[aimsl] FALL 2021 RC33 NEWSLETTER
Karl van Meter
[Initial version by Karl M. van Meter]
TOMORROW – RC33 AWARDS CEREMONY
FALL 2021 RC33 NEWSLETTER
THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION'S RC33
RESEARCH COMMITTEE "LOGIC AND METHODOLOGY"
President
Vera Toepoel (Netherlands)
Secretary
Martin Weichbold (Austria)
Vice President - Finances
Wander van der Vaart (Netherlands)
Vice President - Membership
Inga Gaizauskaite (Lithuania)
Vice President - Information
Karl M. van Meter (France)
Vice Presidents - Online Communication
Claire Wagner (South Africa)
Vice President for Awards
Henrik Andersen (Germany)
Vice President for Conferences
Iasonas Lamprianou (Cyprus)
Vice President for ISA World Congress Programme Coordination: N.N.
Vice President for ISA Forum Programme Coordination: N.N.
Vice Presidents at Large
Pei-shan Liao (Taiwan)
Fumiya Onaka (Japan)
Adriana García Andrade (Mexico)
Yashwant Deshmukh (India)
Past President
Nina Baur (Germany)
Letter from the President
Dear RC33 Members,
Thank you so much for supporting RC33. After we had to postpone our RC33 conference in Cyprus, and finally had to cancel and replace the conference for an online format, we are very grateful that you are still supporting our organization. We tried to make an onsite conference possible – especially given the fact that most of us really wanted to meet each other in person in Cyprus – but in the end, there was too much risk involved. Having an online conference is a suitable alternative, I would say.
The ISA Forum was also held online in 2021. With a digital conference there are some important advantages, such as fewer problems with budget, travel and visas, which make an online conference more inclusive than an onsite conference. At the International Sociological Association, we find this very important. We have had many long debates with the ISA research committee presidents to decide how to proceed with the next Forum (to be held in 2025). I must say that the advantages of an online Forum seem to weigh up to having an in person Forum.
“After two weeks of fruitful exchanges of arguments and consultations with the RC/WG/TG members and boards, the ISA Research Council gathered on Saturday the 12th of June to decide if the next ISA Forum (2025) should be a virtual or a presential event.
51 votes were cast, resulting in the following vote:
- For an on-site/in-person forum: 19 votes, 37%
- For a virtual/online forum: 18 votes, 35%
- Equal support for both options: 14 votes, 27,5%
If we consider only the first two options, the split is 51% favouring an in-person Forum, 49% an online forum.”
The vote is almost evenly split between the two options, with the tiniest majority favouring an on-site forum and a strong will by the RC/WG/TG to support the Forum process whatever format it takes.
The Research Council decision was to send this result to the ISA Executive Committee and leave the final decision to the EC (as communicated by Geoffrey Pleyers, ISA Vice-President for Research).
Furthermore, on May 1st, the ISA Assembly of Councils (i.e. the members of Research Council & of the National Association Council) has decided to postpone the ISA Congress to June 2023 and hold it in Melbourne (rather than virtually). The Assembly of Councils also extended RC boards and ISA mandates until the next Congress. This means that I will be your president for another two years.
Hope to serve you well, and all the best,
Vera Toepoel
RC33 President
Report for the Vice President for Conferences
Moving the 10th RC33 Cyprus Conference to an online, live format
Everybody was so excited when the Board of RC33 (Logic and Methodology in Sociology) of the International Sociological Association decided to organize the 10th RC33 Conference in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2020! People were dreaming of an amazing conference, with a rich academic program, and an entertaining social program with excursions. In November 2018, we proudly announced on our RC33 blog that “the local host of the conference will be the University of Cyprus (UCY – www.ucy.ac.cy ) through its Department of Social and Political Sciences, http://www.ucy.ac.cy/sap/en/ ”; everything seemed in place, nothing could have prepare us for what was coming.
In early 2020, however, the Covid-19 pandemic struck and spread quickly to countries across the world. The Organizing Committee of the Conference, and the Board of RC33 worried about the health of all conference participants. As a result, in May 2020, we were very sad to announce the postponement of the conference. After very careful consideration of all the parameters regarding the Coronavirus outbreak, the RC33 Local Organizers decided to postpone the conference until 7-10 September 2021.
In spite our hopes, the Covid-19 pandemic proved to be too resistance to all our efforts. Neither the protecting measures, nor the lock-downs and the vaccines proved enough to get rid of the virus during 2020. In February 2021, we sent out a short questionnaire to all people with registered emails on our RC33 Cyprus conference database. We intended to collect the opinions of our participants about the organization of the conference. Approximately 350 colleagues received the email and almost half of them responded to our short questionnaire. Half of those who responded did so within an hour; such was their desire to share with us their opinions about the conference. Only half of the responders said that they would come to Cyprus; the others thought that they would not be able to attend a physical conference.
