Abstract
This issue of the BMS includes the fall 2017 issue of the RC33 Newsletter of the Research Committee “Logic and Methodology” (RC33) of the International Sociological Association (ISA). This issue also includes two research articles in English and four research notes in English.
The first research article, “Investigating Interviewer Falsifications - A Quasi-experimental Design”, by Uta Landrock, presents findings from a quasi-experimental research during which interviewers conducted real standardized interviews and subsequently falsified corresponding interviews in the lab, the only approach allowing the authors to know for sure which interviews are falsified.
The second research article, “Personalized SMS, Survey Participation and Data Quality - The Italian Case”, by Chiara Respi and Emanuela Sala, shows that SMSs may be useful contact modes in surveys and evaluates the impact of personalized SMS salutations on response and measurement error. The authors find evidence that such personalization has a positive impact on response rates and some indication that it may lead to better survey data.
The first research note, “Teaching ‘Quanti’ - Lessons from French Experiences in Sociology and History”, by Pierre Mercklé and Claire Zalc, is a reflection on how to use and how to teach quantitative methods in the social sciences, and compares current French and American pedagogical practices.
The second research note, “Agoramétrie’s Trunk Questions and Moscovici Social Representation’s Core - More than Just Similarities, by Karl M. van Meter, shows that Agoramétrie’s “trunk questions” on social conflicts are very similar to Serge Moscovici and his colleagues’ “core” or “nucleus” of social representation, and that this similarity may extend all the way to perhaps being identical.
The third research note, “Another Look at the Relationship between Cohabitation and Marriage - The Use of Crude and Net Probabilities”, by Paraskevi Peristera and Gebrenegus Ghilagaber, looks at whether or not informal cohabitation is a prelude to marriage or a permanent replacement to it, and proposes an approach based on the theoretical relationship between crude and net probabilities of marriage in a competing-risk framework.
The fourth research note, “‘Traveling Codes’ Leuphana Workshop - 30-31 March 2017”, by Fabrizio Li Vigni, is a report on this meeting of “making sense of what happens when climate science travels, whether in the form of mobile scientific tools, models, and software codes, circulating data sets and standards”.