ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Social norms mark a cornerstone of the social sciences. While values have been defined as abstract ideas of desirable goods, social norms are understood as generalized prescriptive expectations of individual behavior perceived as ‘compulsory’. Social norms are more binding than values because deviant behavior may be sanctioned.
Normative climate captures the extent to which such expectations are shared and salient within a social context. While being widely used to characterize contexts such as schools, organizations, or regions, questions remain about how normative climate can be adequately measured and validated across contexts and data types.
This session invites contributions addressing the measurement of normative climate across a broad range of social contexts and empirical settings. Contributions may engage with survey data, administrative data, official statistics, other forms of contextual data, or combinations of different data sources. Relevant contexts may include families, schools, firms, occupations, neighborhoods, regions, countries, or temporal contexts like periods and cohorts.
One first area of interest concerns how normative climate can be constructed from individual or contextual data. Contributions may address the identification of suitable indicators, dimensionality and latent measurement models, aggregation strategies (e.g., accounting for aggregation bias), or the use of official statistics or other contextual indicators. We also welcome methodological work on measurement invariance across contexts.
A second area concerns the predictive validity of normative climate. Contributions may investigate to what extent normative climate predicts individuals’ beliefs, preferences, or behavior. Of particular interest are studies distinguishing contextual from compositional effects (e.g., social/ethnic composition, regional economic conditions, etc.).
A third area concerns construct and criterion validity. Contributions may examine whether established indicators capture the theoretical properties distinguishing social norms from related concepts like values, attitudes, or preferences. This includes questions of sharedness, bindingness, sanctionability, and the mechanisms through which normative climate shapes individual outcomes.