ALLBUS Research Articles

Sequential and Concurrent Mixed-Mode Designs: A Tailored Approach

Abstract Due to rising costs and declining response rates, surveys are increasingly moving from face-to-face interviewing to a self-administered mixed-mode design. Mixed-mode surveys can be conducted using a concurrent or a sequential design. A sequential design in which the web mode is offered first is a common strategy for mixed-mode surveys as it reduces survey costs. However, when deciding which mode choice sequence to use, sample balance should also be considered. One approach to achieving a balanced sample might be to tailor the sequence of the choice of modes, or the mode choice sequence. For this purpose, we use an indicator that assigns the sampled persons to the different mode choice sequences to minimize the variability of response probabilities. In this study, we compare the sample composition achieved with a concurrent and a sequential design. Additionally, we investigate whether indicator-based tailoring of the two mode choice sequences can improve sample composition. We implemented a randomized experiment in the 2021 German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), which surveyed the general population aged 18 and older in private households (N = 5,342) using a mixed-mode design (web and mail). In a first step, respondents were randomly assigned to a concurrent or a sequential design. We find that the two mode choice sequences lead to a similar sample composition. Next, we identify age as the best available single indicator of the variables known before the survey to tailor the mode choice sequence. Our analyses show that a tailored approach based on age improves the sample composition slightly.

Socialism and the Modernization Hypothesis

In Europe, people from post-Soviet countries tend to hold more negative attitudes toward immigration than people from Western societies. This pattern is also evident in the former East and West Germany. In line with the modernization hypothesis, previous research shows that worldviews have become more liberal across generations in Western societies over the last century. This study examines whether such processes of liberalization have taken place at a different pace in Western societies and in post-Soviet societies. To this end, I assess whether changes in attitudes toward immigration across birth cohorts differ between residents of post-Soviet countries and inhabitants of other types of welfare states. Using data from the European Social Survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, and the German General Social Survey, this study shows that the pattern of later-born cohorts holding more liberal attitudes toward immigration is less pronounced in post-Soviet states than in other types of welfare states. These findings have implications for research on attitude change over time and the long-term persistence of communist practices, behaviors, values, and norms.

Faithful and fearful: Does religion promote or reduce fear of crime in Germany?

This article complements existing victimological studies on religion by investigating whether religion promotes or reduces fear of crime in Germany. According to the generalized insecurity approach and the theory of social production functions, religion and fear of crime are linked via secularization-induced diffuse insecurities. It is expected that different facets of religion are tied to fearing crime in different ways because the projection of secularization-induced diffuse insecurities occurs only among those individuals whose religious capital is devaluated. Empirical analyses of data from the 2021 German General Social Survey reveal that some religious minority groups are particularly likely to fear crime, religious belief is positively related to fearing crime, and religious behavior is negatively associated with fearing crime. Additionally, religion can promote fear of crime equally in East and West Germany. In conclusion, the study emphasizes the significance of religion in relation to the fear of crime and underscores the benefits of a general theoretical approach.

BEYOND RELIGION

By equating the traditional mindset with traditional beliefs (in magic, ritual, superstitions, etc.), several studies have consistently shown that such beliefs significantly influence people's political behavior and preferences. While these studies have highlighted the political consequences of a traditional mindset in several countries from the Global South, they nevertheless have little to say as to whether holding superstitious beliefs (e.g., believing in fortune tellers, horoscopes, or lucky charms) has certain political implications for countries in the Global North. In this article, we explore whether the traditional mindset has political consequences even in an industrially advanced Germany. We present an analysis of data from the German General Social Survey (GESIS 2019) showing that superstitious voters have less trust in the political system, are more inclined to think that Hitler would be remembered as a good stateman if he had not perpetrated the Holocaust, that the Nazi regime also had a good side, and that the Jews are different and, in any case, have too much influence. Hence, dissemination of superstitious beliefs could make right‐wing populists more electorally appealing and successful than they once were. We believe our findings to be of some importance as they show that if the proliferation of superstitious beliefs continues unchecked, they may transform our political systems in ways that policy makers and democratic forces should strive to avoid.

EPH109 Predictors of Individual General Life Satisfaction in the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) Cohorts from 2010 to 2021

EPH109 Predictors of Individual General Life Satisfaction in the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) Cohorts from 2010 to 2021

The air pollution disadvantage of immigrants in Germany: partly a matter of urbanity

Abstract Several studies now document the disproportionate distribution of environmental pollution across different groups, but many are based on aggregated data or subjective pollution measures. In this study, we describe the air quality disadvantage of migrants in Germany using objective pollution data linked to nationally representative individual-level survey data. We intersect 1 × 1 km2 grid geo-references from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) 2014, 2016, and 2018 with 2 × 2 km2 estimates of annually averaged air pollution by the German Environment Agency for nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and particulate matter. Respondents with a migration background are exposed to higher levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter than people of German descent. Urbanity of residence partly explains these differences, up to 81 per cent for particulate matter and about 30 per cent for other pollutants. A larger proportion of immigrants live in larger cities, which are more prone to high levels of air pollution. This is especially true for second-generation migrants. Income differences, on the other hand, do not explain the migrant disadvantage. In city fixed effects models, the patterns for migration background point unambiguously in the direction of environmental disadvantage for all pollutants except ozone. However, the within-municipality associations are weak.

