Books by Edzia Carvalho
The measurement of human rights has long been debated within the various academic disciplines tha... more The measurement of human rights has long been debated within the various academic disciplines that focus on human rights, as well as within the larger international community of practitioners working in the field of human rights.
Written by leading experts in the field, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive book on how to measure human rights.
Measuring Human Rights:
o draws explicitly on the international law of human rights to derive the content of human rights that ought to be measured
o contains a comprehensive methodological framework for operationalizing this human rights content into human rights measures
o includes separate chapters on the methods, strengths and biases of different human rights measures, including events-based, standards-based, survey-based, and socio-economic and administrative statistics
o covers measures of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights
o includes a complete bibliography, as well as sources and locations for data sets useful for the measurement of human rights.
This volume offers a significant and timely addition to this important area of work in the field of human rights, and will be of interest to academics and NGOs, INGOs, international governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and national governments themselves.
Articles by Edzia Carvalho
Parliamentary Affairs
Focus group transcripts from the qualitative panel dataset the Qualitative Election Study of Brit... more Focus group transcripts from the qualitative panel dataset the Qualitative Election Study of Britain provide new insights into why the phenomenon ‘Cleggmania’ failed to translate into electoral success for the Liberal Democrats. Narrative and discourse analyses conducted on participants’ vote choice stories indicate the effect of ‘Cleggmania’ was limited to strengthening the resolve of wavering Liberal Democrats. Long-time Labour and Conservative supporters who were leaning Liberal Democrat found their latent identification made voting for a different party uncomfortable. Electoral research can be further advanced through qualitative analysis by delving deeper into the narratives that individuals construct about their vote choice.
The Qualitative Report, 18(45): 1-21, 2013
This research replicates and expands upon the qualitative electoral research of Winters and Campb... more This research replicates and expands upon the qualitative electoral research of Winters and Campbell by using data from focus groups conducted in Essex, England to coincide with three leadership debates during the 2010 British general election. The Qualitative Election Study of Britain (QES Britain) broadly replicated Winters and Campbell’s research design but includes innovations in data collection to more accurately capture assessments. This innovation means the data coding are based entirely on the evaluations of the participants. In our analysis we innovate in the way we display each leaders’ unique evaluation structure. To capture the salience and direction of leadership assessments, we convey the dimensionality of popular perceptions for Brown, Cameron and Clegg using colour and scaling. Our results produce qualitatively informed evaluation structures for each party leader that contextualize quantitative survey findings. Although this case study is limited to a geographically specific group of participants, our results mirror the quantitative BES results. Such similarity in the qualitative and quantitative results increases our confidence that our results provide useful insights into the associations and evaluations ordinary people used in their assessments of the main political party leaders.
The rights of the child, as recognised by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Chil... more The rights of the child, as recognised by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child have been increasingly reiterated in international declarations and national commitments. However, there exists a disparity in `the de jure protection and de facto realization of human rights' (Landman 2005: 5). The relative absence of systematic engagement within academia and without on the issue of mapping the operationalisation of children's rights by States not only hinders ongoing attempts to identify and explain the causes and variation in the failure to implement children's rights but also weakens national and international efforts to hold States accountable for their obligations. This article seeks to address the lack of utilisation of measures of children's rights and the deficiencies in the measures that are in use. By drawing on the existing academic literature and intergovernmental efforts to measure human rights, the article proposes a measurement matrix that could be used to chart the implementation of States' obligations towards children's rights. The matrix is an attempt to further the emerging international endeavours to develop children's rights indicators.
