Suchergebnisse

To disentangle the causal relationship between generalized trust and social experiences in a digitalized world, this article employs a three-wave, self-selected panel study following 533 players from the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft (WoW), over 10 months. Focusing on whether generalized trust can be shaped by the social experiences one makes throughout a lifetime, this study finds a strong relationship between joining or exiting a voluntary association-like environment within the game and changes in generalized trust. Starting to play together in voluntary association-like environments is positively related to increases in generalized trust, while exiting is associated with a decrease in generalized trust. Hence, contrary to other recent studies on associations' ability to affect generalized trust, this study demonstrates effects on generalized trust when studying social encounters within an MMORPG. In other words, a social experience such as gaming together seems to affect generalized trust positively. Adapted from the source document.

Innumeracy among survey respondents in estimating a country's immigrant population is a well-known problem for the social sciences. In general,
individuals have been found to overestimate the immigrant population at the country level. Furthermore, individuals were found to be especially
prone towards overestimating the number if they already were prejudiced against immigrants. If these findings generalize to lower levels of inquiry
such as neighborhoods, then research using subjective assessments of immigrant populations in these contexts might be biased as well. By
distributing a questionnaire among 142 small and mid-sized companies in the city Gothenburg, Sweden, respondent's subjective assessments of
the immigrant population in their neighborhoods was compared to register data of those neighborhoods. Hence, although the sample was only
representative of the working population in small and middle-sized companies in a metropolitan area thus excluding unemployed, retirees, nonworking
students, and the rural population of Sweden, the results demonstrated that subjective assessments could correlate well with objective
assessments. Overall, the results indicated that the disparity between subjective and objective assessments was lower than what could be
expected from previous research findings at the country-level.

Abstract
Survey researchers take great care to measure respondents' answers in an unbiased way; but, how successful are we as a field at remedying unintended and intended biases in our research? The validity of inferences drawn from studies has been found to be improved by the implementation of preregistration practices. Despite this, only 3 of the 83 published articles in POQ and IJPOR in 2020 feature explicitly stated preregistered hypotheses or analyses. This manuscript aims to show survey methodologists how preregistration and replication (where possible) are in service to the broader mission of survey methodology. To that end, we present a practical example of how unknown biases in analysis strategies without preregistration or replication inflate type I errors. In an initial data collection, our analysis showed that the visual layout of battery-type questions significantly decreased data quality. But after committing to replicating and preregistering the hypotheses and analysis plans, none of the results replicated successfully, despite keeping the procedure, sample provider, and analyses identical. This manuscript illustrates how preregistration and replication practices might, in the long term, likely help unburden the academic literature from follow-up publications relying on type I errors.

In recent years, conjoint experiments have been in vogue across the social sciences. A rea­son for the conjoint experiments' popularity is that they allow researchers to estimate the causal effects of many components of stimuli simultaneously. However, for conjoint experi­ments to produce valid results, respondents need to be able to process and understand the wide range of dimensions presented to them in the experiment. If the information process­ing is too demanding or too complicated, respondents are likely to turn to satisficing strate­gies, leading to poorer data quality and subsequently decreasing the researcher's ability to make accurate causal inferences. One factor that may lead to the adoption of satisficing strategies is the presentation format used for the conjoint experiment (i.e., presenting the information within a text paragraph or a table). In the present paper, a direct replication of the single conjoint presentation format experiment described in Shamon, Dülmer, and Giza's (2019) paper in Sociological Methods & Research is presented, and extending their work to paired conjoint experiment. The results of the direct replication showed that re­spondents evaluated the questionnaire more favorably when reading the table format but were, on the other hand, less likely to participate in subsequent panel waves. Albeit the number of break-offs, refusals, and non-responses did not differ between the two formats, respondents who saw the table format evaluated the scenarios with more consistency and less dimension reduction, thus favoring the table presentation format. For paired conjoint experiments, the presentation format did not affect survey evaluations or panel participa­tion but the table format heavily outperformed the text format on every data quality mea­sure except for dimension reduction. Conceptually, albeit not directly replicating the find­ings in Shamon, Dülmer, and Giza (2019), the present manuscript concludes that the table format appears preferable over the text format for conjoint experimental designs.