Aktuelle Forschung

Whereas research in Germany has focused mainly on how environmental burdens such as noise or air pollution affect health or well-being, little is known about the effects of environmental goods. Our study examines urban green spaces as one such environmental good, and asks how their usage affected life satisfaction during the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on attention restoration and stress reduction theory as well as on theories of social integration, we further ask how different kinds of activities such as meeting friends or doing sports mediate the effects of green spaces on life satisfaction. Our empirical analysis builds on unique individual panel data for residents of Hannover and Braunschweig taken from interviews before and during the coronavirus pandemic. Using causal difference-in-difference models, our results reveal no robust effect of increased or decreased green space usage on life satisfaction. However, results depend on the …

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Der Artikel entwickelt einen Katalog von elf wissenschaftlichen Gütekriterien für soziologische Forschungsarbeiten aus einer analytisch-empirischen Perspektive. Der Kriterienkatalog umfasst Qualitätsanforderungen an die Theorieentwicklung und die empirische Sozialforschung. Unterschieden werden zwei Basiskriterien, die den gesamten Forschungsprozess betreffen, neun Kernkriterien, die an einzelnen Etappen dieses Prozesses ansetzen, und eine Reihe von Unterkriterien, die der Spezifikation der Kernkriterien dienen. Die Entwicklung der Kriterien erfolgt entlang eines stilisierten Forschungsprozesses, wie er in der quantitativen Sozialforschung üblich ist. Gleichwohl wird der Versuch unternommen, die Kriterien so zu formulieren, dass diese für die qualitative Sozialforschung anschlussfähig sind. Der Beitrag stellt einen Referenzrahmen zur Verfügung, der die Erarbeitung hochwertiger

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Enduring and accumulated advantages and disadvantages in work and family lives remain invisible in studies focusing on single outcomes. This paper analyzes parallel work and family lives for U-S. Black and White men and women aged 22–44. Results using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that White men enjoy privileged opportunities to combine work and family life and elicit specific gendered and racialized constraints for Black men and women and White women. Black women experience the strongest interdependence between work and family life: events in their work lives constrain and condition their family lives and vice versa. For Black men, stable partnerships and career success mutually support and sustain each other over the life course. In contrast, for Black women, occupational success goes along with the absence of stable partnerships. Precarious and unstable employment is associated with early single parenthood for all groups supporting …

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Exploring worries about protecting the environment in Germany for the timespan 1984–2019, the authors explore expectations and assumptions discussed in historical accounts of the environmental movement in Germany and in studies on environmental attitudes. Based on data from German SOEP, analyses show a period of rising environmental worries in the 1980s, a considerable decline in the 1990s, a relative stability since 2000, and a sizable upswing in 2018. Over time, environmental worries are associated negatively with unemployment rate and economic worries. In the 1980s and early 1990s, younger people were more worried than older people, but, in the meanwhile, this no longer holds. Education and (less so) income yielded significant differences in the 1980s and 1990s, but also these differences have faded away since 2000. Data confirm that environmental worries are shared more broadly in the population and that previously important group differences are …

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Middle range theories consist of delimited sets of assumptions from which specific hypotheses could be logically derived and empirically tested, yet are sufficiently general to apply in a range of domains. Characteristically clear and simple, the ideas in middle range theories involve specified ignorance of what must be learned to build cumulative knowledge of the subject at hand. Strain and anomie, the unanticipated consequences of purposive social action, the self‐fulfilling prophecy, and the Matthew effect are a mere sample of the icons in Merton’s grand oeuvre.

Jennifer Lee (2021): The Legacy of Robert K. Merton: On Theories of the Middle Range. Sociological Forum, Series ‚Legacies of Sociology’s Past‘ Online, 1-5  (Essay), ungated.

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Die Differenzierung der Bildungswege nach den kognitiven Fähigkeiten wird damit begründet, dass sie eine für das Lernen förderliche Homogenisierung der schulischen Umgebung ermögliche, die allen beim Erwerb schulischer Kompetenzen zugutekäme. Der Beitrag untersucht die Effekte einer unterschiedlich strikt geregelten Differenzierung auf die Leistungen in der Sekundarstufe. Grundlage sind Daten der „National Educational Panel Study“. Gezeigt wird, dass es bei strikter Differenzierung keine Verstärkung der Effekte der sozialen Herkunft gibt, wohl aber eine Zunahme der Leistungen in der Sekundarstufe, speziell in der Kombination mit einer homogeneren Zusammensetzung der Schulklassen nach den kognitiven Fähigkeiten. Das gilt…

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In today’s online markets, reputation systems substitute informal sanctioning mechanisms at work in close-knit groups and enable complete strangers to trade with each other across large geographic distances. The organizational features of online markets support actors in solving three problems that hamper mutually beneficial market exchange: the value, competition, and cooperation problems. However, due to the plethora of trading opportunities available online, actors face a problem of excess, i.e., the difficulty of choosing a trading partner. Imitation of other actors’ choices of trading partners (i.e., herding) can solve the problem of excess but at the
same time lead to the neglect of information about these trading partners’ trustworthiness. Using a large set of online-auction data, this paper investigates whether herding as a strategy for solving the problem …

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The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) established the new Priority Programme “META-REP: A Meta-scientific Programme to Analyse and Optimise Replicability in the Behavioural, Social, and Cognitive Sciences” (SPP 2317). The programme is designed to run for six years. The present call invites proposals for the first three-year funding period (2021–2024; CfP deadline: December 2, 2020.

The behavioural, social, and cognitive sciences are in the midst of an intensive debate about the replicability of their empirical findings. Shaken by the results of many replication projects that have been conducted in recent years, scholars have begun discussing what replicability actually means and when a replication can be regarded as successful vs. failed, whether low replication rates are caused by too many false positive findings in the literature, …

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Social status and common group memberships are important determinants of receiving and reciprocating trust. However, social status and group membership can coincide or diverge–with potentially different effects. This study contributes to the existing literature on the role of status and group membership by testing two separate trust-generating mechanisms against each other. Do individuals tend to place trust in high-status groups (irrespective of their own group membership) or, rather, do they tend to trust others with whom they share a common group membership? Following Bourdieu, musical taste classifies persons of different status. By demonstrating their “legitimate” cultural taste, upper-class members distinguish themselves from the middle and lower classes and signal their social status, thereby creating awe, respect and an air of trustworthiness. Empirically, this study relies in online experiments with incentivized trust games enabling to separate the two …

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