Immigration und Soziale Integration – Was sind die Konsequenzen von ethnisch-residentiellen Grenzen und Halos für die soziale Integration in Deutschland?

AbstractDoes immigration erode the social integration of contemporary mass-scale societies? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic, racial, and religious diversity have prompted this important and highly controversial question. This article gives a brief introduction to the scientific literature on this question and derives from it the following gap that it seeks to address: According to a small number of studies on related but different topics, immigration may be detrimental to social integration if it physically manifests as one of two specific types of ethnic residential segregation. The contested boundaries hypothesis has it that border regions sandwiched between ethnically defined neighborhoods are particularly conflict prone and characterized by increased rates of crime. The halo-effect hypothesis claims that majority members who live in homogenous mainstream neighborhoods that border on ethnically diverse ones (or are even encircled by them) are more likely to vote for right-wing populist parties. In this article, we expand both approaches to the study of social integration in theoretical and empirical terms. With respect to theory building, we discuss why social integration, as indicated by social trust and community attachment, should suffer from these two types of ethnic segregation. To test these claims empirically, we use data from the geo-coded German General Social Survey (ALLBUS/GGSS) 2016 and 2018 that we merge with 100-m × 100‑m spatial grid data from the German Census 2011. These data allow us to apply edge detection techniques to identify ethnic residential boundaries, and our recently developed donut-method to measure ethnic residential halos. To our knowledge our study is the first investigation into the arguably important question whether ethnic residential boundaries and halos erode social integration.

Perceived Threat, Reactive Identification, and Religious Change: Right-Wing Secularization in Germany, 1999–2017

In this article, I integrate symbolic threat dynamics into a theoretical discussion of religious change. Specifically, this article demonstrates how symbolic threat can lead to increases in salient collective characteristics among members of the threatened group. To make this case, I examine the religious and historical idiosyncrasies of East and West Germany. In the context of East Germany, I find a dramatic reduction in religious activity among the right-wing between 1999 and 2017, as well as a strong relationship between secularity and fear of foreign domination. Mediated by the deeply atheistic history of East Germany, secularization is here presented as a reaction of eastern identification that repeatedly emerges in the face of cultural threat. To empirically illustrate my theoretical contentions, I rely on survey data from the European Values Study (EVS) and German General Social Survey (ALLBUS).

Germany United?

Abstract In the aftermath of unification, studies consistently uncovered differences in trust between citizens of the east and west of Germany. This article examines if this remains the case. It evaluates the trends and individual-level drivers of trust from 1984 to 2018 using data from the German General Social Survey (allbus) showing, first, that Germans are cautiously trusting of institutions, trust is more extensive than at any point since unification, and the differences between the east and west have narrowed; and, second, that trust is shaped by factors that are broadly similar between the two parts of the country. Multivariate models and post-estimation analyses show that trust is steeped in a variety of phenomena, some of which provide it with resilience and durability. The study rejects suggestions that Germany is suffering from a legitimacy crisis and concludes that the project of national integration is more complete than has previously been thought.

Populism Predicts Sympathy for Attacks Against Asylum Seekers Through National Pride and Moral Justification of Political Violence

Right-wing populism which had been considered fringe just a few years ago became gradually more mainstream. Given the epidemic impact of divisive populist rhetoric on hostile behavior and its strong association with anti-immigration, it is important to ask whether people endorsing populism also justify attacks against asylum seekers. Using the German General Social Survey data ( N = 3,268), we tested a model in which the endorsement of populist beliefs predicted sympathy for attacks against asylum seekers in Germany, through national pride and moral justification of political violence. Results showed that people who evinced higher endorsement of populist beliefs showed also higher sympathy for attacks against asylum seekers. Furthermore, national pride and moral justification of political violence mediated the relationship between populist beliefs and sympathy for attacks against asylum seekers. The role of right-wing populism in the justification of violence toward outgroups is discussed within a contemporary social-psychological framework.

Logical Positivism or Critical Theory as the Methodological Foundation of The Authoritarian Personality?