After further deliberations, in April 2021, we had to announce the cancellation of the in person conference. That was a really very hard decision. However, the good news is that the Board of RC33 decided to organize a live, online conference during the communicated conference dates: 7-10 September 2021.
We communicated our decision to the participants and many decided to present their papers in the online conference. A preliminary program has already been prepared and figures below. We hope that you will all have enjoyed that productive online conference in September and you are waiting for the next face-to-face conference to meet each other in person!
Iasonas Lamprianou
Vice President for Conferences
Report from the Vice President for Awards
First RC33 Awards for Best Paper and Best Paper by a Young Scholar
Due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic the Board of RC33 decided in early 2021 to move the 10th RC33 Conference (which already had been postponed a year from 2020 to 2021) from the planned location of Nicosia, Cyprus to an online format.
With this, we decided to re-open the call for submissions for the first RC33 Awards for Best Paper and Best Paper by a Young Scholar. We solicited papers from RC33 members on social science-related topics published in peer-reviewed journals appearing after 1 January 2018. All members of RC33 were eligible to submit papers for consideration for Best Paper, while Best Paper by a Young Scholar was open to those who had not yet completed their PhD/dissertation or those who had completed it after 31 December 2016.
We were very excited to receive 28 submissions in total: 12 submissions for Best Author and 16 submissions for Best Paper by a Young Scholar. The submissions covered a wide variety of substantive topics and methodological approaches by researchers from just about all over the world.
As of writing, the papers are being evaluated by me and the rest of the Awards Committee, which includes our President, Vera Toepoel, and Vice-Presidents at Large Pei-shan Liao and Rima Wilkes. We are evaluating the papers based on a rough set of criteria, focusing on the paper's scientific contribution and scope, its innovativeness as well as style and presentation. This is proving to be a very difficult task due to the sheer number of excellent submissions!
In September 2021, an awards session was organized for RC33 Awards during which we spent some time highlighting the excellent contributions of our RC33 members. This took place on Friday, 10 September 2021, from 9h15-10h15. We were happy at seeing many of you there!
Thank you to all those who submitted to the First RC33 Awards. We very much appreciated seeing/chatting/interacting with several of you in September at the conference!
Until the next time, take care and best regards,
Henrik Andersen
Vice President for Awards
Report for the Vice President for Finances
Finance report RC33
In our previous report, we sketched out how RC33 finances tends to fluctuate in time (due to irregular membership payments and ISA-fees), that we have a sound balance of income and expenditures (on average around €2,500) and that our account balance amounts to about €9,000.
Recent developments have helped to keep our finances in good order. Since the two major factors that determine our RC33 finances evolved in a positive direction: this applies to the income from RC33 membership fees (both through RC33 and through ISA), and to the expenditures to Sage Publications for providing access to the BMS and, until recently, distributing physical copies to RC33 members.
To start with the latest: thanks to a renewed agreement with Sage, our (long-term average) costs for BMS will be reduced by about half. Subject to the finalization of the agreement under consideration at the time of writing this report, RC33 will purchase online subscriptions to each annual volume of the journal at a fixed rate of nine hundred pounds (plus VAT/Tax at the prevailing rate). This thus is financially beneficial and provides all of our member with full online access to past issues of the RC33 Newsletter and the BMS.
Regarding the income side, the good news is that the important source of income through membership fees is starting to rise again. After the cancellation of the RC33 conference in 2020 – the postponement of the “Cyprus conference” – the prospect of the online RC33 conference in September 2021 resulted in the prolongation of memberships and attracted new members. In the meantime, our new website and the integrated membership payment system are constantly being updated, paying off the effort and costs that have been put in it.
Thus after some big changes in our organisation and the major impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, the current state of affairs can be said to be rather positive.
Wander van der Vaart
Vice President for Finances
Report from the Vice President for Membership
RC33 Membership Development
During 2020 and 2021, RC33 has worked on changes in membership that shall make joining the committee more valuable and accessible.
In 2020, the RC33 Board introduced differentiated membership fees to encourage scientists and students from lower income countries to become RC33 members. We currently distinguish between three categories of countries according to the Gross National Income of the national economies and offer reduced fee for student membership at each category. This applies to RC33-only membership. One may also become a member of RC33 in combination with an International Sociological Association (ISA) membership according to the procedure and rates presented at the ISA website.
In 2021, following a long term partnership with Sage Publications and the journal Bulletin de Methodologie Sociologique (BMS), all valid members of RC33 will receive full online access both to the latest BMS issues and the BMS archive (instead of two hard copies of the BMS per year). We believe this is a great opportunity for our members, as well as a contribution to sustainability goals. We are currently finalising the agreement with Sage and preparing a membership system for the online access to the BMS for RC33 members.
