The linear dependence of age, period, and birth cohort is a challenge for the analysis of social change. With either repeated cross-sectional data or conventional panel data, raw change cannot be decomposed into over-time differences that are attributable to the effects of common experiences of alternative birth cohorts, features of the periods…

Rating scales are ubiquitous in the social sciences, yet may present practical difficulties when response formats change over time or vary across surveys. To allow researchers to pool rating data across alternative question formats, the article provides a generalization of the ordered logit model that accommodates multiple scale formats in the…

Long-running surveys need a systematic way to reflect social change and to keep items relevant to respondents, especially when they ask about controversial subjects, or they threaten the items' validity. We propose a protocol for updating measures that preserves content and construct validity. First, substantive experts articulate the current and…

Psychological variables (e.g. L2 grit) remain a much under-investigated sub-category of individual differences compared with cognitive ones (e.g. aptitude). The present paper aims to gain a better understanding of the psychological effects of multilingualism by investigating tolerance of homosexuality (TH), which has received little scholarly…

The Stranger Face Trust scale (SFT) and Imaginary Stranger Trust scale (IST) are two new self-report measures of generalized trust that assess trust in strangers--both real and imaginary--across four trust domains. Prior research has established the reliability and validity of SFT and IST, but a number of measurement validation tests remain.…

The present paper assesses the causal effects of education on smoking and self-rated health in Canada. Education is instrumented using the changes in compulsory schooling laws. The sample is restricted to cohorts born between 1946 and 1964. The data are from the Canadian General Social Surveys of 1995 and 2016, allowing to observe the evolution of…

Survey research is still confronted by a trend of increasing nonresponse rates. In this context, several methodological advances have been made to stimulate participation and avoid bias. Yet, despite the growing number of tools and methods to deal with nonresponse, little is known about whether nonresponse biases show similar trends as nonresponse…

Which occupations are best for wellbeing? There is a large literature on earnings differentials, but less attention has been paid to occupational differences in non-pecuniary rewards. However, information on both types of rewards is needed to understand the dispersion of wellbeing across occupations. We analyse subjective wellbeing in a large…

Adjacent category logit models are ordered regression models that focus on comparisons of adjacent categories. These models are particularly useful for ordinal response variables with categories that are of substantive interest. In this article, we consider unconstrained and constrained versions of the partial adjacent category logit model, which…

Questions on voluntary association memberships have been used extensively in social scientific research for decades. Researchers generally assume that these respondent self-reports are accurate, but their measurement has never been assessed. Respondent characteristics are known to influence the accuracy of other self-report variables such as…

Respondent incentives are a popular instrument to achieve higher response rates in surveys. However, the use of incentives is still a controversial topic in the methodological literature with regard to the possible reduction or increase in response quality. We conducted an experiment in a large-scale German face-to-face study in which the…

This review aims to provide information on the prevalence and frequency of adult males' pornography use. It appears, the majority (> 80%) of adult men have accessed pornography at some point, and in the past year (40-70%). Around half of younger men (25 or under) are weekly consumers. Pornography use tapers-off with age. Relatively few…

Prior research on the effect of religion on prejudicial attitudes against sexual minorities has looked into how religion may influence public attitudes towards homosexual behaviours, gay marriage, and same-sex adoption. However, less is known about how religion may influence employment discrimination against gays in the education industry where…

Purpose: One of the most consistent predictors of punitiveness is education, with more educated individuals expressing less punitive sentiments. While much of the earlier research focused on the level of education, some researchers have recently begun to look more closely at the nature of that education such as examining the effect of specific…

As the realm of public service and its relative partnerships (both social and economic) continues to change, so must the leadership charged with managing it. Gone are the days when a single government purview was sufficient for managing public service delivery, focused on preconceived notions of what citizens supposedly want. Public value and the…