Measuring Immigrant Populations: Subjective versus Objective Assessments

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

The Impact of Presentation Format on Conjoint Designs: A Replication and an Extension

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

Gaming Together. When an imaginary world affects generalized trust

This thesis, by employing a four month self-selected panel-study of players from the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft as well as a control-group of non-players, find that generalized trust is negatively affected by participation in an online gaming environment. By creating an analytical framework of what constitutes a voluntary association this thesis also find that the Guilds in World of Warcraft constitutes such an association and that some of the negative effect by playing World of Warcraft can be explained by playing in ethnically homogenous guilds and off-set by playing in ethnically heterogeneous guilds. In other words, by playing MMORPG:s we are no longer only playing games, we are gaming together and that affect how we evaluate society