Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

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Local communities play a fundamental role in the development of tourism, they can accelerate or delay the processes of this activity and transmit empathy or apathy towards the visitor. In this sense, the article shows a partial result of research and aims to evaluate the tourism impacts perceived by the communities of the Puerto López canton, Manabí province, Ecuador for tourism stakeholders to develop courses of action. A mixed qualitative-quantitative and descriptive methodology was used, based on a semi-structured survey questionnaire with closed questions on a five-point Likert scale and open questions for the 375 participants to freely express their ideas. The literature review, descriptive statistics and in particular the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) allowed validation of the theoretical positions examined in the field of action of this research. In addition, the substantiation of the findings was done with the help of the analytical-synthetic and comparative methods. All processing was done with SPSS version 25, AMOS version 23, Excel and ArcGIS ArcMap 10.4.1 application. The results correspond to the identification of 16 base indicators for the diagnosis and the construction of a path or pathway type diagram of structural equation model. Residents appreciate the development of tourism activity in the community and consider the impacts to be predominantly positive by strongly agreeing or agreeing with each indicator. The factor corresponding to social impacts are the most highly rated, followed by economic and environmental impacts in consecutive order. The communities are mostly satisfied with tourism and would like to see it increase in the locality. The participation and inclusion of the communities of Puerto López in the processes of tourism management is an aspect that should be paid attention to because of the interest it arouses in the residents and, together with the environmental issue, opens new gaps for future research and for the development of eight lines of action.

This article presents a review of the methodology of my doctoral thesis research, in which the interactions generated in three Facebook (FB) groups were structuring resources. We pursue two objectives. The first one, to reconstruct the place of these sources in the re-formulation of the research problem (and the consequent findings) as well as the difficulties I had to place and prioritize them as the main tools for data production. We also seek to reinstate the challenges and advantages imposed by the source throughout the research. The second objective is to analyze the synergy between the digital sources of information and the analytical and methodological perspectives adopted in the thesis. For this purpose, the work is structured in five sections. In the first, I review the theoretical and analytical coordinates from which the article starts. In the second, I analyze the role of digital sources in the structuring of my doctoral research. In the third, I explain how I worked with the FB groups, paying attention to the operational management of the data and the path I followed (intuitively) to arrive at the methodological approach used: virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000; Airoldi, 2020; Pink, 2019; Hine, 2015). The fourth section takes stock of the source by focusing on the challenges and virtues it presented during the research. Finally, I analyze the synergy that occurred between digital sources of information, the ethnographic approach and pragmatic-pragmatist sociology. I will argue that, even in intrinsically territorial fields of knowledge such as urban studies, digital information sources become productive resources. However, the article does not seek to make new reflections in the framework of already advanced discussions, but to bring into play my own experience in online fieldwork in order to contribute to the pool of meta-reflections on working with sources that today - in the face of the abrupt closure of our fields - are presented as a possibility of openness.

Social networking websites facilitate the access to massive amounts of data for empirical analysis. These data provide evidence to study the characteristics of online communication. Recently, researchers have been interested in the study of the structural characteristics of online communication networks for a better understating of the communication processes underlying the flow of messages from one individual to another on the Internet. This article shows an application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) with data mining techniques to study the structural characteristics of online communication networks. The data corresponds to a corpus of 46,301 tweets published between 2009 and 2015 about the financial crisis of the National University of Colombia, identified with the hashtag #crisisunal. The communication networks were built from the mentions between users with the @ symbol, for a total of 3,124 users connected by 4,143 edges, which structural properties were analyzed using R. The indicators analyzed were the size of the network, diameter, degree centrality, reciprocity and betweenness centrality. The results suggest that communication networks on Twitter present a non-continuous growth, a preferential attachment to the most connected users, vulnerable connections, little reciprocity in the exchange of messages and limited control of information.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on an experience of fictional ethnographic writing that we made while doing collaborative research. Through an exercise of memory, imagination and investigation, we created a radio fiction series together with a social movement that fights for the right to decent housing: Stop Desahucios Granada 15M. Starting from the materiality of one of the scripts that form part of our series, a radio soap opera, we want to show how we jointly wrote the six episodes of the series by constructing first the plots and characters, and after the dialogues. Secondly, we’ll reflect on the performative aspects of the production process, in which we transgressed the scripts. Thirdly, we will address two ‘mutations’ that the collaborative framework of our fiction-based research had generated in our way of doing and communicate ethnography. And finally, we’ll explain the reasons why we consider the writing of the scripts as a central element of our collaborative ethnography.

