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ESRA 2023 Preliminary Glance Program


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Integrating Data from Different Survey Projects 2

Session Organisers Dr Piotr Cichocki (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Dr Piotr Jabkowski (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Dr Marta Kołczyńska (Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences)
TimeTuesday 18 July, 14:00 - 15:30
Room U6-05

Combining data from different sources constitutes a promising research avenue for secondary data users, as it allows for filling in the coverage gaps in individual cross-national survey projects. Such cross-project data harmonisations face severe methodological challenges, as the underlying survey projects may differ significantly in measurement instruments (i.e., question-wording and response scale formats), modes of data collection, sampling designs, and fieldwork procedures or quality assurance protocols. Secondary users of survey data need standardised and easily applicable procedures to facilitate analyses unbiased by the methodological differences among the underlying survey projects.

This session is dedicated to the advances in data integration procedures, including methodological innovations and applications. Welcome contributions include, but are not limited to, papers that:
A. propose methods for accounting for cross-project differences in data quality and comparability,
B. propose methods for accounting for cross-project differences in the measurement instruments,
C. propose measures of the Total Survey Error or its various aspects,
D. combine data from different sources in order to study a substantive research problem.

A controlled vocabulary for a Social Sciences knowledge graph: better definition of relationships

Dr Janete Saldanha Bach (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) - Presenting Author
Dr Claus-Peter Klas (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)

Research entities are increasingly interconnected at various levels and can be expressed in relationship maps, such as knowledge graphs. Interrelations between study units, instruments, questions, response scales, and variables are modelled within and across studies using Data Documentation Initiative - Lifecycle (DDI-LC). As the variable is one of the most relevant entities to enhance data reuse, we provide a framework design to better semantics the variables' relations descriptions to build a Social Sciences knowledge graph. These explicit relations between variables enable comparability across waves and facilitate data harmonization. We provide a brief textual identification of the relation type, supported by a controlled vocabulary (CV) and an extended description of the relationship since the current descriptions do not represent the variables' tie complexity. Documenting these relations will enrich the data reuse by supporting search and browse functionality. This framework will be published as a controlled vocabulary for variable relations via the CESSDA vocabulary manager. Using this proposed controlled vocabulary creates a semantically rich common Social Sciences research knowledge graph across institutes in line with the FAIR principles. As the next step, we will extend the descriptions of relations to all possible entities within DDI.


To what extent do supply and demand meet in politics? Comparing databases for the 2022 Italian General Elections

Professor Maria Paola Faggiano (Sapienza - University of Rome)
Dr Ernesto Dario Calò (Sapienza - University of Rome) - Presenting Author

The Italian general elections held on 25 September 2022 took place in a global historical context rigged with emergency issues, including the persistent management of the Covid-19 pandemic, the difficult economic recovery, and the escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. All these issues have found specific treatments (as well as political connotations) both in the national public debate and in the electoral campaign, undoubtedly contributing to determining the elections’ results. Indeed, while the voters have expressed their views on certain priorities that should shape the political agenda of the Country, various forces in the field have articulated their programs according to different governance approaches, which historically mark their politically oriented action (left-right axis).
Starting from the hypothesis that the demands of the voters reflect their positions in social and cultural spaces (in addition to their political-ideological orientation), and that political parties’ goal is to meet and represent such requests, this paper intends to investigate these two different sides, to detect whether and how they meet and to identify the specific forms of this matching. The survey research includes a joint analysis of two distinct databases. Regarding the political demand expressed by citizens, a web survey was conducted on the voting intentions of Italian electorate during the four weeks of the electoral campaign (29 August - 23 September 2022: 698 respondents). On the political supply front, on the other hand, the entire propaganda apparatus (3,777 posts) of the official Facebook pages of the main ten political parties (that is the four coalitions supported by 93.1% of the Italian voters) was collected. Given the explicit research aim, the further methodological challenge consists in making the two different databases compatible and comparable, appropriately following a qualitative-quantitative analysis approach.


Using combined data from different sources to study occupational characteristics and geographical patterns of German labor emigration in times of technological change

Dr Alexandra Mergener (Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB)) - Presenting Author
Dr Jean Philippe Décieux (Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB))

Technological change has altered labor market demands within well-developed societies implying global competition for skilled labor and, as a consequence, new forms of labor migration. So far, patterns of this labor migration in times of technological change have been underexplored. In order to gain deeper insights into this highly relevant and current topic, we examine both characteristics of German labor emigrants, focusing on education and occupational tasks, and characteristics of geographies of labor migration, concentrating on the status of technological development of the emigration countries.
For this purpose, we rely on a combined dataset of probability-based surveys. The German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) provides unique data on internationally mobile Germans, i.e., Germans who moved abroad between 2017 and 2018. The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) covers information of their non-mobile German counterparts (stayers). The BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey 2018 enables us to obtain detailed information about the occupational tasks of German employees that were matched to the occupations of German emigrants and stayers. In order to reflect the technological standard in the emigration country as a driver for international migration, we also linked the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking to the dataset. This ranking is an internationally renowned measurement approach providing country level data on how 63 countries stand in the process of digitization.
Based on this combined dataset, we found that, first, performing specific occupational tasks is in demand in the global competition for talent. Second, global discrepancies concerning the technological development between countries are a crucial contextual driver. Employees mainly performing analytical tasks within their job tend to move to countries which are technologically more developed than Germany while individuals performing jobs with a high share of manual tasks tend to emigrate to countries that are less technologically developed than Germany.