Suchergebnisse

The SCAPE database comprises 305 coded cases of public environmental governance in North America, Europe and Australasia, spanning several decades up to the year 2014. Its main purpose is to study the effect of different modes of citizen and stakeholder participation on environmental and other outcomes of decision-making. Each case comprises several hundred variables on the context, process and outcomes of decision-making. While most variables are quantitative Likert-scale type variables, several text fields are included, too. Data were obtained through a case-based meta-analysis ("case survey method", see Newig et al. 2013). For each case, three independent raters coded one or several texts. The dataset contains consolidated data (mostly, averages over three coders). A web-based tool that allows easy access to key categories of the dataset will be available at https://partscout.org.

Under what conditions are people prepared to accept restrictions on their personal freedoms in order to protect their own well-being and health, but above all the well-being and health of others? What do decision-making processes have to look like in order to be regarded as legitimate by citizens? Are there freedoms that people do not want to give up under any circumstances? What role does the democratic quality of a political regime play in these questions, and what is the role of various cultural characteristics?

These questions, which refer to the area of tension between individual liberties and collective welfare, arise with particular urgency in view of the worldwide Corona pandemic, but also with a view to future crises, such as the impending climate catastrophe.

To study these questions, DAPEK surveyed 9,000 respondents from six countries (Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland, South Korea, and Spain – 1,500 respondents each) in November 2021. Core of the data collection are two survey experiments. First, a conjoint experiment is designed to analyze which restrictions in pandemic countermeasures affect citizen support. Second, a combination of a best-worst-scaling approach with a framing experiment scrutinizes which political decision-making procedures citizens prefer and whether that varies by different societal challenges. The experimental data are flanked by extensive individual-level data, a.o. on demographics, as well as political and cultural value orientations.

DAPEK is a short-term project of the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script", which is located at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, among others.

Keywords: covid-19, value orientations, societal challenges, decision-making process, freedom

Previous research on educational aspirations and educational decision-making has mostly focused on high-income countries and thus on a relatively homogeneous socio-economic context. However, educational decision-making may be sensitive to contextual factors such as economic deprivation, a dysfunctional welfare state or poor access to credit markets – characteristics shared by most low- and middle-income countries. To better understand how economically disadvantaged individuals in developing countries make their educational choices, we conducted a survey based on a random sample with high school students in the rural department Morazán in El Salvador, a lower middle-income country in Latin America. Our results show that regardless of the social background, almost all students aspire to pursue tertiary education, probably due to the high tertiary degree premium in earnings and the high social benefits. However, the lack of possibilities to finance their studies generally prevents the realisation of these aspirations for lower social background students. While in high-income countries, cost factors are not very important in the decision-making process, the burden of costs explains around 45 percent of the social background effect in El Salvador. Other factors such as academic confidence, expected future economic benefits, parental status maintenance wish, individual risk aversion and time discounting preferences play only a minor role.

In social demography the migrants' point of view regarding their migratory intentions is commonly studied using stated preferences, since it is viewed as one of the most reliable predictors of future behaviour. Recently scholars have begun to examine differences between various pre-move thoughts instead of considering just one simple act in the migration decision-making process. Examples include desires and expectations to move or considerations and plans to move.
However, few of the studies so far have addressed the central question of the factors intervening in the migration decision-making process of staying, returning or moving to another country altogether. Despite much excellent work on residential and international migration intentions, the subject of return or onward migration intentions has attracted little attention. Furthermore, the process of migration decision-making as such is understudied. Finally, existing studies generally considered the migrant population as a whole or focused on one specific type of migrant and did not compare different types of migrants. Yet, without an understanding of those dimensions we are left with an inadequate analysis of the current migration patterns and its drivers.
This study will contribute to the literature by examining the case of recent German immigrants living in Switzerland. It adopts a comparative approach by focusing on the decision-making process regarding different types of migrants as well as varying migratory projects, i.e. the intention to stay in Switzerland, to return to Germany or to move to another country. New survey data will be collected to allow a close and in-depth analysis of the factors that determine their mobility intentions and plans. Moreover, we will gain new empirical insights into the process of decision-making and the existence of different types of migrants in today's legal context of free movement of persons; this being new evidence that will finally allow us to theoretically refine the conceptual framework of the migration decision-making process of different migratory projects and subgroups and to better understand current migration patterns within EU/EFTA-countries.