This paper contemplates objectification of some of the most relevant reflexive processes of a qualitative research. More precisely, it seeks to highlight the centrality of reflexivity in the ethnographic craft when putting into practice one or another epistemic-methodological perspective, which would contribute to outlining an ethnographic investigation that tends to rigour, thereby enabling the public insertion of the generated socio-anthropologic knowledge. In this work, it is shown the set of theoretical-conceptual tools that, to a certain extent, has been useful for the articulation of the aforementioned reflexive dimension, and thanks to which several obstacles and reorientations of a doctoral research are framed. Amongst these tools, the most important are: epistemological distancing, methodological implication, the fluctuation among the research object, the politics of the field, the final product, and its public insertion; the interweaving of the microsocial and structural levels, as well as the time of immersion in the field and the relationship with the defining tempos of the micro-worlds composing everyday life.

The changes promoted in the dairy sector from the industrial restructuring process, which began decades ago, as well as the most recent governance systems and policies of the European Union in the matter, are fully related to the vast abandonment that a large number of dairy farms, both in Spain and Catalonia since years ago. This process is experienced in a special way by those smaller and family-type farms. Therefore, the consequences that this evolution of the sector may have in the medium and long term are not negligible from the perspective of the future of the agricultural world. For this reason, it is of great interest for the social sciences to know the socioeconomic conditions that currently characterize the evolution of dairy farms, as well as the social representations that farmers build on them. These will be the main objectives of the article. We therefore try to analyze the socio-economic conditions of the farms and the way in which they are conceived and valued by farmers, as well as exploring how they face their future. The empirical work has combined a quantitative analysis with a qualitative analysis through focus groups and interviews with dairy farmers. The results suggest the existence of fear of the end of the small family farm, as well as the disappointment of the ranchers in a crisis situation that they are not capable of reversing.

En los últimos años, se han llevado a cabo una serie de reevaluaciones metodológicas significativas en varias disciplinas de la ciencia, debido a los desarrollos del aprendizaje automático. Esto es particularmente evidente en las matemáticas y la informática, mientras que en las ciencias sociales y del comportamiento estos fenómenos parecen abordarse con cierta reserva. Un buen ejemplo es el uso de redes neuronales artificiales. Sin embargo, reconociendo estas características, se puede suponer que están relativamente bien diseñados para resolver muchos problemas de la ciencia política. Esto se debe a la naturaleza de los fenómenos sociales que, al menos, se caracterizan por lo siguiente: (1) Su base teórica no está en última instancia determinada, (2) Carecen de relaciones funcionales plenamente reconocidas y (3) Se describen mediante datos que de manifestarse en cierta forma puede ser engorroso para el modelado tradicional. El presente artículo insiste en los estímulos para el uso de redes neuronales, aunque reconocemos que se debe proceder con cautela. Para mitigar la posible opacidad, se propone una nueva conceptualización del esquema de categorización de redes neuronales basada en la ciencia política. Esto tiene como objetivo ayudar a los científicos sociales a aceptar uno de los métodos de desarrollo exponencial en esa caja de herramientas que es el aprendizaje automático.

Qualitative social research on the lives of migrants in Chile involves investigating the social suffering that arises from the "migratory condition" that is produced. The progressive recrudescence of migration policies both at national and international level since the end of the 20th century has further deepened the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic, generating a complex scenario for research in this area for two reasons: the online modality assumed by the interviewing exercise, and the increase of frictions in the relationship between Chileans and migrants. In this text we ask ourselves how to investigate someone who suffers, for which we stop, on the one hand, in the interview as an exercise that should be vigilant of the structural conditions in which it occurs and that can produce symbolic violence, while it should tend to the understanding of the social from the singularity of a life that the interview attends. This implies considering that the ethics of research runs through the very exercise of, in this case, the interview, so that it is not an external constraint to the method, but an integral part of its deployment. Informed consents play a fundamental role in the achievement of the above, however, they often turn out to be standardized protocols that fail to protect or inform the participating subjects, given their technical language and the little reflection on the social relationship they establish, with the result that Informed Consent ends up being installed in the distance between the researcher and the research participant. This is why it is necessary to stop and consider what is understood by ethics, in order to make the interview a fair institution that is built on the recognition of the other as part of the research exercise. Thus, ethics in qualitative social research must be recognized as both situated and, therefore, as reflexive and non-standardized. Thus, we conclude by arguing that in qualitative social research, understanding and ethics are imbricated in a single exercise.