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Im Vergleich zu Umfragen an Wahrscheinlichkeitsstichproben bieten Umfragen an Access-Panels, die auf Nicht-Wahrscheinlichkeitsstichproben basieren, unbestreitbare wirtschaftliche Vorteile. Diese Vorteile gehen jedoch mit unvermeidbaren Qualitätseinbußen einher, die auch dann bestehen bleiben, wenn Erstere sehr niedrige Responseraten haben. Daher müssen die wirtschaftlichen Vorteile und die methodischen Einschränkungen gegeneinander abgewogen werden. Es wird argumentiert, dass diese Abwägung anhand normativer Festlegungen erfolgen muss. Unter Anwendung der hier vorgeschlagenen Maßstäbe kommt der Beitrag zu dem Schluss, dass die Qualitätsansprüche an über Massenmedien verbreitete Meinungsumfragen höher sein sollten als für rein (sozial)wissenschaftliche Zwecke. Compared with surveying respondents of a probability sample, surveying members of a self-selective custom online panel offers indisputable economic advantages. However, these advantages come with an unavoidable drop in quality. This disadvantage holds true even in comparison to probability sampling surveys with very low response rates. Therefore, it is necessary to balance the economic advantages against the methodological limitations. We argue that this consideration needs to be done according to normative determinations. Using the criteria proposed in this article, we conclude that public opinion research distributed through mass media should have higher quality standards than research with solely scientific purposes.

A review of all research papers published in the European Sociological Review in 2016 and 2017 (N = 118) shows that only a minority of papers clearly define the parameter of interest and provide sufficient reasoning for the selected control variables of the statistical analysis. Thus, the vast majority of papers does not reach minimal standards for the selection of control variables. Consequently, a majority of papers interpret biased coefficients, or statistics without proper sociological meaning. We postulate that authors and reviewers should be more careful about control variable selection. We propose graphical causal models in the form of directed acyclic graphs as an example for a parsimonious and powerful means to that end.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-hsb-10.1177_00221465221081094 for The Long Arm of Prospective Childhood Income for Mature Adult Health in the United States by David Brady, Christian Guerra, Ulrich Kohler and Bruce Link in Journal of Health and Social Behavior

Emerging evidence has highlighted the important role of local contexts for integration trajectories of asylum seekers and refugees. Germany's policy of randomly allocating asylum seekers across Germany may advantage some and disadvantage others in terms of opportunities for equal participation in society. This study explores the question whether asylum seekers that have been allocated to rural areas experience disadvantages in terms of language acquisition compared to those allocated to urban areas. We derive testable assumptions using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) which are then tested using large-N survey data (IAB-BAMF-SOEP refugee survey). We find that living in a rural area has no negative total effect on language skills. Further the findings suggest that the “null effect” is the result of two processes which offset each other: while asylum seekers in rural areas have slightly lower access for formal, federally organized language courses, they have more regular exposure to German speakers., Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe; 151

Pioneering scholarship links retrospective childhood conditions to mature adult health. We distinctively provide critical evidence with prospective state-of-the-art measures of parent income observed multiple times during childhood in the 1970s-1990s. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we analyze six health outcomes (self-rated health, heart attack, stroke, life-threatening chronic conditions, non-life-threatening chronic conditions, and psychological distress) among 40-65 year olds (N=3,813-3,944). Parent relative income rank has statistically and substantively significant relationships with five of six outcomes. The relationships with heart attack, stroke and life threatening chronic conditions are particularly strong. Parent income rank performs slightly better than alternative prospective and retrospective measures. At the same time, we provide novel validation on which retrospective measures (i.e. father’s education) perform almost as well as prospective measures. Further, we inform several perennial debates about how relative versus absolute income and other measures of socio-economic status and social class influence health.