Focus groups are a qualitative research method that involves a facilitated group discussion to elicit the perspectives of participants. They use group dynamics and encourage communication among research participants. Thus, focus groups are particularly useful for brainstorming ideas and to understand the reasons for differing opinions. They also have broad applicability in social and behavioral science, and the resulting findings can be used to inform practice and policy. This chapter provides an overview of focus group methods, including design, participant selection, conduct, and analysis. It also provides a guide to ensure rigor in conducting and reporting focus group studies. Considerations in conducting focus groups in specific populations, including children and culturally and linguistically diverse populations, will also be discussed along with considerations for using online platforms to conduct such studies.

In this chapter, we illustrate how to perform an economic analysis of energy investments from a private as well as a social point of view. In the first part of the chapter, we present the most important investment criteria that can be applied in the evaluation of private investments, i.e., the net present value and the internal rate of return. Because of their importance in the energy sector, we also discuss the computation of the levelised cost of energy (LCoE) and the concept of the learning curve. In the last part of the chapter, we introduce social cost–benefit analysis, highlighting the differences between this approach oriented to choose projects which maximize society’s welfare, with respect to private cost–benefit analysis. At the end of the chapter, we discuss issues in developing countries related to the topics discussed in the chapter.

Chapter 3 offers a sustained reading of the nature of auditory perception in George Eliot’s Middlemarchin order to demonstrate the significance of listening and attentiveness not only to the pathological sounds of the body but to those metaphoric heart beats and vibrations that signify psychological struggles within the novel as a whole. In Eliot’s realist project, I argue, both medical and imaginative explorations of the vibrations and pulses beyond the thresholds of usual human ‘stupidity’ and sensory perception are stimulants to the imagination, but they are not a cause for horror or dread like those gothic treatments of the stethoscope discussed in the previous chapter. Rather, they offer an opportunity for cultivating medical knowledge, sympathy, and humility. Here, attentive, stethoscopic listening ultimately provides a means of discrimination, of knowing and orienting oneself, and of relating to others in the modern world.

This chapter contributes a decolonising analysis of tax primarily in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine the legal constitution of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act in relation to its attempts to reform First Nations’ governance. I demonstrate how the federal government looked to organise a ‘taxpayer’ ethos amongst First Nations citizens through publicising First Nations band salary details and audits. This taxpayer ethos was meant to simultaneously encourage citizens to critique their governments rather than the Canadian federal government, but also to promote private property on reserves. I make a theoretical argument for the necessity of thinking through tax with a decolonising lens that both specifically respects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and offers a critique of how tax operates to erode that very sovereignty.

Obtaining French citizenship is not enough to secure social acceptance, and terror attacks committed in the name of Islam have critically impaired Muslims’ claims to national membership. Beginning with a discussion of how the construction of Muslims as a “suspect community” has impacted their daily lives, the chapter explores Muslim leaders’ efforts to display exemplary conduct to reassure majority members and circumvent the terrorist stigma. Their actions, such as organizing guided tours and open days in mosques, are emblematic of this endeavor, as well as of the asymmetrical burden of mutual understanding that characterizes postcolonial European societies. Moreover, embodying exemplariness involves cultivating Islamically justified dispositions for approachability and gentleness in daily interactions. Efforts to allay suspicions can also lead Muslim leaders of the UOIF to establish taboo forms of cooperation with intelligence officers, which highlights the ways in which the securitization of Islam relies partly on the involvement of certain community members. Overall, through their practice of disidentification from “Salafi,” “literalist,” and other “extremist” worshippers, French Muslim leaders tend to reinforce the distinction made by state authorities between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” thereby deflecting the fundamentalist stigma onto some coreligionists.

Hamlet is thrown into a state of uncertainty about the eternal. Indeed, his famed “delay” is a response to the thought of eternity. He is given “pause” by imagining “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”. The eternal is the “rub”. The chapter tackles this obscure rub by turning to Soren Kierkegaard, who references Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in his Philosophical Fragments. Resurrection, for Kierkegaard, is a movement through non-being to being. Negativity here plays a critical role. To be “born again”, the learner must “become[] nothing and yet … not [be] annihilated”. Hamlet’s struggle with the eternal opens him to an expansive view of humanity that goes beyond Claudius’s will to power or Laertes’s customary honour. It brings him to a new political vision, outside the violent and reductive dynastic politics of Denmark. Hamlet seeks what would seem impossible within revenge tragedy: the incalculable. The “eternal” is here used in an inclusive sense to show how the obscure but liberating thought of the timeless or untimely allows ideas of justice, charity, equality, and forgiveness to enter the play. The eternal suggests an imaginary perspective that negates our current preoccupations and political economies.

The goal of this chapter is to raise awareness for legal design evaluation, introduce existing theoretical frameworks in evaluation that can be used as templates for legal design evaluations, and recommend the next steps. It will provide strategies for defining and utilizing mixed methods data, quantitative data, and qualitative data. This chapter outlines the human-centered value and intended uses of Trauma-Informed Evaluation and Culturally Responsive Evaluation (CRE) and conclude with proposed suggestions for further efforts in legal design evaluations.

Considers how to track cells and molecules. Introduces tracking algorithms and statistical tools to analyse the resultant data.

Building a successful research career often requires being adept at the methods and tools of the time. For social and behavioral scientists today, that means navigating online participant platforms and the tools used to create online studies. In this chapter, we describe how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) can be leveraged as a source for participant recruitment. We provide a brief history of MTurk’s usage by researchers, describe the challenges researchers have faced with the site, and summarize the status of issues like data quality, sample representativeness, and ethics in online research. Along the way, we provide tips for how researchers can use MTurk to collect high-quality data and to start and advance a research career.

It is well known that tales of the occult and the supernatural provided Charles Dickens with an ideal forum in which to explore the mysterious workings of the human mind, body, and nervous system. Although Dickens’s imaginative explorations of spectral encounters can be firmly tied to his preoccupation with the operations of the mind, this chapter demonstrates that Dickens nonetheless actively drew upon spiritualist modes of thought and practice in his writing. This is most notable, I argue, in Dickens’s meditations on the nature of the creative ‘spirit’ as a kind of presence to be overheard and in his use of sound in facilitating strange or seemingly supernatural experiences. A self-confessed voice-hearer and ghost-seer, Dickens frequently positions both himself and his characters, most especially those upon their deathbeds, as highly sensitive listeners, alert to, indeed eager to encounter, the possibilities of vibrations beyond the ordinary.

A 73-year-old man was referred by his oncologist because of dyspnoea occurring for one and a half weeks, and high CK levels (1341 U/L). For four years he was treated for a melanoma with pulmonary and cerebral metastases. Treatment included nivolumab that had been started three months previously. The dyspnoea was worse on exertion and when lying down. He also experienced some difficulties speaking clearly, and choking had occurred a few times during the past week. He had no diplopia. The complaints did not fluctuate. There was some recent myalgia, but he had not noticed any muscle weakness.