Multilevel models are often used to account for the hierarchical structure of social data and the inherent dependencies to produce estimates of regression coefficients, variance components associat...

In the United States and elsewhere, risk assessment algorithms are being used to help inform criminal justice decision-makers. A common intent is to forecast an offender’s “future dangerousness.” S...

The use of inter-rater reliability (IRR) methods may provide an opportunity to improve the transparency and consistency of qualitative case study data analysis in terms of the rigor of how codes an...

Video data analysis (VDA) represents an important methodological framework for contemporary research approaches to the myriad of footage available from cameras, devices, and phones. Footage from po...

Video data offer important insights into social processes because they enable direct observation of real-life social interaction. Though such data have become abundant and increasingly accessible, ...

Policy evaluation studies, which assess the effect of an intervention, face statistical challenges: in real-world settings treatments are not randomly assigned and the analysis might be complicated...

Obtaining reliable and timely estimates of migration flows is critical for advancing the migration theory and guiding policy decisions, but it remains a challenge. Digital data provide granular inf...

Discrete-time survival analysis (DTSA) models are a popular way of modeling events in the social sciences. However, the analysis of discrete-time survival data is challenged by missing data in one ...

Transformer-based models for transfer learning have the potential to achieve high prediction accuracies on text-based supervised learning tasks with relatively few training data instances. These mo...

Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this p...

Mixed-mode surveys are popular as they can save costs and maintain (or improve) response rates relative to single-mode surveys. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear how design decisions like survey mo...

Ethnographic and interview research have made significant contributions to cumulative social science and influenced the public conversation around important social issues. However, debates rage ove...

Increasingly, the broader public, media and policymakers are looking to qualitative research to provide answers to our most pressing social questions. While an exciting and perhaps overdue moment f...

The last decade witnessed a spectacular rise in the volume of available textual data. With this new abundance came the question of how to analyze it. In the social sciences, scholars mostly resorte...

Public culture is a powerful source of cognitive socialization; for example, media language is full of meanings about body weight. Yet it remains unclear how individuals process meanings in public ...

Radical-right campaigns commonly employ three discursive elements: anti-elite populism, exclusionary and declinist nationalism, and authoritarianism. Recent scholarship has explored whether these f...

As the field of computational text analysis within the social sciences is maturing, computational methods are no longer seen as ends in themselves, but rather as means toward answering theoreticall...

Taking a sociological view, we can investigate the empirical consequences of variations in the rhetoric of sociological methodology. The standards advocated in Qualitative Literacy divide communiti...

Small and Calarco have done the field a great service; we must go further and arm readers with better understandings of when authors have in fact fulfilled Small and Calarco’s strictures.

This article uses the interventionist theory of causation, a counterfactual theory taken from philosophy of science, to strengthen causal analysis in process tracing research. Causal claims from pr...

In social stratification research, the most frequently used social class schema are based on employment relations (EGP and ESEC). These schemes have been propelled to paradigms for research on soci...

This article presents a computational approach to examining immigrant incorporation through shifts in the social “mainstream.” Analyzing a historical corpus of American etiquette books, texts from ...

Research in organizational theory takes as a key premise the notion that organizations are “actors.” Organizational actorhood, or agency, depends, in part, on how external audiences perceive organi...

Egocentric networks represent a popular research design for network research. However, to what extent and under what conditions egocentric network centrality can serve as reasonable substitutes for...

The network scale-up method (NSUM) is a survey-based method for estimating the number of individuals in a hidden or hard-to-reach subgroup of a general population. In NSUM surveys, sampled individu...

This paper considers the adoption of computational techniques within research designs modeled after the extended case method. Echoing calls to augment the power of contemporary researchers through ...

Text as Data represents a major advance for teaching text analysis in the social sciences, digital humanities and data science by providing an integrated framework for how to conceptualize and depl...

In relational event networks, the tendency for actors to interact with each other depends greatly on the past interactions between the actors in a social network. Both the volume of past interactio...

Grouped and right-censored (GRC) counts have been used in a wide range of attitudinal and behavioural surveys yet they cannot be readily analyzed or assessed by conventional statistical models. Thi...