In this paper, the central research question discusses to what extent logical positivism or critical theory forms the methodological core of the seminal work on the authoritarian personality. A central thesis is that due to her background in psychology, logical positivism and psychoanalysis and her neglected but central role in the authoritarian personality study, Else Frenkel-Brunswik has had a much more lasting and productive influence on authoritarianism research than Adorno as the rep­resentative of critical theory. This was certainly not reflected in the public discourse or in intellectual discussions, at least in Europe. This article shows how the original F-Scale was changed in subse­quent research and how the application of psychometric techniques improved. However, by employ­ing Lakatos’ concept of the research programme, I analyse how authoritarianism research developed in a degenerative way by reducing the number of factors from nine to three and giving up the psy­choanalytic explanation of the underlying mechanisms, a systematic test of sociological and contex­tual factors, and the original mixed method approach of combining surveys and qualitative inter­views. Finally, the issue of the effects of idealisation of parents on the measurement of the items and the use of typologies were not tackled in later research. Employing data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), I describe how some of Frenkel-Brunswik’s central methodological and theoretical ideas have been tested using confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation mod­els. Finally I summarise the way in which the research programme can be developed more fruitfully by integrating developmental psychology, sociology, political science, psychoanalysis and statistical generalised latent variable models.

The Role of Values as Mediator in Relationships Between Social Position and Cultural Omnivorousness in Germany

Research on cultural omnivorousness—the concept conceptualized originally as the ability to expand one’s cultural preferences—continues to grow in prominence in studies of the cultural dimension of social stratification. Given recent inconsistent empirical findings, this study returned to the origins of the concept and examined the role of values in developing omnivorous cultural taste. Based on the example of Germany and relying on data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS/GGSS) in 2014, this study empirically examined the indirect effect of social position on cultural omnivorousness via postmaterialistic values using structural equation modeling. The findings suggest that postmaterialist values could be mediators; a higher position in the social structure implied a higher likelihood to hold postmaterialist values, which led to higher cultural omnivorousness. The indicators of social position were also analyzed separately, given that the explanatory power of educational attainment in predicting cultural omnivorousness was approximately the same as that of occupational characteristics. The proportion of the relationship mediated by values did not differ significantly in models with education or occupational characteristics as predictors of cultural omnivorousness.

The culture of official statistics. Symbolic domination and “bourgeois” assimilation in quantitative measurements of immigrant integration in Germany

While cultural sociology has recently made a comeback in research on social inequality both in the context of poverty studies and studies of immigrant integration, it has rarely investigated how particular constructions of the problem of socioeconomic mobility are themselves culturally situated. The article addresses this neglect by investigating the problematization of disadvantaged lives within the relational framework of Bourdieu’s cultural theory of the state. Here, the state exercises symbolic violence by transforming one arbitrary cultural standpoint in social space into a universal standard, or a taken-for-granted “doxa,” against which other cultural positions can only come off as deficient. The article extends this perspective by addressing the role of official statistics in this process. Taking Germany’s official monitoring of the socioeconomic integration of immigrants as its case and drawing from document analysis, interviews, ethnographic observation, and data from the German General Social Survey, the article shows how such statistical instruments of the welfare state in fact tacitly universalize a model of the good life particular to civil servants, the very constructors of the monitors, as a benchmark for immigrant integration.

Different Trends in Marriage and Fertility Behavior for Roman Catholics, German Protestants, and Women without Religious Affiliation in West Germany: An Analysis of Five Birth Cohorts Based on the German General Social Survey

In this visualization, the author shows that cohort changes in the propensity to get married and bear a child are different for Roman Catholics, German Protestants, and religiously unaffiliated West German women. The data are from the German General Social Survey—Cumulation 1980–2018. Calculations are based on the life-table method (Kaplan-Meier estimates). In general, demographic changes toward a lower tendency to get married and to bear a child start among the religiously unaffiliated and diffuse to the Christian groups over time, with the Catholics being most resistant to change. The different time trends in demographic behavior translate into increasing differences between religious groups across time, which are most pronounced in the cohort born from 1960 to 1969, and tend to decrease again thereafter.

Political regime and the impact of sporting success on national pride: a quasi-natural experiment in Germany

ABSTRACT This study aims to identify the impact of sporting success on national pride. Scholars have examined the association between elite sports and national sentiment. However, the association between the impact of successful elite sports on national pride and the influence of past political regimes remains uncertain. This study examines how the national pride of Germans changed with the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil by analysing the social survey data of the German General Social Survey 2014. This research analyses the fluctuation of general national pride and sport-related national pride through sports events. Germany is selected as an ideal context for research. Because the German national team won the 2014 FIFA World Cup, comparative analysis of East and West Germans allows to consider the influence of past sport-related national identity policy on current residents during an event that involved victory in a sport. The results show that both East and West Germans experienced increased feelings of sport-related national pride during the World Cup. Furthermore, East Germans’ sport-related national pride increased slightly more than West German after they witnessed the success of national athletes in the World Cup. However, general national pride decreased slightly from before the World Cup to after the event. Thus, the impact of sporting success on national pride depends on past sport policy, but the influence of past political regime is small. And the impact of sporting success is restricted to the sport-related domain of national pride.

