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Full-Text Articles in Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies

Like A Jar Of Flies? A Study Of Self-Control In An Organizational Social Dilemma With Large Stakes, Matthew W. Mccarter, Jonathan R. Clark, Darcy Fudge Kamal, Abel Winn Dec 2018

Like A Jar Of Flies? A Study Of Self-Control In An Organizational Social Dilemma With Large Stakes, Matthew W. Mccarter, Jonathan R. Clark, Darcy Fudge Kamal, Abel Winn

Business Faculty Articles and Research

We study the practice of self-control in an organizational social dilemma when the stakes are large, using 47 years of vital census data from 18th century Sweden. From 1750 to 1800, eighty percent of Sweden lived in a simple-structure organization called a bytvång or village commons. The amount of resources a village family received was a function of their size. During this period, crop failures left the population facing starvation. Using autoregressive time-series modeling, we test whether the people of Sweden continued to take steps toward increasing the stress on the commons by marrying and birthing children or practiced …


Local Governance Of Immigrant Incorporation: How City-Based Organizational Fields Shape The Cases Of Undocumented Youth In New York City And Paris, Stephen P. Ruszczyk Nov 2018

Local Governance Of Immigrant Incorporation: How City-Based Organizational Fields Shape The Cases Of Undocumented Youth In New York City And Paris, Stephen P. Ruszczyk

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

City-based organizations and governments play an important role in incorporating undocumented immigrant youth. This article investigates how localities sociopolitically incorporate these immigrants by examining the governance constellations and institutional logics of the organizational field that manages undocumented youth. Comparing sets of municipal and civil society organizations in different national settings, I use the two cases of New York City and Paris to ask how the ‘city-based organizational field of immigrant incorporation’ shapes citizenship experiences of undocumented youth. Data come from multi-level longitudinal ethnography over 8 years with two dozen undocumented youth and with organizations in each city as well as …


Why Do Cell Phone Interviews Last Longer? A Behavior Coding Perspective, Jerry Timbrook, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth Oct 2018

Why Do Cell Phone Interviews Last Longer? A Behavior Coding Perspective, Jerry Timbrook, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Why do telephone interviews last longer on cell phones than landline phones? Common explanations for this phenomenon include differential selection into subsets of questions, activities outside the question-answer sequence (such as collecting contact information for cell-minute reimbursement), respondent characteristics, behaviors indicating disruption to respondents’ perception and comprehension, and behaviors indicating interviewer reactions to disruption. We find that the time difference persists even when we focus only on the question-answer portion of the interview and only on shared questions (i.e., eliminating the first two explanations above). To learn why the difference persists, we use behavior codes from the U.S./Japan Newspaper Opinion …


Neighborhood And Social Environmental Influences On Child Chronic Disease Prevalence, Ashley Wendell Kranjac, Justin T. Denney, Rachel T. Kimbro, Brady S. Moffett, Keila N. Lopez Sep 2018

Neighborhood And Social Environmental Influences On Child Chronic Disease Prevalence, Ashley Wendell Kranjac, Justin T. Denney, Rachel T. Kimbro, Brady S. Moffett, Keila N. Lopez

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

We investigate how distinct residential environments uniquely influence chronic child disease. Aggregating over 200,000 pediatric geocoded medical records to the census tract of residence and linking them to neighborhood-level measures, we use multiple data analysis techniques to assess how heterogeneous exposures of social and environmental neighborhood conditions influence an index of child chronic disease (CCD) prevalence for the neighborhood. We find there is a graded relationship between degree of overall neighborhood disadvantage and children’s chronic disease such that the highest neighborhood CCD scores reside in communities with the highest concentrated disadvantage. Finally, results show that higher levels of neighborhood concentrated …


Comparing Survey Ranking Question Formats In Mail Surveys, Jolene Smyth, Kristen Olson, Allison Burke Jan 2018

Comparing Survey Ranking Question Formats In Mail Surveys, Jolene Smyth, Kristen Olson, Allison Burke