The institutional arrangements that characterize the Swiss, corporatist-like, decision-making system were designed at a time when the impact of the "outside world" on both the form and content of legislative acts was presumably very low. With the deepening of the processes of economic globalization and political internationalization, however, an increasing number of issues that used to be domestic in nature are now co-defined at the international level and/or strongly influenced by norms elaborated abroad.
Against this background, the purpose of this project is to evaluate the impact of the internationalization/globalization processes on the national decision-making system and related institutional arrangements in Switzerland. In order to do so, we shall intend to rely on a double strategy. First, we will carry out a "before-after" analysis, that is, a comparison between the characteristics of the Swiss decision-making institutions and processes in the most recent legislative period (1995-99), with those at an earlier stage of the internationalization process (legislative period 1971-75). While data already exists for the period 1971-75, corresponding data - on the institutional setting, the duration of decision making processes, the importance and level of conflictuality of a given act, etc. - will have to be gathered for the legislature 1995-99. All legislative acts which were treated by the Swiss parliament between 1995 and 1999 and which were either initiated by a popular initiative or subject to a referendum (presumably around 200 acts) will be included in the quantitative analysis. Second, we will carry out a more detailed, but still mostly quantitative, network analysis of a small sample of the "most important" legislative acts of the period 1995-99. We shall focus on three legislative acts that differ with respect to their "international-national" character: a "purely" domestic policy decision, and two types of "mixed" decision. For this part of the study, socio-metric data collected through structured interviews with the relevant political elites will be the main source of information.
The first general assumption of this project is that the process of internationalization has induced changes in the institutional framework of the Swiss decision-making system. Most noticeably, internationalization is expected to have limited the formal consultation/ concertation procedures during the legislative process. The "before-after" analysis will help test whether and to what extent these changes have actually occurred. The second general assumption is that the changes in the decision-making institutions brought about by internationalization have influenced the distribution of political power in the Swiss political system. The policy network analysis in the three selected policy domains will help highlight the possible changes in power relations and how they are related to institutional changes.

The aim of the following research project is to analyze the determinants of adolescents' and young adults' career decisions.
At the end of compulsory school and at the end of vocational education and training (VET), and in the age of a young adult, career decisions were examined from an adolescent's perspective.
At the first wave of data collection, criteria for (apprenticeship) staffing analyzed from a HR manager's perspective as well. Three decision-making situations, which are crucial for vocational educational processes, were analyzed: (1) before entering vocational education and training (VET), (2) at the time of graduation from VET (possible options: employment, interim solution, tertiary level qualifications, additional VET, further education), (3) after 4-5 years of employment (possible options: tertiary level qualifications, additional VET, further education). In the following measurement waves determinants for implementing a career decision were examined through repeated measurements. From a theoretical perspective, in addition to decision-adaptive trajectories, maladaptive courses that either result in adjustments or terminations with reorientations are feasible. Reasons for adjustments are found in experienced occupational stress that young adults fail to moderate due to lack of appropriate resources. The balance between occupational stress and resources is a control mechanism that regulates life courses and in which primary and secondary control processes (as shown in the model of Heckhausen and Schulz, 2010) are essential. Through the implementation of career decisions, young adults enter new vocational and further educational contexts. By performing actions, they initiate personal developmental processes, which – in the best case – lead to the realization of a decision (for example to a further education degree). The extent of the goal attainment subsequently affects not only the original educational expectancies and values but also the perception of vocational person-environment fit, vocational satisfaction, job commitment, perception of vocational continuity and vocational self-efficacy.
This explanatory model of vocational development was examined by means of two additional surveys of the sample from the initial project (cohort-sequence-design). After two and four years respectively, adolescents of all three cohorts were online surveyed for a second and third time. At the second time the sample was supplemented with additional participants so each cohort counted at least 800 participants. These data offered the opportunity for a longitudinal review of the postulated explanatory model on regulation of vocational careers. Data enabled the analysis of adolescents' vocational trajectories and their willingness for an apprenticeship or further education between elementary school and tertiary level qualifications from a theory-driven and differentiated perspective. Further, it was possible to substantially extend previous knowledge , for example regarding expedient controlling and optimization of further education options and offers.

