A Multilevel Model for Coalition Governments. Uncovering Party-Level Dependencies Within and Between Governments.

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Coalition research increasingly emphasizes party-level explanations of coalition outcomes. However, this work does not account for the complex multilevel structure between parties and governments: many parties participate in multiple governments and governments often comprise multiple parties. In this paper, I show that this crisscrossing structure creates dependencies among observations both across and within governments. If … Read more

Micro-level determinants of macro-level outcomes. The micro-macro link with empirical methods.

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Explaining how macro-level outcomes emerge from their constituting parts at the micro-level is a complex undertaking. In empirical research, however, statistical methods that feature trivial aggregation functions dominate because methods to study more complex aggregation processes remain underdeveloped. In this thesis, I contribute to the development of empirical-statistical methods for the study of micro-macro links. … Read more

Social Closure in U.S. High Schools? Patterns and Determinants of Socioeconomic Segregation in Adolescent Friendship Networks.

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Adolescent friendship networks exhibit limited interaction across socioeconomic and racial lines. Using Add Health data and a novel exponential random graph model, this study examines socioeconomic segregation in high school friendships and its relationship to racial segregation. Results show that networks are segregated less by socioeconomic status (SES) than by race, yet low-SES students are … Read more

Analyzing complex data structures: network, spatial, multilevel, and text data.

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The world and data about the world are becoming increasingly complex. Examples of complex data structures include network data that represent connections among individuals (e.g., friends on social media platforms), spatial data that represents geolocations (e.g., smartphone location data), data collected at multiple levels (e.g., employees in organizations), and text data (e.g., interviews, online comments). These … Read more

Introduction to Inferential Social Network Analysis

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Most courses on social network analysis (SNA) focus on descriptive SNA, such as measuring the density of a network, identifying subgroups within a network, or examining the centrality of actors within a network. Inferential SNA, which focuses on explaining the formation of networks and behaviors and beliefs of actors embedded in networks, by contrast, is … Read more

Introduction to Multilevel Modeling

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Many kinds of data have a multilevel, hierarchical, nested, or clustered structure. Animal and human studies of inheritance, for instance, deal with a natural multilevel structure where offspring are grouped within families. Offspring from the same parents tend to be more alike than individuals at large. Clinical trials and other data collections also create data … Read more

Survey Attitude as Indicator for Survey Climate and as Predictor of Nonresponse and Attrition in a Probability-Based Online Panel

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Despite much research effort into response enhancing methods, trend studies over the years showed that response rates are declining. Differences in nonresponse trends over countries can only partially be explained by differences in survey design and field methods between countries. General attitudes towards surveys and survey climate are often named as important theoretical concepts for … Read more

Treatment effects on within-group and between-group inequality. A causal decomposition approach.

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Rising inequality has been linked to growing disparities within and between economic strata. Yet, existing approaches to analyzing inequality often disregard within-group inequality and are limited in addressing causal questions about why inequality is changing. This paper introduces a causal approach to examining how treatment variables impact within-group, between-group, and total inequality. The method permits … Read more

Socio-economic status and the self-evaluation of school performance

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Since for high-schoolers many consequential life choices lie still ahead, it is crucial that their choices suit their abilities. Among other things, students’ misperception of their academic ability can lead to educational misinvestment with potentially severe consequences. While previous research has documented gender differences in the self-perception of academic performance, disparities by socioeconomic status (SES) … Read more