The social meaning of inherited financial assets: moral ambivalences of intergenerational transfers

What do inherited financial assets signify to heirs and testators and how does this shape their conduct? Based on grounded theory methodology and twenty open, thematically structured interviews with US heirs, future heirs and testators, this article explicates a theoretical account that proposes a moral ambivalence as the core category to understand the social meaning of inherited financial assets. In particular, the analysis reveals that the social meaning of inherited assets is a contingent, individual compromise between seeing inherited assets as unachieved wealth and seeing them as family means of support. Being the lifetime achievement of another person, inheritances are, on the one hand, morally dubious and thus difficult to appropriate. Yet in terms of family solidarity, inheritances are "family money," which is used when need arises. Taken from this angle, inheriting is not the transfer of one individual's privately held property to another person, but rather the succession of the social status as support-giver along with the resources that belong to this status to the family's next generation. Heirs need to find a personal compromise between these poles, which always leaves room for interpretation

Career trajectories into undereducation: Which skills and resources substitute formal education in the intergenerational transmission of advantage?

A significant share of employees in Europe has less formal training than is required by their job; they are undereducated. We use harmonized panel data from the United Kingdom and Germany to investigate the skills and resources allowing the undereducated to develop careers in occupations supposedly beyond their reach. Our theoretical approach complements individual-centered labor market theory with an intergenerational mobility perspective which regards undereducation as a form of family status maintenance. Our empirical results show that persons whose (non-)cognitive skills exceed their formal education are more likely to be undereducated in the cross-section, and to enter undereducated employment or be promoted into it throughout the life course. Yet beyond individual merit, parental socio-economic status is a similarly-important predictor of these outcomes; our analyses even trace a significant share of the importance of (non-)cognitive skills to it. To complete our intergenerational argument, we finally demonstrate that undereducation acts as a pathway to the intergenerational reproduction of earnings inequality - more so, in fact, than the avoidance of overeducation. These results are remarkably similar across the UK and Germany, although some country differences suggest higher skill-induced career mobility in Britain and stronger origin effects in Germany. We discuss promising avenues for further comparative research in the conclusion

Why You Should Always Include a Random Slope for the Lower-Level Variable Involved in a Cross-Level Interaction

Mixed-effects multilevel models are often used to investigate cross-level interactions, a specific type of context effect that may be understood as an upper-level variable moderating the association between a lower-level predictor and the outcome. We argue that multilevel models involving cross-level interactions should always include random slopes on the lower-level components of those interactions. Failure to do so will usually result in severely anti-conservative statistical inference. We illustrate the problem with extensive Monte Carlo simulations and examine its practical relevance by studying 30 prototypical cross-level interactions with European Social Survey data for 28 countries. In these empirical applications, introducing a random slope term reduces the absolute t-ratio of the cross-level interaction term by 31 per cent or more in three quarters of cases, with an average reduction of 42 per cent. Many practitioners seem to be unaware of these issues. Roughly half of the cross-level interaction estimates published in the European Sociological Review between 2011 and 2016 are based on models that omit the crucial random slope term. Detailed analysis of the associated test statistics suggests that many of the estimates would not reach conventional thresholds for statistical significance in correctly specified models that include the random slope. This raises the question how much robust evidence of cross-level interactions sociology has actually produced over the past decades

Multilevel Analysis with Few Clusters: Improving Likelihood-based Methods to Provide Unbiased Estimates and Accurate Inference

Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield biased point estimates and severely anti-conservative inference with few upper-level units. In this article, the authors seek to rectify this negative assessment. First, they show that ML estimators of coefficients are unbiased in linear multilevel models. The apparent bias in coefficient estimates found by Stegmueller can be attributed to Monte Carlo Error and a flaw in the design of his simulation study. Secondly, they demonstrate how inferential problems can be overcome by using restricted ML estimators for variance parameters and a t-distribution with appropriate degrees of freedom for statistical inference. Thus, accurate multilevel analysis is possible within the framework that most practitioners are familiar with, even if there are only a few upper-level units