Missing data are a pervasive problem in data analysis. Three common methods for addressing the problem are (a) complete-case analysis, where only units that are complete on the variables in an anal...

A growing body of social science research investigates whether the economic payoff to a college education is heterogeneous — in particular, whether disadvantaged youth can benefit more from attendi...

The impact of a major historical event on child and youth development has been of great interest in the study of the life course. This study is focused on assessing the causal effect of the Great R...

Many students of statistics and econometrics express frustration with the way a problem known as “bad control” is treated in the traditional literature. The issue arises when the addition of a vari...

The estimation of RxC ecological inference contingency tables from aggregate data is one of the most salient and challenging problems in the field of quantitative social sciences, with major solutions proposed from both the ecological regression and the mathematical programming frameworks. In recent decades, there has been a drive to find solutions stemming from the former, with the latter being less

Adaptive survey design refers to using targeted procedures to recruit different sampled cases. This technique strives to reduce bias and variance of survey estimates by trying to recruit a larger and more balanced set of respondents. However, it is not well understood how adaptive design can improve data and survey estimates beyond the well-established post-survey adjustment. This paper reports the

Over the past decade, sociologists have become increasingly interested in the formal study of semantic relations within text. Most contemporary studies focus either on mapping concept co-occurrences or on measuring semantic associations via word embeddings. Although conducive to many research goals, these approaches share an important limitation: they abstract away what one can call the event structure

When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining symbolic boundaries: boundary retention—entrenching themselves in pre-existing symbolic distinctions—and boundary reformation—innovating new

Social scientists increasingly use video data, but large-scale analysis of its content is often constrained by scarce manual coding resources. Upscaling may be possible with the application of automated coding procedures, which are being developed in the field of computer vision. Here, we introduce computer vision to social scientists, review the state-of-the-art in relevant subfields, and provide

Welzel et al. (2021) claim that non-invariance of instruments is inconclusive and inconsequential in the field for cross-cultural value measurement. In this response, we contend that several key arguments on which Welzel et al. (2021) base their critique of invariance testing are conceptually and statistically incorrect. First, Welzel et al. (2021) claim that value measurement follows a formative rather

Our original 2021 SMR article “Non-Invariance? An Overstated Problem with Misconceived Causes” disputes the conclusiveness of non-invariance diagnostics in diverse cross-cultural settings. Our critique targets the increasingly fashionable use of Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA), especially in its mainstream version. We document—both by mathematical proof and an empirical illustration—that

We comment on the argument by Welzel, Brunkert, Kruse and Inglehart (2021) that theoretically expected associations in nomological networks should take priority over invariance tests in cross-national research. We agree that narrow application of individual tools, such as multi-group confirmatory factor analysis with data that violates the assumptions of these techniques, can be misleading. However

The debate about the characteristics and advantages of quantitative and qualitative methods is decades old. In their seminal monograph, A Tale of Two Cultures (2012, ATTC), Gary Goertz and James Mahoney argue that methods and research design practices for causal inference can be distinguished as two cultures that systematically differ from each other along 25 specific characteristics. ATTC’s stated

The risk of multitasking is high in online surveys. However, knowledge on the effects of multitasking on answer quality is sparse and based on suboptimal approaches. Research reports inconclusive results concerning the consequences of multitasking on task performance. However, studies suggest that especially sequential-multitasking activities are expected to be critical. Therefore, this study focusses

Suppose X and Y are binary exposure and outcome variables, and we have full knowledge of the distribution of Y, given application of X. We are interested in assessing whether an outcome in some case is due to the exposure. This “probability of causation” is of interest in comparative historical analysis where scholars use process tracing approaches to learn about causes of outcomes for single units

Experimental designs in the social sciences have received increasing attention due to their power to produce causal inferences. Nevertheless, experimental research faces limitations, including limited external validity and unrealistic treatments. We propose combining qualitative fieldwork and experimental design iteratively—moving back-and-forth between elements of a research design—to overcome these

In Goffman's terms, qualitative interviews are social encounters with their own realities. Hence, the ‘situational critique’ holds that interviews cannot produce knowledge about the world beyond these encounters, and that other methods, ethnography in particular, render lived life more accurately. The situational critique cannot be dismissed; yet interviewing remains an indispensable sociological tool