Although the year 2020 marked the end of a four-year membership cycle for many RC33 members, we are happy to see membership renewals and new membership registrations. Based on membership data in June 2021, RC33 has 122 valid members. Currently, 75% of members joined via ISA and 25% are RC33-only members. Scientists and students from Germany make up 20% of members; however, RC33 community unites members from 43 different countries.
We invite scientists and students interested in logic and methodology in sociology to become members of RC33, join our community and benefit from membership opportunities.
Inga Gaižauskaitė
Vice President for Membership
Report from the Vice President for Information
Circulating Information, Changing and Evolving Organizations
RC33 has managed to continue circulating information and changed and evolved several aspects of our organization since the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. This is the third RC33 Newsletter published during the pandemic and RC33 has managed to change its 2020 conference from a very attractive in-person meeting in Cyprus to our first ever online conference in 2021. And RC33’s relationship with Sage Publication has also evolved into a more modern format without paper printing but with full access to all BMS past publications.
Our BMS-RC33 distribution list activity has changed the least since the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic since it has always been entirely done through the Internet from the beginning. And several of these changes and evolving situations are still ongoing as we go to press. The RC33 Conference program – as it stands today and is printed below – will surely change before 7 September, and the details of the changes in the distribution of the RC33 Newsletter with the BMS by Sage Publications are still being worked out, although the general lines of this agreement were presented above. Probably the most important aspect of this agreement is that RC33 members will have full access to BMS archives on the Sage website. In the past, we learned that many universities were subscribed to the BMS but only to a limited number of years to the BMS archives, thus depriving their students of full access to previously published RC33 and BMS material.
The value of this material and that of our RC33 network associated with the BMS-RC33 distribution list resulted recently in an invitation by Pew Research and Elon University to distribute their “Will digital spaces improve – Future of Digital Life Survey” seeking “your insights about the evolution of the digital public sphere and whether or not there may be improvements in the tone and impact of online spaces in the coming years in regard to their influence on society”. Our RC33 network was also the source of a suggestion to distribute the American Sociological Association’s Footnotes very valuable report “ASA’s COVID-19 Resources for Sociologists”. There will certainly be similar future occasions when RC33 members will be able to benefit from their membership, so maintain your association with RC33 for other forthcoming possibilities.
Karl M. van Meter
Vice President for Information
Program at a Glance (as of July 2021)
Tuesday 7 September 2021
Day Chair: Henrik Andersen
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09:00-10:00 |
Opening and Keynote Opening by Vera Toepoel, President of RC33 Keynote Presentation: Keynote Presentation author: Katrin Weller Keynote Presentation abstract: |
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10:15-11:30 |
Session 1: Harmonization of Background Variables for Cross-national Surveys Session chair: Elvira Scholz, Pei-shan Liao Presentation 1: The International Standard Level of Education [ISLED] for ISCED-2011 Harry BG Ganzeboom, Heike Schröder Presentation 2: Harmonisation of Background Variables for East Asian Social Survey Noriko Iwai, Tetsuo Mo Presentation 3: Investigating the structure of political trust to national institutions: Evidence from the 2016 European Social Survey for Southern Europe Anastasia Charalampi Presentation 4: Background Variables in the ISSP Evi Scholz, Petra Brien |
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11:45-13:15 |
Session 2: Survey Solutions and Hard to Measure Aspects Session chair: Markus Quandt Presentation 1: Using comparative survey data to describe the 'ethnic' composition of populations - more pitfalls or more opportunities? Markus Quandt, Mónica Méndez Lago Presentation 2: Two competing approaches to measuring ethnic origin: ancestry and country of birth Silke Schneider, Anthony F. Heath Presentation 3: Data quality in on-line surveys: Experience from Serbia Bojan Todosijević, Dragan Stanojević Presentation 4: A measurement evaluation of a six item measure of quality of life (CASP6) across different modes of data collection in the 1958 National Child Development Survey (NCDS) Age 55 years. Dick Wiggins, George Ploubidis, Matt Brown Presentation 5:Is it Origin, Destination or Mobility? A Monte Carlo Simulation of the Diagonal Reference Model. Alessandro Procopio, Robin Samuel |
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13:45-15:15 |
Session 3: The use of passive measurement to replace or augment survey questions Session chair: Vera Toepoel Presentation 1: When survey science met online tracking: presenting an error framework for metered data Oriol J. Bosch, Melanie Revilla Presentation 2: Smartphone sensor measurements in general population studies Bella Struminskaya, Peter Lugtig, Barry Schouten