The ethnic diversity and collective action survey (EDCAS): technical report

"The EDCA-Survey is a large scale CATI telephone survey conducted in three countries: Germany, France and the Netherlands. The survey was designed to test theoretical arguments on the effects of ethnic diversity on social capital and civic engagement. This aim demands for a sophisticated design. The survey is not representative for the entire populations of Germany, France or the Netherlands. Instead, the basic population is the population over the age of 18 in 74 selected regions in Germany, France and the Netherlands that have sufficient language skills to conduct an interview in the language of their country of residence, or in the case of the oversample of people with Turkish migration background to conduct the interview in Turkish. The aim of the survey is to enable the comparison of these 74 regions, which vary on contextual characteristics of interest. In addition, the EDCA-Survey includes one oversample of migrants in general (24%) and an additional second oversample of Turkish migrants in particular (14%). The oversampling is the same within each of the 74 regions, each of which has about 100 observations and seven specially chosen cities even 500. This survey design is an important characteristic of the EDCA-Survey and distinguishes it from other available data. This is important since one aim of the EDCA-Survey is to enable the aggregation of contextual characteristics from the survey itself. Overall, 10.200 completed interviews were conducted - 7500 in Germany, 1400 in France and 1300 in the Netherlands." (author's abstract)"Der EDCA-Survey ist eine CATI gestützte Telefonumfrage, die in Deutschland, Frankreich und den Niederlanden durchgeführt wurde. Die Umfrage wurde mit dem Ziel erhoben, Effekte ethnischer Diversität auf Sozialkapital und Zivilengagement zu untersuchen. Dieses Vorhaben setzt ein komplexes Surveydesign voraus. So ist die Umfrage nicht repräsentativ für die Bevölkerungen von Deutschland, Frankreich und den Niederlanden. Stattdessen bildet die Grundgesamtheit die Bevölkerung von 74 ausgewählten Regionen der drei Länder, die über die Sprachfertigkeit verfügen, ein Interview in der Landessprache oder gegebenenfalls auf Türkisch zu führen. Ziel ist der Vergleich dieser 74 Regionen, die sich hinsichtlich verschiedener Charakteristika unterscheiden. Darüber hinaus weist der EDCA-Survey eine überproportionale Stichprobe von Personen mit Migrationshintergrund (24%) und eine zweite überproportionale Stichprobe von Personen mit türkischem Migrationshintergrund (14%) auf. Diese überproportionale Stichprobe wurde in jeder der 74 Regionen gezogen, in denen jeweils ca. 100 Interviews durchgeführt wurden. In sieben speziell ausgesuchten Regionen wurden 500 Interviews geführt. Dieses Surveydesign ist ein zentrales Charakteristikum des EDCA-Surveys und ermöglicht die Aggregation von Kontextmerkmalen aus dem Survey. Insgesamt wurden 10.200 vollständige Interviews erhoben – 7500 in Deutschland, 1400 in Frankreich und 1300 in den Niederlanden." (Autorenreferat

Why trust? A mixed-method investigation of the origins and meaning of trust during the COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark

Trust is highlighted as central to effective disease management. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Denmark seemed to embody this understanding. Characterizing the Danish response were high levels of public compliance with government regulations and restrictions coupled with high trust in the government and other members of society. In this article, we first revisit prior claims about the importance of trust in securing compliant citizen behaviour based on a weekly time-use survey that we conducted during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic (2 April–18 May 2020). Analysis of activity episodes, rather than merely self-reported compliance, both reconfirms the importance of institutional trust and nuances prior suggestions of detrimental effects of trust in other citizens. These survey-based results are further augmented through thematic analysis of 21 in-depth interviews with respondents sampled from the survey participants. The qualitative analysis reveals two themes, the first focusing on trust in others in Danish society and the second on the history of trust in Denmark. Both themes are based on narratives layered in cultural, institutional and inter-personal levels and further underline that institutional and social trust are complementary and not countervailing. We conclude by discussing how our analysis suggests pathways towards an increased social contract between governments, institutions and individuals that might be of use during future global emergencies and to the overall functioning of democracies

The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: Investigating Immigration and Social Policy Preferences. Executive Report.

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of selective model reporting and lack of replicability. The heterogeneity of countries obscures attempts to clearly define data-generating models. P-hacking and HARKing lurk among standard research practices in this area.This project employs crowdsourcing to address these issues. It draws on replication, deliberation, meta-analysis and harnessing the power of many minds at once. The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative carries two main goals, (a) to better investigate the linkage between immigration and social policy preferences across countries, and (b) to develop crowdsourcing as a social science method. The Executive Report provides short reviews of the area of social policy preferences and immigration, and the methods and impetus behind crowdsourcing plus a description of the entire project. Three main areas of findings will appear in three papers, that are registered as PAPs or in process