobos, a different perspective may lead to the hypothesis that group cooperation evolved predominantly in “poor” environments where animals had to collaborate in groups to find resources and to protect themselves against out-group threats.

This chapter discusses the method and research design, and some of the methodological problems, in the project. The research investigates the outcome of long-term unemployment among youth. There are various methodological problems in comparative research. However, the attrition analyses conducted for the countries involved showed that, all in all, the material is well balanced and that there is no need to correct skewness. However, the Scottish and Italian cluster samples are difficult to assess because they are not representative samples.

The introduction outlines the main themes and explains the theoretical and methodological framework of the book. The author introduces the Indigenous communities in which the fieldwork was conducted, explains the methodology and case selection and discusses the rationale for the comparative approach. It considers the complexity of the concept of gender from an Indigenous perspective. Secondary literature on Indigenous feminist analyses of self-determination is also discussed, especially that produced in the United States. The original research is also framed and contextualized in the broader, ongoing conversation on Indigenous self-determination and Indigenous feminist analyses in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.