Qualitative secondary analysis has generated heated debate regarding the epistemology of qualitative research. We argue that shifting to an abductive approach provides a fruitful avenue for qualitative secondary analysts who are oriented towards theory-building. However, the concrete implementation of abduction remains underdeveloped—especially for coding. We address this key gap by outlining a set

Individual religiosity measures are used by researchers to describe and compare individuals and societies. However, the cross-cultural comparability of the measures has often been questioned but rarely empirically tested. In the current study, we examined the cross-national measurement invariance properties of generalized individual religiosity in the sixth wave of the World Values Survey. For the

Previous research reveals that the visual design of open-ended questions should match the response task so that respondents can infer the expected response format. Based on a web survey including specific probes in a list-style open-ended question format, we experimentally tested the effects of varying numbers of answer boxes on several indicators of response quality. Our results showed that using

Discrimination is associated with numerous psychological health outcomes over the life course. The nine-item Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) is one of the most widely used measures of discrimination; however, this nine-item measure may not be feasible in large-scale population health surveys where a shortened discrimination measure would be advantageous. The current study examined the construct

Research on mixed devices in web surveys is in its infancy. Using a randomized experiment, we investigated device effects (desktop PC, tablet and mobile phone) for six response formats and four different numbers of scale points. N = 5,077 members of an online access panel participated in the experiment. An exact test of measurement invariance and Composite Reliability were investigated. The results

Quantile regression (QR) provides an alternative to linear regression (LR) that allows for the estimation of relationships across the distribution of an outcome. However, as highlighted in recent research on the motherhood penalty across the wage distribution, different procedures for conditional and unconditional quantile regression (CQR, UQR) often result in divergent findings that are not always

Long-running surveys need a systematic way to reflect social change and to keep items relevant to respondents, especially when they ask about controversial subjects, or they threaten the items’ validity. We propose a protocol for updating measures that preserves content and construct validity. First, substantive experts articulate the current and anticipated future terms of debate. Then survey experts

The field of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is witnessing a heated debate on which one of the QCA’s main solution types should be at the center of substantive interpretation. This article argues that the different QCA solutions have complementary strengths. Therefore, researchers should interpret the three solution types in an integrated way, in order to get as much information as possible

Indirect questioning techniques such as the randomized response technique aim to control social desirability bias in surveys of sensitive topics. To improve upon previous indirect questioning techniques, we propose the new Cheating Detection Triangular Model. Similar to the Cheating Detection Model, it includes a mechanism for detecting instruction non-adherence, and similar to the Triangular Model

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are applied to reduce response biases in self-report surveys on sensitive research questions (e.g., on socially undesirable characteristics). However, there is evidence that they cannot completely eliminate self-protecting response strategies. To address this problem, there are RRTs specifically designed to measure the extent of such strategies. Here we assessed

Disparities across race, gender, and class are important targets of descriptive research. But rather than only describe disparities, research would ideally inform interventions to close those gaps. The gap-closing estimand quantifies how much a gap (e.g., incomes by race) would close if we intervened to equalize a treatment (e.g., access to college). Drawing on causal decomposition analyses, this type

This paper presents a model of recurrent multinomial sequences. Though there exists a quite considerable literature on modeling autocorrelation in numerical data and sequences of categorical outcomes, there is currently no systematic method of modeling patterns of recurrence in categorical sequences. This paper develops a means of discovering recurrent patterns by employing a more restrictive Markov

In the field of disparities research, there has been growing interest in developing a counterfactual-based decomposition analysis to identify underlying mediating mechanisms that help reduce disparities in populations. Despite rapid development in the area, most prior studies have been limited to regression-based methods, undermining the possibility of addressing complex models with multiple mediators

Narrating history is perpetually contested, shaping and reshaping how nations and people understand both their pasts and the current moment. Measuring and evaluating the scope of histories is methodologically challenging. In this paper we provide a general approach and a specific method to measure historical recall. Operationalizing historical information as one or more word phrases, we use the phrase-mining