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The Center for Homeland Defense and Security's unique academic environment brings together mid- and senior-level government officials with world-renowned faculty and experts in the diverse disciplines that comprise homeland security. The CHDS classroom is a place where participants think critically about homeland security issues and work collaboratively to develop strategic solutions. Master's degree participants research and write course papers along with a final thesis. These original works concentrate on proposing creative policies, strategies and approaches to the public safety challenges facing their agencies and the broader homeland security community.

Sustainable development, climate policy, biodiversity conservation - all these represent flash points at the intersection of environmental science, economics, and public policy. This volume offers a snapshot of environmental economic research on a range of policy-relevant problems. Academic contributions are complemented by the views of policy makers on environmental policy priorities, the usefulness of academic research for decision making, and the future of applied research.

"Every aspect of our everyday life has been infiltrated by technology. In many cases, technology has the potential to increase productivity in our subjects of study while simultaneously enhancing social participation. Despite these advantages, technology and digital services have the potential to have a detrimental impact on people's emotional, physical, and social well-being. Our interactions with the media have changed as our lives and expectations have changed. To attain digital wellbeing and mindfulness, it is not essential to use technology less frequently. Rather, it is about critically questioning how we use technology and considering why we use it - do we make a constructive decision or do we simply let ourselves be lured by the tempting digital platforms?"--

The process of completing any piece of empirical research requires that a large number of methodological decisions be made at each step in the undertaking. Some of these decisions are very clearly prescribed by conventional practice, while others allow for wide discretion. This paper discusses various kinds of discretionary decisions in applied research where special difficulties are necessarily produced by the requirement to speak to the needs of policy makers and other research users. Emphasizing the inevitable advocacy role of applied researchers, suggestions are provided for which kinds of discretionary methodological decisions in applied research should be encouraged and which should be condemned.

Applied research has the potential for greatly enriching social theory Many of the metatheoretical assumptions that underlie social theory are seldom explicitly stated. The attempted application of theory and postapplication analysis often bring these assumptions to the fore. Applied research also allows for a more rigorous testing of theory than that which is possible in nonapplied research. In this paper an effort is made to delineate some aspects of the relationship between applied social research and theory through the use of cultural deprivation theorizing and investigations.

Non-parametric methods are widely used for studying populations that take on a ranked order (such as movie reviews receiving one to four stars). The use of non-parametric methods may be necessary when data have a ranking but no clear numerical interpretation, such as when assessing preferences. In terms of levels of measurement, non-parametric methods result in "ordinal" data. As non-parametric methods make fewer assumptions, their applicability is much wider than the corresponding parametric methods. In particular, they may be applied in situations where less is known about the application in question. Also, due to the reliance on fewer assumptions, non-parametric methods are more robust. Non-parametric methods have many popular applications, and are widely used in research in the fields of the behavioral sciences and biomedicine.-

Health literacy has become a key-element of public health promotion – rising as a discipline, a career and even a transactional value – and a variety of professionals have assembled around it. This paper departs from the divergent notions of health knowledge that such heterogeneity entails. Embracing a patient-centered and narrative-oriented approach, our objective is to problematize the ways in which health knowledge has been conceived in common health literacy approaches, and explore unconventional in-depth assessment strategies. Drawing from our experience of working in a literacy assessment project focused on asthma, cancer and child obesity, as well as John Law's ideas about the onto-political dimensions of method, we argue that selecting a methodology entails an important responsibility of the social researcher in constructing reality, in this case in enacting a particularly consequential definition of health knowledge. Here, we reconstruct the steps through which the project's methodology was developed, with emphasis on the adaptation of the McGill Illness Interview Schedule. We also present some of the project's results and point to future directions. Asking what it means to know about health and what the role of social science should be in studying health knowledge, the ultimate goal of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on how applied research can be intellectually, ethically and politically responsible.