Pregnancy termination and its interplay with critical life stages and events has rarely been subjected to careful scrutiny in the social sciences, mainly due to a lack of high-quality survey data. Using the first eleven waves (2008-2018) of the German Family Panel Study (pairfam) and employing linear probability models, we examine women and also men with partners who either had induced abortion (N=260 women; N=170 men) or became parents (N=1478 women; N=1220 men). We frame abortion as a social process in which life circumstances and disruptive life events fundamentally shape the decision to carry a pregnancy to term or to discontinue it. We find that teenage or late pregnancy, educational enrolment, previous children, partnership dissolution and economic uncertainty are associated with induced abortion. Our evidence suggests that abortion decisions are powerfully shaped by life-course contingencies and their complex intertwining.

This research is part of sentencing studies, that is, the process by which judges punish offenders. In order to study the effect of order (i.e. whether the order in which the evidence is administered influences judicial decisions) and the compensatory effect linked to the paradox of conviction (i.e. that in order to convict, judges would be satisfied with clues that are all the less convincing the more serious the crime committed, but that they would then compensate their lack of conviction with a less severe sentence), this research proposes to conduct a broad survey of all criminal judges in Switzerland.

As response rates continue to decline, the need to learn more about the survey participation process remains an important task for survey researchers. Search engine data may be one possible source for learning about what information some potential respondents are looking up about a survey when they are making a participation decision. In the present study, we explored the potential of search engine data for learning about survey participation and how it can inform survey design decisions. We drew on freely available Google Trends (GT) data to learn about the use of Google Search with respect to our case study: participation in the Family Research and Demographic Analysis (FReDA) panel survey. Our results showed that some potential respondents were using Google Search to gather information on the FReDA survey. We also showed that the additional data obtained via GT can help survey researchers to discover topics of interest to respondents and geographically stratified search patterns. Moreover, we introduced different approaches for obtaining data via GT, discussed the challenges that come with these data, and closed with practical recommendations on how survey researchers might utilize GT data to learn about survey participation.

The SOEP-K2ID project aims at:

investigating effects of ECEC quality on children's socio-emotional development,
examining socio-economic selectivity in parental choices of ECEC quality,
assessing information asymmetries between mothers and ECEC providers,
exploring how ECEC quality affects maternal employment and wellbeing and indirectly child development.

The three-year project launched in September 2013 is funded by the Jacobs Foundation. The project collected new data on the quality of ECEC institutions, that children below school age in Socio-Economic Panel Study attend. In a first step, the project surveyed parents of all SOEP children below school age to investigate the parental decision-making process and subjective evaluations with respect to ECEC quality of the institutions attended by their children. In a second step, the project collected indicators of structural, orientation and process quality from directors and class teachers of the ECEC institutions to capture the quality of interactions between children and teaching staff, activities, learning environment, and teacher orientations. By combining institutional information on the educational context with individual and household data collected in the SOEP, this new data set will allow researchers to examine associations with children's development first during early childhood and school years and subsequently until adulthood.

During lower secondary education young adults deal more and more with the upcoming career choice. Studies have shown that career choice is not implemented only by adolescents themselves but interacts with persons of reference and further social environment. However, the extent of fit between a person's characteristics (interests, skills) and the job requirements in the apprenticeship generally manifests after the transition to vocational education and training (VET). With that in mind, the key questions focus on two important research topics:

1) To what extent do personal characteristics and contextual factors influence and predict choice actions and corresponding outcomes in lower secondary school as well as educational decisions and the choice of the apprenticeship's professions at the end of lower secondary school?

2) To what extent do characteristics of choice actions, characteristics of persons of reference in school and family and the companies' socialization tactics after transition influence performance indicators at the end of the first year of post-compulsory education?