Presentation 3: Analyzing smartphone data for social research Sonja Malich, Sebastian Bähr, Georg-Christoph Haas, Florian Keusch, Frauke Kreuter, Mark Trappmann Presentation 4: Distributing activity trackers to investigate health behavior: response rates, data quality, and the role of incentives Vera Toepoel, Peter Lugtig, Annemieke Luiten Presentation 5: Consent to data linkage: A meta-analysis Anne Elevelt, Vera Toepoel, Peter Lugtig |
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15:30-17:00 |
Session 4: Web Probing Session chair: Katharina Meitinger, Vera Toepoel Presentation 1: How does the scale affect subjective health ratings? Insights from Web probing Katharina Meitinger, Cornelia Neuert, Dorothée Behr Presentation 2: Closed-ended vs open-ended: Evaluating the potential of targeted embedded probes Cornelia Neuert, Katharina Meitinger, Dorothée Behr Presentation 3: Response Behavior in Web Probing – The Impact of Open-Ended Probing Questions on Online Survey Behavior Patricia Hadler Presentation 4: Web Probing Using a Research Messenger function Vera Toepoel
Presentation 5: Integrating web probing qualitative evidence with quantitative data for extending question-and-answer models in cross-cultural survey research Dörte Naber, Jose-Luis Padilla |
Wednesday 8 September 2021
Day chair: Inga Gaisauskaite
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09:00-10:00 |
Session 5: Methods of Social Network Analysis Session chair: Claire Wagner, Inga Gaisauskaite Presentation 1: Longitudinal Social Network Methods for Education Christian Bokhove, Jasperina Brouwer, Christopher Downey Presentation 2: Dynamics of group-based meetings amongst teenagers Marion Hoffman, Timothée Chabot, Tom A.B. Snijders Presentation 3: Interactive network graphs online to analyze surveys Modesto Escobar |
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10:15-11:45 |
Session 6: Assessing the Quality of Survey Data II Session chair: Wander van der Vaart Presentation 1: Implementing empirical results of complex models for panel data (dynamic panel models, growth curve models) into dynamic microsimulation Petra Stein, Dawid Bekalarczyk, Eva Depenbrock Presentation 2: Propensity Score Analysis of the Mixed-mode Effect of a Panel Survey Su-hao Tu, Ruoh-rong Yu, Tsung-wei Hung Presentation 3: Systematic non-response socio-demographic differences in time-diary data collection: Evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Elena Mylona Presentation 4: Survey Participation to the First Wave of ITA.LI, the Italian Household Longitudinal Study Chiara Respi, Emanuela Sala Presentation 5: What does it mean to be an interviewer? Exploring fieldwork experiences of survey interviewers in Lithuania Inga Gaižauskaitė |
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12:00-13:30 |
Session 7: Assessing the Quality of Survey Data I Session chair: Iasonas Lampriou Presentation 1: Gender role attitudes in the Philippines and elsewhere Harry BG Ganzeboom, Linda Luz Guerrero, Iremae Labucay, Gerardo Sandoval Presentation 2: How Do Survey Mode, Frame, and Fieldwork Effort Affect Data Quality? A Meta-analysis Based on the Data from ISSP, CSES, ESS, and LAPOP Survey Programs. Adam Rybak Presentation 3: Are CAPI and CAWI methods interchangeable? Testing the issue of measurement invariance in a mixed-mode survey design Tiziano Gerosa, Chiara Respi Presentation 4: Coverage error in web surveys in Europe Alessandra Gaia, Emanuela Sala, Chiara Respi Presentation 5: The cross-country validation of the WHO-5 well-being index with item response theory and the alignment procedure Philipp Sischka |
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13:45-15:15 |
Session 8: Research emotions and sensitive topics Session chair: Martin Weichbold Presentation 1: Does the sensitiveness of items show in electrodermal activity? Kathrin Gärtner, Severin Maurer, Martin Weichbold Presentation 2: Error of Measurement: Researching immigrant populations Marvin Brinkmann Presentation 3: Instrumentalization of Emotion During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election – A Neopragmatist Analysis of the Presidential Nominees’ Media Communication Sheena F. Bartscherer Presentation 4: Between Baby and Blood: Interpreting Accounts of Pregnancy Loss on You-Tube Julia Böcker Presentation 5: Core Relations Themes as a method for reconstructing emotion from text Christian von Scheve |
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15:30-17:00 |
Session 9: Innovations and challenges in qualitative research Session chair: Inga Gaisauskaite, Claire Wagner Presentation 1: Quality Criteria for Online Qualitative Research Marlene Schuster, Melanie Hense Presentation 2: Integrating Q Methodology within In-depth Interviews and Focus Groups: Making Sense of Europeanization Discourses in Georgia Lia Tsuladze Presentation 3: Qualitative Analyses of Quantitative Computer Simulations Georg Mueller Presentation 4: Challenges in conducting longitudinal qualitative research among parentally bereaved African children Mienke van der Brug Presentation 5: Interviewing adolescents through time: balancing continuity and flexibility in a qualitative longitudinal study Susanne Vogl |
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17:15-18:30 |
Board Meeting |
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