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Although questions that ask respondents to rank-order a list of items can be analytically valuable, responding to ranking questions typically requires a good deal of cognitive effort. This is especially true in mail questionnaires where the advantages of electronic response formats available in web surveys are inaccessible. In this article, we examine two alternative formats for ranking questions in mail surveys. Using a nationally representative mail survey of U.S. adults, this article experimentally compares ranking formats in which respondents write numbers in boxes versus selecting items for the most and second most important issues using a grid layout. Respondents to …


Effects Of A Government-Academic Partnership: Has The Nsf-Census Bureau Research Network Helped Improve The U.S. Statistical System?, Daniel H. Weinberg,, John M. Abowd, Robert F. Belli, Noel Cressie, David C. Folch, S. H. Holan, Margaret C. Levenstein, Kristen Olson, Jerome P. Reiter, Matthew D. Shapiro, Jolene Smyth, Leen-Kiat Soh, Bruce D. Spencer, Seth E. Spielman, Lars Vilhuber, Christopher K. Wikle Jan 2018

Effects Of A Government-Academic Partnership: Has The Nsf-Census Bureau Research Network Helped Improve The U.S. Statistical System?, Daniel H. Weinberg,, John M. Abowd, Robert F. Belli, Noel Cressie, David C. Folch, S. H. Holan, Margaret C. Levenstein, Kristen Olson, Jerome P. Reiter, Matthew D. Shapiro, Jolene Smyth, Leen-Kiat Soh, Bruce D. Spencer, Seth E. Spielman, Lars Vilhuber, Christopher K. Wikle

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The National Science Foundation-Census Bureau Research Network (NCRN) was established in 2011 to create interdisciplinary research nodes on methodological questions of interest and significance to the broader research community and to the Federal Statistical System (FSS), particularly to the Census Bureau. The activities to date have covered both fundamental and applied statistical research and have focused at least in part on the training of current and future generations of researchers in skills of relevance to surveys and alternative measurement of economic units, households, and persons. This article focuses on some of the key research findings of the eight nodes, organized …


The Effects Of Respondent And Question Characteristics On Respondent Answering Behaviors In Telephone Interviews, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth, Amanda Ganshert Jan 2018

The Effects Of Respondent And Question Characteristics On Respondent Answering Behaviors In Telephone Interviews, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth, Amanda Ganshert

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In a standardized telephone interview, respondents ideally are able to provide an answer that easily fits the response task. Deviations from this ideal question answering behavior are behavioral manifestations of breakdowns in the cognitive response process and partially reveal mechanisms underlying measurement error, but little is known about what question characteristics or types of respondents are associated with what types of deviations. Evaluations of question problems tend to look at one question characteristic at a time; yet questions are comprised of multiple characteristics, some of which are easier to experimentally manipulate (e.g., presence of a definition) than others (e.g., attitude …


Item Location, The Interviewer–Respondent Interaction, And Responses To Battery Questions In Telephone Surveys, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth, Beth Cochran Jan 2018

Item Location, The Interviewer–Respondent Interaction, And Responses To Battery Questions In Telephone Surveys, Kristen Olson, Jolene Smyth, Beth Cochran

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Survey researchers often ask a series of attitudinal questions with a common question stem and response options, known as battery questions. Interviewers have substantial latitude in deciding how to administer these items, including whether to reread the common question stem on items after the first one or to probe respondents’ answers. Despite the ubiquity of use of these items, there is virtually no research on whether respondent and interviewer behaviors on battery questions differ over items in a battery or whether interview behaviors are associated with answers to these questions. This article uses a nationally representative telephone survey with audio-recorded …


The Effects Of Mismatches Between Survey Question Stems And Response Options On Data Quality And Responses, Jolene Smyth, Kristen Olson Jan 2018

The Effects Of Mismatches Between Survey Question Stems And Response Options On Data Quality And Responses, Jolene Smyth, Kristen Olson

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Several questionnaire design texts emphasize a dual role of question wording: the wording needs to express what is being measured and tell respondents how to answer. Researchers tend to focus heavily on the first of these goals, but sometimes overlook the second, resulting in question wording that does not match the response options provided (i.e., mismatches). Common examples are yes/no questions with ordinal or nominal response options, open-ended questions with closed-ended response options, and check-all-that apply questions with forced-choice response options. A slightly different type of mismatch utilizes a question stem that can be read as asking for two different …