The Elmhirsts emerged from the First World War feeling that orthodox Christianity was no longer adequate as a guide either to belief or to conduct. Like others of their era, they looked for new forms of spiritual meaning, a new guide to moral behaviour, new sources of affective or social fulfilment and different frameworks for understanding the nature of society as a whole. Collectively, this chapter terms these searches ‘socio-spiritual questing’. It considers four approaches taken at Dartington to filling the gap left by Christianity. The Elmhirsts tried re-shaping the Church with the help of the arts, explored the possibilities of Eastern spirituality, worked to advance humankind’s unity through group spiritual exploration and experimented with a planned regime of ‘psycho-physical hygiene’. Interwar socio-spiritual questing was so wide-ranging and amorphous that it defies comprehensive survey. Dartington Hall provides an alternative way of drawing together its various strands: an unusual convergence in a diffuse landscape of seeking.

I make the case that researchers should understand epistemology and its implications for their work. Provides an overvierw of subsequent chapters.

This chapter suggests that the cosmopolitanism of convicts, ex-convict settlers, and their descendants rendered penal colonies ideal places for investigations into the human sciences, and for the development of social science research methods. Administrators and visitors carried out innovative statistical and ethnographic studies in punitive locations, triangulating medical records, and anthropometric measurement with surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. The focus of attention of such research included the pathology of criminal behaviour, the social, cultural, and biological impacts of transportation, and sexuality. In some cases, it emerged out of a concern with the merits or otherwise of penal colonization. In others, it contributed to and shaped contemporary debates on race and, in the Indian context, caste. This can be seen in the analysis of the work of French naval surgeon Joseph Orgéas, in French Guiana; Anton Chekhov’s famous study of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East; and censuses in the Andaman Islands. Finally, the chapter examines Franck Cazanove’s study of sexuality in the relégué(e) (repeat offender) settlement of Saint-Jean-du-Maroni in French Guiana. Inadvertently, though focused on ‘depravity’, it reveals much about same-sex cohabitation, marriage, and love.

There remains a gap between needs, aspirations and delivery in psychiatry and mental health. To close this gap there is a need to attend more intensely to social science and mad studies, as well as neuroscience, in professional formation in psychiatry and mental health. Further strengthening of the nursing profession and greater engagement of action therapies will also help close the gap in practice. To be effective, such efforts must be underpinned by a commitment to pluralism.

Behaviour is the actions and reactions of an organism or group of organisms. Living organisms, robots and virtual agents all exhibit measurable forms of behaviour. Measuring behaviour involves assigning numbers to direct observations of behaviour using specified rules. Direct observation means collecting data that relates directly to the performance of the behaviour pattern in question. Measuring behaviour accurately and reliably is important because behaviour is central to answering many questions in the biological and social sciences. Measuring behaviour is challenging because behaviour has a temporal component, does not always occur in discrete bouts, is generally complicated, can be influenced by stimuli undetectable to humans and varies both within and between individuals. Studying behaviour can be broken down into a series of steps that starts with asking a question and ends with communicating findings.

Ten years since the publication of the first edition of this handbook two things are clear: The world is no less complicated than it was a decade ago and we are better at designing, running, and analyzing experiments today than we were then. In light of these observations, in this chapter I highlight the areas in which political scientists and their collaborators have excelled and how they have done so; but I also point out the challenges –in fact, in some cases, the pure limitations – that remain. Still, the prescription is for more work, more science, and more explanation in the service of reducing the apparent chaos of the interactions between the people and institutions around us.

The emergence of “social theory” as a distinct intellectual genre represents a historic renewal of considerable importance. Tracing the development of key concepts allows us to understand its analytical specificity as compared to the traditional genres of inquiry (politics, law, morals, and political economy). It makes it possible to identify its formative period (between the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century), and its most prominent pioneers – Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Scottish moral philosophers.

Johan Heilbron is a historical sociologist, currently Professor of the Sociology of Education at Uppsala University and affiliated with the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP-CNRS-EHESS) in Paris and Erasmus University Rotterdam. Relevant books include The Rise of Social Theory (1995), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity (coedited, 2001), Pour une histoire des sciences sociales: hommage à Pierre Bourdieu (coedited, 2004), French Sociology (2015), and The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations (coedited, 2018).

Chapter 10 describes the curious case of the social science of war, which shed its social problem framing in the early postwar era. From the interwar years through to the late 1940s, war was a public-facing problem whose solution-the eradication of armed conflict-seemed within reach for many social scientists and their internationalist allies. Quincy Wright's magisterial and multi-disciplinary 1942 A Study of War exemplified the social-scientific ambition to foster peace through an expert-guided world order. The Cold War, however, abruptly stalled war's brief career as a social problem. The Soviet threat, and the national security state erected in response, helped to reframe the social science of war in management terms. For the next two decades most social scientists of war-though split on methodology and approach-hitched their study to the Cold War struggle. By the late 1960s the Vietnam debacle had implicated Defense-sponsored work on counter-insurgency and psychological warfare, leading to a public backslash against military entanglements. Many social scientists abandoned the study of war in Vietnam's wake, ceding the domain to political science in general and international relations in particular. The result was a social science of war that remained, into the 1980s, centered on statecraft and security.

In this epilogue, we reflect on the prospects for advancing interdisciplinarity in the sciences of culture, mind, and brain. Neuroscience is increasingly applied to address questions of central concern to the social sciences. Social sciences, in turn, can contribute to neuroscience research in a variety of ways, including: (1) the study of social factors that influence the brain across the lifespan; (2) the context-sensitive translation of neuroscience research into applications in clinical and other social settings; (3) critical social analyses of cultural, conceptual, and institutional framing and constraints on neuroscience research, knowledge production, and applications; and (4) integration of each of these approaches in an ecosocial view of the brain in its social-cultural niche. Obstacles to interdisciplinarity stem from institutional structures, methodological strategies, epistemic commitments, and divergent ontologies. We describe strategies to surmount these obstacles, including: (1) institutionally, creating spaces for collaborative work, supporting interdisciplinary career tracks, and ensuring sustained funding; (2) conceptually, borrowing models and metaphors across disciplines, establishing boundary objects of common interest, using system diagrams to locate diverse levels and processes in the same model; and (3) methodologically, establishing convergent validity through mixed and hybrid methods, and creating shared databases and pipelines to facilitate integration of multiple perspectives.

Chapter 2 analyses sociological and psychological research pertaining to same-sex parenting. This chapter builds on as it uses the relevant research to guide the application of the best interests principle. This research is used to inform the demands of the principle and to reduce the indeterminacy and subjectivity of decision-making as it relates to the children of gay and lesbian families. Existing sociological and psychological studies are assessed to determine whether children’s best interests can be served by same-sex parents and, consequently, whether legal recognition of these family relationships is desirable. This approach is also used to assess the application of specific laws in terms of their impact on the best interests of the child.

David J. Brewer is famous for announcing in 1892 “this is a Christian nation” from the bench of the United States Supreme Court. He believed that Christianity justified an official separation of church and state while remaining the foundation of all human law. A liberal Congregationalist who was comfortable straying from literal readings of the Bible, Brewer spoke often in public on Christianity although his religious faith rarely surfaced in his judicial decisions. His many public speeches allow us to see how religion underlay his opposition to economics regulations as part of an influential conservative voting bloc on the Fuller Court at the turn of the century. Brewer’s stance against appeals in criminal trials relied upon his belief that flawed human justice and perfect divine justice played different roles. Brewer’s work in the peace movement was supported by a hope that it helped to hasten the Second Coming of Christ.