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Participatory modeling (PM) is an engaged research methodology for creating analog or computer-based models of complex systems, such as socio-environmental systems. Used across a range of fields, PM centers stakeholder knowledge and participation to create more internally valid models that can inform policy and increase engagement and trust between communities and research teams. The PM process also presents opportunities for knowledge co-production and eliciting cross-sectional and longitudinal data on stakeholders' worldviews and knowledge, risk assessment, decision-making, and social learning. We present an overview of the stages for PM and how it can be used for community-based, stakeholder-engaged social science research.

The impact of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) is supported by evidence from physical and life science fields, especially when student-apprentices work in traditional laboratories. Within social sciences specifically, some excellent student outcomes associated with UREs adhere to non-lab-based modalities like course-based research experiences (CUREs). Here, the authors evaluate the laboratory-based undergraduate research experiences (LUREs) as a potentially valuable approach for incorporating social science undergraduates in research. Using comparative analysis of survey data from students completing three types of social science-based UREs (n = 235), individual research experiences (IREs), CUREs, or LUREs, students perceived gains overall regardless of the type of experience, with some indication that LUREs are the most effective.

There has been a recent explosion of articles on minimum sample sizes needed for analyzing qualitative data. The purpose of this integrated review is to examine this literature for 10 types of qualitative data analysis (5 types of saturation and 5 common methods). Building on established reviews and expanding to new methods, our findings extract the following sample size guidelines: theme saturation (9 interviews; 4 focus groups), meaning saturation (24 interviews; 8 focus groups), theoretical saturation (20–30+ interviews), metatheme saturation (20–40 interviews per site), and saturation in salience (10 exhaustive free lists); two methods where power analysis determines sample size: classical content analysis (statistical power analysis) and qualitative content analysis (information power); and three methods with little or no sample size guidance: reflexive thematic analysis, schema analysis, and ethnography (current guidance indicates 50–81 data documents or 20–30 interviews may be adequate). Our review highlights areas in which the extant literature does not provide sufficient sample size guidance—not because it is epistemologically flawed, but because it is not yet comprehensive and nuanced enough. To address this, we conclude by proposing ways researchers can navigate and contribute to the complex literature on sample size estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite often heroic commitments to immersion in a given field context, and despite frequent theoretical fluency in analysis, anthropologists rarely show the steps by which they analyze and interpret their data. Because of this, the validity of anthropological analyses is generally difficult to assess, the reinterpretation of existing studies is often a dubious proposition, and the ethical implications of research sampling strategies are often impossible to know. This essay makes use of a corpus of sermon data collected over a summer at a Catholic monastery to illustrate the limitations of sociocultural, ethnographic anthropology as currently practiced and offers several strategies for the interpretation, analysis, and presentation of anthropological data meant to fix these limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Community-based participant-observation purposefully combines participant-observation and community-based participatory research. While participant-observation is the core method of ethnography and foundational to cultural anthropology, community-based participatory research initially emerged from health and related applied sciences to align researchers' and communities' agendas through focused collaboration. Participant-observation and community-based participatory research have different scholarly origins and norms but are united in centering communities' understandings on their terms. Combining the strengths of both, we provide a step-by-step explanation of community-based participant-observation, with examples from a study of water insecurity in colonias north of the U.S.–Mexico border. Using community-based participant-observation, researchers can facilitate the co-production of knowledge and community benefit by analyzing high-quality data that inform theory building and basic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, scholars have invoked E. P. Thompson's and James Scott's concept of a "moral economy" to explain how people mobilize notions of justice to make claims to water. We draw together 20 years of literature to assess the state‐of‐the‐art present in research on moral economies for water. We trace the historical foundations of the moral economies concept and its relevance to water; define the three basic components of a moral economy for water—(1) shared understandings of justice, (2) normative economic practices, (3) social pressure mechanisms—and provide examples of how they manifest globally. We then discuss how moral economies for water can cycle through four basic states—balanced struggle, intensified reaction, mass revolt, and collapse and dissolution—at different scales. We also explore the implications of the moral economies framework for key areas of current research on water: water sharing, water commons, water markets, and biocultural outcomes, and discuss the ways in which the moral economies framework dovetails with recent advances in water research, especially the economics of water and development. We argue that the moral economies framework is a powerful explanatory tool for understanding the relationships between ideas of water justice, economic behaviors, and mechanisms of social enforcement that complements other methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives. We envision moral economies for water as a field that can facilitate a range of norm‐based analyses of economic behavior and water justice, including across scales—from local to global—and in broad, integrative, multiscalar, and cross‐disciplinary ways. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Water GovernanceHuman Water > Value of WaterHuman Water > Rights to Water [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship is commonly understood as the identification, evaluation, and execution of a market‐based opportunity to produce profits. But anthropological scholarship shows that capitalism, and market relations more broadly, cannot function without acts of distribution. Focusing on two different groups of entrepreneurs across the racialized socioeconomic divides of Cape Town, South Africa – White South African entrepreneurs in the city's central business district and Black South African entrepreneurs in the city's largest township of Khayelitsha – this article compares the distributive resources that entrepreneurs use to launch and maintain their businesses. I show that the productive capacity of all entrepreneurs depends upon the distributive resources that are available to them, gained primarily from access to intergenerational wealth or from lateral modes of reciprocity and social support. But more importantly, I demonstrate how these distributive resources and activities reproduce the structural economic inequalities of racial capitalism, which are rooted in South Africa's colonial and apartheid history. I conclude by discussing the implications that this has for the ways that anthropologists discuss the potential of distributive strategies among marginalized populations, as well as the way that scholars and policy‐makers understand the economic potential of entrepreneurial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty‐five years after democratic transition, the political liberation of Black South Africans has yet to translate into socioeconomic transformation. As protesters highlight the nation's failed economic transformation, a group of residents in Khayelitsha—Cape Town's largest township—are attempting to bring about economic transformation by becoming entrepreneurs. While informal entrepreneurship has been a mainstay of South African townships for decades, in this article, I examine the motivations of this new generation of Khayelitsha entrepreneurs, who are starting formal businesses with the goal of gaining a foothold in the power center of South Africa's economy. I demonstrate that while many scholars view entrepreneurship as a symptom of neoliberal ideology, Khayelitsha entrepreneurs view entrepreneurship in less individualistic and more communally oriented ways: as a path to establish greater wealth and opportunity for future generations of Black South Africans. I argue that these understandings of entrepreneurship are indicative of alternative economic imaginations that could have the potential to dislodge dominant capitalist ideas of economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]