Social Greek letter organizations, known as fraternities and sororities, are prevalent fixtures on college campuses in the United States, and have been shown to alter academic, health-related, and social behaviors. Research has often focused on within-college effects due to data availability. Here, we examine how membership corresponds to…

Postelection surveys regularly overestimate voter turnout by 10 points or more. This article provides the first comprehensive documentation of the turnout gap in three major ongoing surveys (the General Social Survey, Current Population Survey, and American National Election Studies), evaluates explanations for it, interprets its significance, and…

The National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) longitudinal student surveys have long been exceptionally useful for many purpose. Despite their many virtues, however, these surveys cannot be used to monitor trends at short time intervals, they do not allow for flexible changes to survey content, they cannot generally be used to infer policy…

The recent change in the general social survey (GSS) to a rotating panel design is a landmark development for social scientists. Sociological methodologists have argued that fixed-effects (FE) models are generally the best starting point for analyzing panel data because they allow analysts to control for unobserved time-constant heterogeneity. We…

Past research shows a statistically significant relationship between college completion and sociopolitical attitudes. However, recent scholarship suggests the effects of college on social outcomes may be confounded with unobserved family background. In this study, we leverage the shared family and social background of siblings to better identify…

In this article, we review popular parametric models for analyzing panel data and introduce the latest advances in matching methods for panel data analysis. To the extent that the parametric models and the matching methods offer distinct advantages for drawing causal inference, we suggest using both to cross-validate the evidence. We demonstrate…

Does participation in one wave of a survey have an effect on respondents' answers to questions in subsequent waves? In this article, we investigate the presence and magnitude of "panel conditioning" effects in one of the most frequently used data sets in the social sciences: the General Social Survey (GSS). Using longitudinal records…

This article describes (1) the survey methodological and statistical characteristics of the nonrandomized method for surveying sensitive questions for both cross-sectional and panel survey data and (2) the way to use the incompletely observed variable obtained from this survey method in logistic regression and in loglinear and log-multiplicative…

Obtaining predictions from regression models fit to multiply imputed data can be challenging because treatments of multiple imputation seldom give clear guidance on how predictions can be calculated, and because available software often does not have built-in routines for performing the necessary calculations. This research note reviews how…

The present study assesses how education impacts religiosity. Education is instrumented using the changes in the Canadian school leaving age laws. The data are from the Canadian General Social Surveys collected between 1990 and 2011. The effects of education on both affiliation status and religious attendance are considered. Education is found to…

Researchers have examined racial and gender patterns of intergenerational education mobility, but less attention has been given to the ways that race and gender interact to further shape these relationships. Based on data from the General Social Survey, this study examined the trajectories of education mobility among Blacks and Whites by gender…

The associations between social and psychological influences and environmental attitudes, intentions and behavior have generated considerable interest, both in the fields of environmental behavior and of environmental education. We use the 2010 General Social Survey (GSS) to study these associations and expand the scope of earlier studies by…

Informal institutions are defined as socially shared rules that guide individuals' behaviors outside of officially sanctioned channels. This paper investigates the link between individual educational attainment and education-related informal institutions by examining second-generation immigrants in the USA. I measure the education-related informal…

The purpose of the present study was to test the Emotional Stability dimension of the Big Five factors of personality traits theory to predict or explain a relationship with Employee Organizational Commitment, when the relationship between Emotional Stability (ES) and Employee Organizational Commitment (EOC) was moderated by Gender and AgeGroup.…

This paper describes a multi-disciplinary, project-based course. The course is aimed at providing greater curricular access to applied statistics for students across both divisional and departmental boundaries and includes lecture and laboratory components as well as intensive individualized instructor and peer support. Learning materials and…