Book Reviews and Responses by Edzia Carvalho
European Politics and Society
Dundee University Review of the Arts, 2014
Human Rights and Human Welfare, 2012
Professor Richards highlights, in his generous review of our book Measuring Human Rights that one... more Professor Richards highlights, in his generous review of our book Measuring Human Rights that one of the aims of the book is to bring to the forefront the importance of conceptualization before operationalization -that conceptual clarity (or lack of it) is at the heart of the problems concerning the measurement of human rights. He draws out three key issues from the book as the springboard for further discussion on measurement of the concept -a) the "Respect, Protect and Fulfill" (RPF) framework, b) the lack of reliable data sources, and c) the conceptual links between human rights, human development, and human security. Although Prof. Richards' discussion of these issues is quite illuminating and very often along lines with which we agree, we believe that he misreads some arguments concerning each of these issues and, in some cases, mistakenly attributes them to Measuring Human Rights. At the risk of being somewhat pedantic, we would like to clarify these arguments and respond to his helpful suggestions for further research in the field.
Human Rights and Human Welfare, 2012
Human Rights and Human Welfare, 2010
Political Studies Review, 7(3)., 2009
Reports and other Papers by Edzia Carvalho
Online publications by Edzia Carvalho
Sage Research Methods Cases, 2014
Qualitative Election Study of Britain (QESB) was a qualitative investigation into people’s politi... more Qualitative Election Study of Britain (QESB) was a qualitative investigation into people’s political attitudes before and after their vote choice for the 2010 general election. We provide a close examination of the leaders evaluation component of this much larger study to present our recommendations for good research design. By ‘research design’ we refer to the entire research process: from development of the research question through to reporting the results of the data analysis. Using the leaders’ evaluation component of the QESB as the research question, we explain and clarify the various aspects of a research design and provide examples of good research practice.
Sage Research Methods Cases, 2013
The research question at the core of this study examined how people in Britain perceived the lead... more The research question at the core of this study examined how people in Britain perceived the leaders of the three main political parties. To answer this question, we collected data from fourteen focus groups held during and after the 2010 election campaign in the three nations of Britain. The Qualitative Election Study of Britain was the qualitative dataset generated from the transcripts of these focus groups. We used the grounded theory method to evaluate these data and examine how people viewed the leaders of the three main political parties. This method required reading and categorizing the data multiple times to uncover different layers of patterns and codes. Each process of categorization yielded categories and connections that were more substantive and analytical than the previous iteration. The grounded theory method was the appropriate method to examine popular perceptions of party leaders during the 2010 election campaign as it let us systematically uncover patterns and codes through a process of successive coding; we could analyse the data without preconceptions about what we would find. However, the method was not sufficient to provide deeper and nuanced representations of why people held such views. Therefore, we used discourse analysis to complement the grounded theory method and get the most detail from the data.
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Books by Edzia Carvalho
Written by leading experts in the field, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive book on how to measure human rights.
Measuring Human Rights:
o draws explicitly on the international law of human rights to derive the content of human rights that ought to be measured
o contains a comprehensive methodological framework for operationalizing this human rights content into human rights measures
o includes separate chapters on the methods, strengths and biases of different human rights measures, including events-based, standards-based, survey-based, and socio-economic and administrative statistics
o covers measures of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights
o includes a complete bibliography, as well as sources and locations for data sets useful for the measurement of human rights.
This volume offers a significant and timely addition to this important area of work in the field of human rights, and will be of interest to academics and NGOs, INGOs, international governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and national governments themselves.
Articles by Edzia Carvalho
Book Reviews and Responses by Edzia Carvalho
Reports and other Papers by Edzia Carvalho
Online publications by Edzia Carvalho
Written by leading experts in the field, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive book on how to measure human rights.
Measuring Human Rights:
o draws explicitly on the international law of human rights to derive the content of human rights that ought to be measured
o contains a comprehensive methodological framework for operationalizing this human rights content into human rights measures
o includes separate chapters on the methods, strengths and biases of different human rights measures, including events-based, standards-based, survey-based, and socio-economic and administrative statistics
o covers measures of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights
o includes a complete bibliography, as well as sources and locations for data sets useful for the measurement of human rights.
This volume offers a significant and timely addition to this important area of work in the field of human rights, and will be of interest to academics and NGOs, INGOs, international governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and national governments themselves.
We preserve this preliminary version online to document the evolution of our qualitative analysis from working paper to final version."