Foreign Accents in the Early Hiring Process: A Field Experiment on Accent-Related Ethnic Discrimination in Germany

Based on a field experiment conducted in Germany between October 2014 and October 2015, this article focuses on the disadvantages associated with the presence of a foreign accent in the early hiring process, when applicants call in response to a job advertisement to ask whether the position is still available. We examine whether a foreign accent influences employers’ behaviors via productivity considerations and/or whether foreign-accented speech is related to statistical discrimination or tastes among employers or customers that translate into differential treatment. To address these processes, we supplement our field-experimental data with information on job and firm characteristics from the texts of vacancy announcements and advertising companies’ homepages, on labor supply from the Federal Employment Agency, and on anti-immigrant attitudes from the German General Social Survey. Results suggest that while calling with a Turkish name did not result in a lower rate of positive replies, this rate was reduced for candidates who called with a Turkish accent. Turkish-accented applicants were told more often than the advertised position was already filled. Our findings suggest that the difference in response rates was not due to productivity considerations related to how well individuals understood foreign-accented speakers. Instead, results support the notion that the observed disadvantages were linked to discrimination based on employers’ ethnic tastes. While we found no indications pointing to the relevance of customer tastes or statistical discrimination, we cannot rule out these processes altogether. Our findings demonstrate that language cues can be more relevant than applicants’ names in shaping employers’ initial responses. They, thereby, highlight the need to consider multiple ethnic cues and different stages of the hiring process.

Monetary Incentives in Large-Scale Face-to-Face Surveys: Evidence from a Series of Experiments

Abstract Monetary respondent incentives are a means to counteract the trend toward declining response rates. This article summarizes the results of a series of experiments conducted in the past decade in the German General Social Survey. We found that prepaid monetary incentives led to a higher increase in response than promised incentives. There was no evidence that either promised or prepaid incentives had a systematic effect on sample composition. The incentives helped to reduce fieldwork efforts. Thus, the costs of incentives can—at least partially—be offset by a reduction in the number of contact attempts required to achieve a certain number of completed interviews. Our findings are highly credible due to the replicative design of the experiments.

Land use disadvantages in Germany: A matter of ethnic income inequalities?

Environmental hazards affect people from different income groups and migration backgrounds on different levels. The research on environmental inequalities and environmental justice has proposed several theories to explain such inequities; still, it remains unclear which of these theories applies to the German societal context. This research investigates whether individual-level income differences between Germans and migrants account for objectively measured exposure to the environmental goods and bads of land use, specifically soil sealing and green spaces. Marginal effects and predictions based on georeferenced survey data from the German General Social Survey reveal that Germans with higher incomes live in areas with better neighbourhood quality. Germans with lower incomes are exposed to fewer disadvantages stemming from land use, and there is no marginal difference between nonurban and urban municipalities. Spatial assimilation in high-income groups occurs; however, the difference in low-income groups can be explained by place stratification and discrimination in the housing market. While this study uses more indirect and non-hazardous measures of environmental quality – in contrast to air pollution or noise – it provides evidence that such indicators also create distributional injustices in Germany.

Belonging and exclusion: the dark side of regional identity in Germany

A collective regional identity is a favourable condition for the acceptance of majority decisions made at the regional level and for the delegation of competencies from the central to regional governments. Moreover, a regional identity can play an important role in times of global challenges. Regional attachment might generate a we-feeling and help individuals to cope better with a complex world. The same feeling, however, might also serve as a basis for exclusionary attitudes. In this article, we analyse regional identity at the Land level in Germany with data from the German General Social Survey. Our results show that regional identity is strong in both the eastern and western parts of the country, with people in the east, surprisingly, identifying with their respective Land slightly more than people in the west, even though the five eastern Länder were only established in 1990 after decades of centralist rule. Furthermore, the dark side of regional identity manifests itself only in eastern Germany, where a stronger regional identity tends to go hand in hand with a greater dislike of foreigners.

Articulations of Family Life and Organization for Happy Life

Family is an instrumental for the development of the nation and culture. Different culture have different perception regarding the importance of the family. There are also difference in types of family, and social scientists measure the characteristics of the family in different cultures. In this paper we tried to explore the importance of family for happy life. In order to test the hypothesis, the chosen research question, data from the German General Social Survey 2014 is used. Based on statistical analysis and their results, both hypothesis are supported. These hypotheses and their results indicates that the people who spend their leisure time with family, they consider and think that family is important. On the other hand, people who are more interested in soaps and sitcoms, they may think that, all problems and issues are part of life but family is still important for them.