Kazimierz M. Slomczynski

Harmonization of Cross-National Survey Projects on Political Behavior: Developing the Analytic Framework of Survey Data Recycling

This article describes challenges and solutions to ex post harmonization of survey data in the social sciences based on the big data project “Democratic Values and Protest Behavior: Data Harmonization, Measurement Comparability, and Multi-Level Modeling.” This project engages with the relationship between democracy and protest behavior in comparative perspective by proposing a theoretical model that explains variation in political protest through individual-level characteristics, country-level determinants, and interactions between the two. Testing it requires data with information at both the individual and country levels that vary across space and over time. The project’s team pooled information from 22 well-known international survey projects into a data set of 2.3 million respondents, covering a total of 142 countries and territories, and spanning almost 50 years, to construct common measures of political behavior, social attitudes, and demographics. The integrated data set is appended with country variables from nonsurvey sources. Mapping the methodological complexities this work raised and their solutions became the springboard for the analytic framework of Survey Data Recycling (SDR). SDR facilitates reprocessing information from extant cross-national projects in ways that minimize the “messiness” of data built into original surveys, expand the range of possible comparisons over time and across countries, and improve confidence in substantive results.

Sociologists everywhere: Country representation in conferences hosted by the International Sociological Association, 1990–2012

Professional events that feature face-to-face interaction of social scientists from across the world are, next to publications and research, important forms of scientific knowledge production and dissemination. Thus, they are vital to the World Science System (WSS). Like other WSS elements, scholarly involvement in international social science events is characterized by unequal cross-national representation. This article focuses in-depth on the International Sociological Association (ISA), a major international social science professional association, to examine inequality in attendance at its flagship conferences. To what extent do countries differ with respect to the number of scholars attending ISA conferences? What factors drive attendance? The authors base their hypotheses on the economic, political and social dimensions that influence country representation. To test these hypotheses the authors use a dataset containing information on 212 countries and their participation in the eight ISA conferences – World Congresses and Forums – held from 1990 to 2012. Results show that a country’s GDP, level of democracy and social science research infrastructure (SSRI) substantially determine their level of representation. SSRI effects are significant above and beyond the effect of GDP and of other controls. Findings also show a meaningful over-time decrease in representation inequality according to countries’ GDP.

Political Behavior and Big Data

Interest in the use of “big data” in the social sciences is growing dramatically. Yet, adequate methodological research on what constitutes such data, and about their validity, is lacking. Scholars face both opportunities and challenges inherent in this new era of unprecedented quantification of information, including that related to political actions and attitudes. This special issue of the International Journal of Sociology addresses recent uses of “big data,” its multiple meanings, and the potential that this may have in building a stronger understanding of political behavior. We present a working definition of “big data” and summarize the major issues involved in their use. While the papers in this volume deal with various problems - how to integrate “big data” sources with cross-national survey research, the methodological challenges involved in building cross-national longitudinal network data of country memberships in international nongovernmental organizations, methods of detecting and correcting for source selection bias in event data derived from news and other online sources, the challenges and solutions to ex post harmonization of international social survey data – they share a common viewpoint. To make good on the substantive promise of “big data,” scholars need to engage with their inherent methodological problems. At this date, scholars are only beginning to identify and solve them.

Guest Editors' Introduction: The Polish Panel Survey, Polpan 1988-2008

Like the introduction to the spring 2012 issue of the International Journal of Sociology, this introduction describes the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN) on which the articles presented here are based. POLPAN is a survey among a random (probability) sample of the adult population in Poland interviewed in 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2008. The substantive articles in this issue of the journal deal with the influence of heterogeneity on intergroup relations, stability and change in religiosity, dynamics of occupational careers, patterns of employment, and perceived unemployment. Most of the analyses include sociodemographic differentiation in a dynamic perspective. The introduction ends with comments on the accessibility of the data from POLPAN 1988-2008 for future analyses.

Analyzing Social Change with the Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN 1988–2013

In the Introduction to this special issue of the International Journal of Sociology we illustrate the centrality of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN to empirical research on main social, economic and political phenomena that shape the social structure. POLPAN 1988–2013 is the longest continuously run panel survey in Central and Eastern Europe that focuses on changes in the social structure with individuals as the units of analysis. To date, it is the only research worldwide that collects, for a length of 25 years, life histories from a nationally-representative sample of adults, and that also opens the possibility of panel research on renewal samples of the young. Thanks to the expanded samples of young respondents, scholars can also use POLPAN for cohort analyses. We discuss the role of POLPAN also in light of its history: POLPAN started as a government-funded project in state socialist Poland, and its subsequent waves capture all pivotal moments of contemporary Poland: the post-communist transformation, the joining of the EU, and the 2008 global economic crisis and its aftermath. Thus, the panel data are uniquely suited for analyzing how individuals influence the social structure while being influenced by it. We end this Introduction with a summary of the four papers included in the Special Issue, all of which employ data from the POLPAN project.