Surveys

Environmental attitudes in Europe

The climate protests in March 2019 mobilized over a million of people around the globe. A team of social scientists from universities across Europe organized a survey of the #FridaysForFuture strike events on March 15 in 13 cities in nine countries. The report can be found here. A new wave of climate protests (and surveys) is planned for the end of September. Naturally, most participants at these protests are acutely aware of the environmental threats and motivated to take action.

Voter shifts in parliamentary elections in Poland, 2007-2015

How 2015 voters voted in 2007 and 2011 How 2007 voters voted in 2011 and 2015 About POLPAN Where did the current governing party get their votes from? Did supporters of the previous ruling party switch preferences or did they abstain from voting altogether? Cross-sectional datasets, such as one-off election polls, do not typically provide data to answer these questions. Panel studies, such as the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN), do.

Measuring meritocracy with survey data

Determining meritocratic allocation Calculating the distance to meritocracy Distance to meritocracy by country Meritocracy is a principle according to which rewards are based on merit, as well as an ideal situation resulting from the operation of this principle. In their 1985 Social Foces paper titled “How Far to Meritocracy? Empirical Tests of a Controversial Thesis”, Tadeusz Krauze and Kazimierz M. Słomczyński proposed an algorithm to construct a theoretical joint distribution of education and income, given their marginal distributions, that would satisfy the conditions of meritocratic allocation.

Political participation patterns in Poland

Political participation in Poland Latent class analysis Three types of participants: the Disengaged, Activists, and Protesters Region maps I recently came across Jennifer Oser’s 2017 article in Social Indicators Research about “political tool kits”, i.e. profiles (or patterns) of participation in different political activities. Her general argument is that research on citizen participation would benefit from analyses of such participation patterns instead of (or at least in addition to) just looking at determinants of participation in single activities.

Personal vs. household income in cross-national surveys

Sample correlations Sample correlations by gender Sample correlations by age Sample correlations by education Contrast Conclusion One of the reasons for the harmonization of personal income in addition to household income was to check if the two correlate highly enough to use household income as a substitute for personal income in analyses where economic status is a control variable. This would be great, because household income variables are available in 1177 surveys out of 1721 analyzed in the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1, while personal income only in 453 surveys.

Harmonizing measures of income in cross-national surveys

Data Number of response options Item non-response Distributions Harmonized target variables Next steps with Przemek Powałko Individual economic status is a necessary element of almost all sociological analyses, including studies of political attitudes and behavior. To supplement the already harmonized variables in the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1 and for the purposes of my resesarch of the effects of education on political engagement, Przemek and I harmonized two additional variables: personal income and household income1.

Measuring the level and inequality of political participation with survey data

Political participation in the ESS Country levels of political participation Inequality of political participation Democracy indicators Economic inequality Matrix scatter plots How to measure political inequality? The Variaties of Democracy project (V-Dem) has a set of political equality indicators that capture the extent to which political power is distributed according to wealth and income, membership in a particular social group, gender or sexual orientation (cf. V-Dem Codebook v.

Age distributions in samples from cross-national survey projects

Cross-national survey projects conduct surveys on representative samples of adult populations. How do the distributions of respondents’ age vary across surveys carried out in the same country in different years and different projects? Like in a couple of previous posts (here, here and here) I use data from the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1, which includes selected harmonized variables from 22 cross-national survey projects. SDR only includes surveys that claim to have samples representative for adult populations.

Reliability of survey estimates: Participation in demonstrations

Data Differences within country-years Differences by groups Gender Age Urban/rural residence Education Sampling scheme The growth in cross-national survey projects in the last decades leads to situations when two or more surveys are carried out in the same country and the same year but in different projects, and contain overlapping sets of survey questions. Assuming that the surveys are based on representative samples - a claim that major cross-national survey projects typically make - it could be expected that estimates from surveys carried out in the same country and year are reasonably close.

Validating survey data: Educational attainment in SDR and the OECD

Educational attainment data OECD data SDR data Cleaning and merging SDR and OECD data Results The curious case of ISSP Switzerland Conclusion Appendix with Przemek Powałko General population surveys with representative samples should have a similar education structure as shown by data from administrative sources, especially if survey weights are used. In this post we compare sample aggregates from 15 cross-national survey projects (including the European Social Survey, the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, and others) from the Survey Data Recycling database with educational attainment statistics from the OECD.

Shiny app for exploring harmonized cross-national survey data (SDR v.1.0)

Instructions References  In the previous post I wrote about downloading and exploring the Survey Data Recycling (SDR), version 1 dataset, which consists of selected harmonized variables from 22 survey projects, 1966-2013. The SDR project will develop a website for browsing, subsetting, downloading, and visualizing data from the SDR project. This website is currently under construction. Meanwhile, I made a Shiny app with basic functionalities of the future on-line browsing and subsetting tool (also serves as its mock-up): https://mkolczynska.

Exploring the dataset of survey datasets: Survey Data Recycling version 1

Introduction Downloading the SDR data Exploring SDR: availability of variables by project Exploring SDR: availability of variables with different formulations Identifying surveys containing selected variables Subsetting the Master File Country coverage plot Combining data from different survey projects creates new opportunities for research, alas, at the cost of increased volume (obviously) and complexity of the data. The Survey Data Recycling project created a dataset with data from 22 international survey projects.