Primary theoretical starting point is the social-cognitive career model (Lent, Brown and Hackett, 1994). The planned study is based on the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project "Institutional Determinants of Tracking during the Transition in Lower Secondary Education (Effects of Tracking)". It longitudinally extends the project with two additional waves of measurement. The ninth grade adolescents that have participated in previous waves of measurement are surveyed one more time. The sample is enhanced with supplementary ninth graders. In ninth grade, data on aspects of choice actions, choice attitudes and associated contextual factors are collected. In the first year of post-compulsory education, the experienced socialization tactics employed by the company and the performance indicators are measured. Additionally, teachers are asked about the post-compulsory education of their students at the end of ninth grade in order to validate the adolescents' information. For the first time in the Swiss educational context, this study examines, on a longitudinal basis and starting from the end of primary school, how educational and career decision-making processes interact with one another resulting in more or less successful performances after transition to post-compulsory education. In a theoretical perspective, this project enables further development of models on career choice and on transition to post-compulsory education. In practical term (valorization), this project provides schools, career counseling and teacher education administrations helpful basics to support adolescents in the process of career decision-making (optimization of school-to-work transition). Finally, this project provides insights on how companies may introduce and support newcomers.

The project implements the project "Institutional conditions of selection in the transition to lower secondary education". (Effects of selection WiSel I, No. 11063). The two datasets can be linked: https://forsbase.unil.ch/dataset/dataset-detail/16266/1473/

Deutsch:
Die Studie "Lehrende als Gatekeeper für externe Förderprogramme im Bildungssystem" untersucht erstmalig den Prozess der Fremdselektion durch Lehrende bei der Auswahl von Schüler/innen für Bildungsinterventionen, die das Ziel der Reduktion sozialer Ungleichheit beim Übergang zur Hochschule verfolgen. Hierfür wird die Frage diskutiert, inwieweit den Zielen entsprechend Schüler/innen ohne akademischen Hintergrund Zugang zu einer spezifischen Bildungsintervention erhalten. Mittels einer teils explorativen Studie wird untersucht, inwiefern sich die von den Lehrenden für ein Programm ausgewählten Schüler/innen von den nicht ausgewählten Schüler/innen unterscheiden. Dazu werden mithilfe von Entscheidungsbaumanalysen Daten von 1129 Schüler/innen der Sekundarstufe II in 28 Schulen (darunter 23 Gymnasien und 5 Gesamtschulen) betrachtet.

Englisch:
The study focuses on the selection process of teachers when selecting students for an educational intervention that aim to reduce social inequality in the transition to higher education. We ask the questions to what extent students without academic background get access to such educational interventions. By the means of exclusive data from one intervention program, we identify characteristics of students that distinguish selected students from non-selected students. For this purpose, we use decision tree analyses and random forest analyses to examine data from 1129 students in 28 upper secondary schools, including 23 grammar schools and 5 comprehensive schools.

In the context of the CH@YOUPART project we are studying the political participation of young adults in Switzerland. We are particularly interested in the forms of political involvement that 18 to 25 year olds prefer and the frequency of these activities. Furthermore, we investigate why young Swiss are political active or why not. The goal of this project is to find out more about the situation in Switzerland as well as to learn if young adults in here differ in this respect from their peers in other European countries.
The active participation of the population in the political process is essential, especially for a direct democracy. Through this participation a range of opinions find entrance into the political process and policy decisions thereby obtain their legitimacy. The participation behavior of the young generation is thus crucial for the future of the political system in Switzerland. The aim of this project is therefore to obtain answers to two questions:
1. How do young adults participate politically in Switzerland?
2. How can the political participation of young adults be explained?
Thereby, we are equally interested in the politically active and non-active Swiss and the reasons for their respective behavior. The political participation of young Swiss has only been covered comprehensively in very few studies. The existing data, however, is outdated. Moreover, this data does not allow for comparisons of the political activities of 18 to 25 year olds in Switzerland with same age EU citizens. Both aspects have been taken into account in the development of the CH@YOUPART research design.
This project is conducted by the Swiss Centre of Competence in the Social Sciences (FORS) with the support of the State Secretariat for Education and Research of the Federal Department of Home Affairs.