background and purpose: the problematic reduction of civic engagement in local communities of khuzestan province in the southwest of iran has became a serious issue for research in social planning and policy making. efforts have been made to study the risk factors as the deterrents to engaging in the society. methods: this study aims to investigate the factors influencing civic engagement among...

Based on the past sixteen years of experience with an online collaborative endeavor offered across differing university types, as well modes instruction, best practice found that by fostering student peer exchanges a web site students reached high level achievement in these courses. Findings indicate despite differences institutions or were academically reflective their discussions geographic b...

English A deep philosophical divide exists between ‘strictly objective’ scientists, who believe that engaging in civic debates undermines objectivity, and ‘citizen scientists’, who believe scientists can – and at times should – help decision makers incorporate sound scientific knowledge. Here we suggest that the threat posed to scientific objectivity by the escalating politicisation of science ...

This article describes and evaluates civic networks in Europe and the USA. These are seen as attempts to use new media technology, particularly the internet, to improve participation in local democratic processes. Various aspects of democratic communication are examined, including information access, preference measurement, deliberation and group mobilization. A wide variety of city-based exper...

For more than a generation in the United States, and now increasingly in Europe, students have shown growing interest in the “tradition” of political theory. This particular literary practice is often said to be one of the guiding intellectual threads of the Western tradition as a whole. It is remarkable, therefore, that historically this “tradition” has had practically no professional practiti...

COHABITATION Cohabitation is defined by social scientists as two adults of the opposite sex living together in an intimate, nonmarital relationship. Cohabitation has rapidly become a prominent feature on the landscape of American family life. Using the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), Kennedy and Bumpass (2007) estimated that 58% of women aged between 25 and 29 had cohabited at som...

This paper provides what we believe to be the first collection of data on social capital in the transition countries of central/eastern Europe and of the former Soviet Union. Using data from the World Values Survey 1990 and 1995 we document the degree of trust and of civic participation and find that these indicators of social capital are significantly lower than in OECD countries (Organisation...

Work-for-welfare style unemployment policies have been introduced in the majority of western countries as part of an overarching contractual regime, which demands various prescribed forms of reciprocation of citizens who require government income support. Communitarian scholar, Lawrence Mead, argues that such policies are ethically justified because they demand 'civic equality' of unemployed ci...