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Dear colleague,
We would like to draw your attention to the following session at the ESRA 2011 meeting:
Analyzing social change with repeated cross-sections
Over the past decades social surveys have become an indispensable tool for social monitoring. Today, scholars studying social change have the data of many national and international survey programs at their finger tips. The strength of surveys like the General Social Survey in the US, the ALLBUS in Germany or the British Social Attitudes Surveys in the UK is that they regularly replicate items thereby allowing the analysis of social change. International surveys like the EVS or the ISSP, also covering several decades of replicated cross-sections, add the opportunity to examine social change in a cross-national perspective.
The papers in this session should have a methodological focus on strategies and techniques for analyzing repeated cross-sections. Papers dealing with cohort studies and how to assess the impact of age/period/cohort (APC) driven social change are especially welcome. The papers may, e.g., contribute to the further development of APC-methods in the context of other statistical tools such as multilevel analysis or random effects models. Papers addressing a substantive research question are also welcome as long as the research question is related to social change and the methodological aspects of the chosen study design and data analysis are reflected.
To submit a paper please visit tghe following website and follow the instructions (see also attached file):
http://surveymethodology.eu/conferences/
Deadline January 14, 2011
Christof Wolf & Tilo Becker
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Christof Wolf Sprecher der Sektion Methoden der Empirischen Sozialforschung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie
Tel. 0621 1246-153, -197
Dear colleague,
We would like to draw your attention to the following session at the ESRA 2011 meeting:
Interviewer effects in telephone surveys
Telephone surveys represent a large proportion of quantitative data collection in the social sciences. Yet, there are serious concerns regarding many aspects of data quality, namely accuracy of answers, missing data and low response rates. In this session we are particularly interested in the effects of interviewers’ socioeconomic characteristics, behavior, training, conversational skills as well as convictional strategies and vocal characteristics: How do these variables link to data quality in telephone surveys? We regard the role of the interviewer and particularly their communicative behavior as especially important in telephone interviews: Due to the widespread practice of cold calling interviewers are the only source of information the respondent can use in his/her decision on survey response and subsequent information processing.
This session especially comprises papers that focus on interviewer effects in telephone surveys. Amongst others we are interested in effects of interviewers’ socioeconomic characteristics, behavior, training, conversational skills as well as convictional strategies and vocal characteristics. Presentations may for instance focus on unit and item nonresponse, response patterns or further respondent behavior such as survey satisficing or answering sensitive questions.
To submit a paper please visit the following website and follow the instructions:
http://surveymethodology.eu/conferences/
*Deadline January 14, 2011*
Henning Best & Gerrit Bauer
Dear colleague,
We would like to draw your attention to the following session at the ESRA 2011 meeting:
Natural Experiments in Survey Research
Experiments are generally regarded as the royal road to causal inference. Yet, social science research often cannot make use of research designs based on randomized laboratory experiments. This is, in part, due to the very nature of social inquiry, which generally is concerned with society. Consequently, critics blame the (alleged) low external validity of lab experiments in the social sciences. Natural experiments can help to reduce these problems as they are set in a real societal context, and external validity can be enhanced. They do, however, face serious problems as well: endogeneity, insufficiencies in standardizing treatment- and control conditions, and self-selection into study- and control group. Advances in data analysis have tackled these problems, and methods such as IV-regression, conditional fixed-effects models and propensity score matching help in identifying unbiased treatment effects. In this session we are particularly interested in papers on identification of treatment effects in natural experiments, research combining surveys with natural-experimental designs, papers that employ multiple methods of treatment estimation, and innovative ways to design or analyze natural experiments in cross-sectional and especially panel surveys.
To submit a paper please visit the following website and follow the instructions:
http://surveymethodology.eu/conferences/
*Deadline January 14, 2011*
Henning Best & Gerrit Bauer
methoden@mailman.uni-konstanz.de
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Henning Best -
Sprecher der Methodensektion