**6. References**

138 Sociological Landscape – Theories, Realities and Trends

over 50% are with the expression of "impacts", "losses", "suffering from", or "changes of life", even no these kind of words but only a description of the phenomena. Therefore, this study on the vulnerability to coastal hazards includes as many as possible literatures, and no special criteria set up to exclude or include studies. In the process of full-text reading, the synthesists analyze the literatures and mine the connotative driving factors and their causing relations of vulnerability from all studies. This requires skills in semantic (literal) and idiomatic (meaning)

By virtue of their emphasis on idiographic knowledge, or the complexities and contradictions of particulars, in some sense qualitative studies resist "summing up"(Light and Pillemer 1984). Then developing a technique to compare the findings of each study, along with determining the methodological comparability, or the similarities and differences among studies is the permanent challenge to meta-analysis. Some researchers argue that a "quality weighting" could be set to weight the studies and then to make the comparison of findings(DiMatteo, Morton et al. 1996). But then the problem of "criteria by qualify" would

The meta-analysis of vulnerability in this study meets the same problem. The factors in category "Geography and Environment" possess the highest total number of mentioned times and the highest percentage of times mentioned. But in some of the documents, the geography of the particular case under investigation is presented simply as background information rather than a contributing factor to hazard vulnerability. Then when determine the relative importance of factors only by counting the frequencies, geography and environmental factors would be the most important, which obviously is a misleading conclusion. On the other hand, if the relative importance is determined by other criteria of weight, such as the background of authors, the disciplines, the geographic affiliations, it

Also the weighting of factors is related directly to the outputs of meta-analysis. Additionally, how to weight the difference and the similarity between studies is a complex problem which depends on the aims of meta-analysis, methods employed, criteria of

Meta-analysis is a systematic framework that could be applied in the synthesis and comparison of accumulated studies, no matter literatures or field data. Unlike quantitative meta-analysis, in the qualitative research field the methods employed in meta-analysis is various according to different studies. Currently the main methods used in qualitative metaanalysis are still vote-counting or similar methods (Geist and Lambin 2001; Kevale 2001; Misselhorn 2005). But this is an inexact approach to integrating research, because it depends on the sample size very much. In fact, the wide variety of presentation ways, the artificial lines drawn in research reports among methods, results, discussions and findings are all challenges to the meta-analysis methods. Therefore, progressed approaches are expected in

From the view of applied fields, meta-analysis approach has been used for a long time mainly in the field of experimental medicine, clinical pharmacology, and behavioral sciences. Also it has been used in quasi or non-experimental contexts of economic research

qualitative meta-analysis to match the progressed research framework.

translation of key ideas in studies(Noblit and Hare 1988).

would plunge in the bias of quality or sampling again.

selection and even the expectation of outputs.

**5.3 Weighting factors in synthesis** 

be introduced inevitably.


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**Can Sociology Help Us to Live a Better Life ?** 

This question, although trivial as it could appear, is neither so easy to by-pass, nor so

Sociology consists, at first, of a lot of concepts (better: "ideal types", according with Weber), statements, theories, all grounded on observations and reasoning. In other words, it consists of knowing something, but also of thinking about the reliability of the way we put together

According with a common sense shared by both laymen and most scholars, at the first level all kinds of knowledge are the outcome of some methodical actions aiming to reproduce within human mind some features of "reality". At the second level, they come from a methodical reasoning aiming to "explain" the events observed. And finally, they consist of drawing some

Some basic assumptions taken for granted are connected with such statements. The first one is that there is a "reality" existing behind and before our observations, independently on them; secondly, such reality is (or at least ought to be) rationally arranged to give place to a *Kosmos*, so as the ancient Greeks said. Then, human reason is able to catch such rational arrangements, because of a real similarity between both reasons: human and natural, subjective and objective. Finally, the three levels are "rationally" ordered according with the

Philosophers have many different opinions about such statements, but anyway they couldn't be demonstrated. Then I think it would be dangerous to build our knowledge on such unsettled grounds. Of course we can let laymen do so: indeed by this way they usually build a common sense knowledge permitting them to manage their everyday life. Moreover the same happened successfully along many centuries, before the modern pattern of science

We know very well that such a pattern has been revised several times: during the Enlightenment, by the nineteenth century Positivists and the neo-Kantian philosophers, until the sophisticated discourses of twentieth century epistemologists (see mainly the

such concepts, statements etc. Exactly the same as other sciences do.

above hierarchy of priority: observing, explaining, forecasting.

elaborated by Royal Society would be established.

conclusions useful to forecast what could arrive in the future, more or less far.

**1. Introduction** 

useless: as I hope to show a little later.

**A Phenomenological Approach** 

**to Clinical Sociology** 

*Suor Orsola Benincasa University, Naples,* 

Massimo Corsale

*Italy* 

Yu, C.-S. (2002). A GP-AHP method for solving rout decision-making fuzzy AHP problems. Computers and Operations Research 29(14): 1969-2001. **8** 
