Human facial movements transmit a wealth of dynamic signals that provide crucial information about people’s emotional states. The temporal dynamics of facial expressions of emotion are optimised to hierarchically transmit biologically rooted and socially adaptive signals over time. We begin this chapter by formally defining these signals and by offering an overview of recent advances in research methods that improving our understanding of them. We then describe how the ability to decode such biologically relevant social signals emerges early in life and evolves throughout adolescence. Next, we discuss how experience, culture, and individual differences shape the decoding of facial expressions of emotion, before moving towards differences in processing static and dynamic facial expressions of emotion. Finally, we elaborate on the use of more ecologically valid experimental designs, cross-cultural studies, and understanding the roots of individual differences in facial expression processing to improve future knowledge in the field.

Economic study of inequality and stratification often disregards the lived experiences of multiply marginalized people and communities, in particular Black disabled people. Chapter 1 makes a case for a different form of economic analysis that follows the lead of Black disability justice activists working for social equality. The argument proceeds in three parts. The first section of the chapter explains stratification economics and positions disability-based inequality within contemporary accounts of intergroup economic disparity. The second section introduces disability justice and activists who use the term to mark an alternative to traditional rights-based theories of social progress. It subsequently offers a justification and theoretical framework for conducting intersectional economic research on racism, misogyny, and ableism. The third and final section outlines the necessary components of our strategy for integrating disability-based analysis into the work of stratification economics, identifying essential steps that will guide our analysis of employment, health, wealth, and education in subsequent chapters.

So, here we are at the final chapter, and at this point you might be minded to ask ‘So what?’ Although some of you may have found this book to be so compelling that you have decided to become an epidemiologist, it is likely that most of you will looking for other ways for this epidemiology stuff to value add to your health science learning and ongoing professional or academic lives. In modern life, we are deluged with health information that is provided in multiple formats, including social media, news websites, online videos, televised news bulletins and chat shows, and even academic texts and other published literature. How are we to find something approaching the truth in this plethora of often contradictory information? In its focus on epidemiology, this book has aimed to provide you with the tools for evaluating scientific information using critical thinking – a way of identifying and evaluating evidence that has wide applicability to just about every area of human endeavour.

Epidemiology is the study of patterns and determinants of disease and other health states in populations. It primarily uses quantitative methods (those methods dealing with counting, measuring and comparing things) that definitely use statistics and include statistical methods, but in this book we will not be talking about performing any statistical acrobatics more complicated than completing a sudoku puzzle.

In order to examine our three questions, we need objective research methods. Estimating whether a treatment can work, does work, and has value requires a wide range of research strategies. Evidence establishing that a treatment works under controlled conditions does not necessarily assure benefits when the intervention is applied in clinical practice. This chapter considers the development of a research protocol, and biases that might be attributable to participant recruitment, enrollment, retention, and dissemination of findings. In practice, establishing the value of a treatment should consider an examination of the existing literature, development of thorough research plans, recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen research methods, and integration of study results within a wider body of knowledge. We challenge beliefs in a hierarchy of methods that assumes some methods, such as the RCT, are free from bias.

This chapter outlines future research directions to advance understanding of sexual minority and gender diverse (SMGD) individuals and their relationships by advocating for the examination of cultural and legal contexts that shape SMGD experiences across nations. Additionally, this chapter argues that future research should address minority stress processes and resilience factors, with attention to couple-level outcomes and mechanisms connecting stigma to health and incorporate intersectionality to elucidate how multiple marginalized identities interact. Methodological considerations for future research are also presented. Lastly, this chapter discusses translational priorities including community outreach, tailored interventions and programs, legal advocacy utilizing research evidence, educational initiatives, and technology-enabled solutions tailored for SMGD individuals. This chapter concludes with an integrated perspective on open questions, methods, and real-world applications to guide the next phase of research and practice aimed at promoting justice and well-being for SMGD individuals globally.

In a brief discussion of our key primary sources, we outline the necessary limits of our own investigation into an enormous and understudied archive, suggest ways in which the structure of the archive shaped our analysis and offer reflections that we hope will inspire future scholars to launch inquiries of their own.

The investigation of singular practices and actions is the bedrock of Conversation Analysis (CA), yet it is not the only approach that CA research can take. This chapter poses a series of analytic questions designed to guide the analyst’s attention towards a complementary mode of analysis, one which takes as its object of study not a singular practice but rather a system of practices, alternative solutions to a recurrent problem of social organization. While this approach has been employed to greatest effect in research on generic organizations of interaction, the analytic techniques are themselves generic and applicable across domains of action. Rather than select a practice or action and ask what forms it can take or what environments it can inhabit, conversation analysts can instead select a problem, an exigency of social interaction, and ask how participants solve it. Alternative practices and actions naturally cluster around the organizational problems to which they serve as possible solutions, and it is this endogenous organization that CA research aims to document. The chapter sketches out and illustrates a range of analytic techniques that conversation analysts have employed in past research and can employ again to discover and investigate organizations of practice.

While the preceding chapters of the Handbook have focused on practical skills in CA research methods, this chapter looks towards the path ahead. A diverse group of conversation analysts were asked to outline possible projects, point readers toward un- or under-described interactional phenomena, and discuss persistent issues in the field. The contributions address future advances in data collection, specific interactional practices, the complex interplay between language and the body, and cross-cultural and crosslinguistic comparisons, among other issues. The chapter concludes with a concise reiteration of the bedrock principle that underpins all CA research methods.