Events

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023, 17.45, ISS Cologne (in-person or via ZOOM)

Next to significant expansions of legal rights and recognitions of homosexuals, the beginning of the 21^st century brought along a rapid expansion of social science research on gay and lesbian family issues. Whereas many studies are still based on qualitative research designs, the greater availability of high-quality survey data has spawned a new wave of quantitative research allowing representative studies of sexual minority populations that go beyond simple demographic accounts of, for example, union dynamics or fertility. We provide an overview of recent studies based on the German Family Panel (pairfam) and the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA), investigating such diverse topics as intergenerational relationships, expectations concerning partnerships and parenthood, as well as the subjective well-being of gays and lesbians in Germany.

For information about online or in-person attendance, please click here.

Wednesday, May 17th, 2023, 17.45, ISS Cologne (in-person or via ZOOM)

Existing work presents mixed findings on the impact of weather events on international migration. Relying on fine-grained data over 1980-2018 in the Mexico-U.S. setting, we turn to machine learning (ML) tools to first determine if weather events can predict migration choices of 140,000+ individuals. We include a comprehensive list of weather indicators measured at various lags and to consider complex interactions among the inputs. These models rely on data-driven model selection, optimize predictive performance, but often produce ‘black-box’ results. In our case, the results show that weather indicators offer at best a modest improvement in migration predictions. We then attempt to open the black box and model the linkages between select weather indicators and migration choices. We find the combination of precipitation and temperature extremes and their sequencing to be crucial to predicting weather-driven migration responses out of Mexico. We also show heterogeneity in these responses by household wealth. Specifically, ...

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Wednesday, May 3, 2023, 17.45, ISS Cologne (in-person or via ZOOM)

Difficult relationships may impede some benefits of social integration. This study inquires how many difficult relationships prevail in the personal network in late life, where they originate, and to what extent they affect loneliness. We supplemented the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) with our data collection on egocentric networks before the COVID-19 pandemic and a module that re-assessed loneliness during the pandemic. The sample comprised 883 respondents with a mean age of 73, and their 4,142 relationships. 15% of the respondents had at least one difficult relationship. Findings suggest that older adults may face structural and social-emotional constraints that pressure them to continue difficult relationships. Relationship difficulty in the personal network was unrelated to an increase in loneliness. The talk will also present some preliminary insights from on ongoing mixed methods project in carnival organizations.

For information about online or in-person attendance, please click here.

Wednesday, April 12, 2023, 17.45, ISS Cologne (in-person or via ZOOM)

Research has made clear that racial inequality is affected by neighborhood conditions. One important condition is access to financial establishments. We examine how living in minority neighborhoods affects ease of access to conventional banks vs. to alternative financial institutions (AFIs) such as check cashers and payday lenders, which are often more expensive and have at times been called predatory. Based on more than 6 million queries, we compute the difference in the time required to walk, drive, or take public transit to the nearest bank vs. the nearest AFI from the middle of every block in each of 19 of the nation's largest cities. Results suggest that race is strikingly more important than class, as the AFI is more often closer than the bank in well-off minority neighborhoods than in poor white ones. I present additional survey and interview results on the factors underlying these differences.

For information about online or in-person attendance, please click here.

In this new format, the Academy of Sociology teams up with a major German Sociology department to organize a hybrid speaker series. The Spring 2023 series will take place at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology (ISS), University of Cologne. In a mix of international and local speakers, the series invites to discussions about how sociological scholarship addresses major societal challenges and developments.

Organized by Clemens Kroneberg (Cologne) and Malte Reichelt (Bamberg), the AS speaker series will feature talks by Mario L. Small (Columbia), Lea Ellwardt (Cologne), Filiz Garip (Princeton), Karsten Hank (Cologne), and Elizabeth Bruch (Michigan) on topics such as racial inequality, climate change and migration, social networks, sexual minorities, and online dating markets. The program can be found here.

If you want to attend in person, please visit our event page for registration (for free). Online attendance is possible without registration via Zoom (click here, Meeting ID: 384 326 1393, Passcode: 2324).

ESRA hosts its main conference every two years to bring together applied survey researchers, methodologists and statisticians from Europe and beyond. The 2023 conference theme is “Survey research in times of crisis: Challenges, opportunities, and new directions”.

The conference showcases the latest survey research and offers a number of professional development opportunities, including short courses and awards. It is traditionally hosted in university buildings to keep registration fees to a minimum. ESRA aims to be as inclusive as possible, promoting in particular the participation of doctoral students and early career researchers.

The ESRA 2023 Conference will take place from 17 July to 21 July 2023 at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Milan, Italy. Call for Abstracts is open until 20t December, 2023.

For details click here.

The German Stata Users Group Meeting 2022 will be held on Friday, 10th June 2022 in Frankfurt at the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. On the day before the conference, there will be a workshop titled “Taking a page from Git: Reproducible research & dynamic documents with Stata” given by Sven Spieß.

Organzisers: Alexander Schmidt-Catran, Christian Czymara (both Goethe-University Frankfurt), Johannes Giesecke (Humboldt University Berlin), Ulrich Kohler (University of Potsdam).

The conference language will be English. The logistics of the conference are being organized by DPC Software GmbH, distributor of Stata in several countries including Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Czech Republic and Hungary (http://www.dpc-software.de).
For detailed program and registration information click here.

Online Workshop, September 23 and 24, 2021

In advance, participants can watch several short introductory videos on pairfam's design, samples, data structure, variables, missing values ​​and available documentation. On September 23, a 2-hour introduction to data preparation and multi-actor links (including an exercise) will be offered via zoom. The following day includes a 2-hour zoom session on weighting options, longitudinal data management and exemplary fixed effects regressions.

The workshop will be in English.

If you would like to take part in the workshop, please write an email to support@pairfam.de.

For more information see https://www.pairfam.de/en/

Workshop at German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Sep 27-28, 2021

The past years have witnessed a surge of new data allowing researchers to more precisely examine the nature, determinants, and effects of spatial mobility. Sophisticated survey designs, geo-referenced data, the extension of bibliometric data-bases, social media data, and new ways of linking datasets have increased the possibilities of research on spatial mobility and integration in addressing previously hard-to-examine questions. These methodological developments highlight the pressing need for a discussion about the potentials and pitfalls of newly available data and methods in research on spatial mobility and integration. Relevant questions include:

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GESIS Research Data Management Workshop, April 23-24, 2020, Cologne

This workshop has been cancelled due to the Corona crisis.

The workshop helps researchers to ensure that their research data is usable within the project and can be safely made available to others - both for the purpose of research replication and for re-use in new contexts. Ideally, these tasks are implemented in the research process without major extra efforts for researchers. For this purpose the workshop focuses on legal issues of data collection and sharing, on basic concepts of data cleaning and data documentation, on the organization of research data within the research project of as well as on sharing the data beyond the research project of origin.

For further information click here.