Abstract The global mechanisms of modern society, including the formation a market and expansion foreign domestic trade have led to increased demands on quality products services. Information about quantity manufactured is obtained as result measurements. Metrological activity has significant impact acceleration scientific technological progress, improvement product production efficiency. There...

The enduring importance and utility of comparative research in sociology are as old as the discipline itself. Although comparative research flourishes within this discipline, methodological problems persist. After defining comparative research, this article outlines some of its central problems, including: (1) case selection, unit, level and scale of analysis; (2) construct equivalence; (3) var...

Every year in England and Wales there are about 200 million consultations between patients and general practitioners. Yet knowledge about these consultations is uneven and, in many aspects, scanty. There are statistics about the numbers, cost, and content of the prescriptions that are made up as a result of these consultations. The survey of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Office of...

In systematic studies of the molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis, DNA fingerprinting is used to estimate the fraction of incident cases attributable to recent transmission of Mycobacterium tuberculosis rather than reactivation disease and to identify risk factors for recent transmission. This approach is based on the premise that tuberculosis cases that share a DNA fingerprint are epidemiolo...

Networks describe a range of social, biological and technical phenomena. An important property of a network is its degree correlation or assortativity, describing how nodes in the network associate based on their number of connections. Social networks are typically thought to be distinct from other networks in being assortative (possessing positive degree correlations); well-connected individua...

EDITOR,—In a recent paper published in this journal, Kposowa reported that divorced and separated men had a higher risk of suicide than married men. Men and women of other unmarried status reportedly did not suVer any excess risk of suicide in comparison with their married counterparts. We have some reservation about the findings, and wish to point out two methodological problems that may have ...

While much attention has been paid to the idea of displacement in crime place theory and research, methodological problems associated with its measurement have often been overlooked. We focus on such issues in the context of immediate spatial displacement around hot spots of crime. Using the Minneapolis Hot Spots Experiment (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995) as an example, we identify specific proble...