We’d like to believe that effort matters to what we attain in life. In fact our belief in meritocracy depends on that. But what if how much effort people spend itself depends on your social background?
“The Social Origins of Effort: How Incentives Reduce Socioeconomic Disparities among Children”
Thumbnail is emptiness, and emptiness is thumbnail.
Here's a link to the video tho, in case anybody is wondering what they're apologizing for 😂
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG-6...
On Feb 17, our @inetoxford.bsky.social team will launch the INET Oxford Inequality Working Group, an online seminar series that invites discussion on inequality and public policy. Our first speaker: @drodrik.bsky.social presents his new book. Details & registration: www.inet.ox.ac.uk/events/share...
03.02.2026 14:46 — 👍 17 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
As we write our final editorial for European Societies, we return to the spirit of our first editorial (Präg, Ersanilli and Gugushvili, 2022) and to the question that guided our tenure: did we deliver on what we promised? At the outset, we set out a twofold vision. We wanted to keep European Societies a genuinely general sociology journal with a focus on Europe and European sociology, open to all substantive areas and to authors worldwide. At the same time, we wanted to modernize the journal by lowering barriers to participation, moving toward open access and open science, and by running peer review as fairly, comprehensively, and efficiently as possible. Looking back, we believe the direction of travel has been consistent with that agenda, even if some constraints have become more pronounced as submissions have grown. The most tangible step toward barrier reduction has been the shift in the journal's publishing model. The move to MIT Press and the adoption of a noncommercial, diamond open-access model have made the journal free to read and free to publish in. This has mattered not only as an institutional achievement by ESA, but also as a signal of what a flagship journal of the European Sociological Association can be: a truly public scholarly resource rather than a gated space shaped by the ability to pay. In parallel, we worked to reduce friction in submission and production by making procedures more predictable and less resource-intensive for authors, and by strengthening the journal's commitment to transparency, including the routine expectation of replication materials for quantitative work published in the journal (Präg, Ersanilli and Gugushvili, 2025). We have thought of these changes as working on “access” and “voice” simultaneously. By “access,” we mean making it easier for people to read the journal and to submit their work. By “voice,” we mean that a broader range of scholars, institutions, and regions appears on our pages and shapes the debates. Bot…
European societies in motion, and a commitment to voice A general sociology journal should reflect the major currents shaping European societies, not by chasing headlines, but by publishing sociological work that helps explain how Europe is changing. Over the past years, the journal has continued to engage research on inequalities and social stratification, climate change and ecological transition, migration and shifting borders, transformations in work and welfare, population aging and health inequalities, and the reconfiguration of social trust and political contestation. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further underlined how quickly the horizon of “normal” European development can rupture, and how urgent it becomes to understand societies that have too often been treated as peripheral in general sociological publishing. The Special Issue on understanding Ukrainian society before and after the invasion (Martsenyuk et al., 2024) was therefore an attempt to contribute to that understanding while also practicing what we had argued for from the start: that underrepresented parts of Europe should not appear only through external observation, but should be visible through scholarship that is locally grounded, rigorously theoretical, and fully integrated into European sociology. Throughout our tenure, we also sought to ensure that the journal provided space for the plurality of sociological traditions across Europe. European sociology remains multi-paradigmatic and unevenly structured by regional and institutional inequalities. We therefore aimed to combine a high threshold for publication with broad openness to different intellectual styles, methods, and substantive agendas, and to keep ourselves accountable by paying attention to patterns in submissions and editorial outcomes across regions and approaches. This is unfinished work, but it is work that cannot be postponed if we want a journal that represents European sociology as it exists, rather th…
the structural reality remains that a general journal with finite capacity cannot publish all of the strong sociology it receives, even when that sociology deserves a wide readership. This pressure is intertwined with another growing challenge: the difficulty of securing peer reviewers. Reviewing is the central infrastructure of scholarly publishing, but it rests on time and goodwill that are increasingly stretched. Across our term, it has become harder to find the right expertise quickly, particularly for more specialized topics or for underrepresented contexts where the pool of suitable reviewers is smaller. We therefore want to thank reviewers once more, not as a ritual, but as recognition that the journal's quality and fairness depend directly on their labor. We also hope that our community continues to treat reviewing as part of academic reciprocity, because without a sustainable reviewing culture, no editorial team can reliably balance speed, rigor, and equity. Thanks, acknowledgments, and handover We owe special thanks to Patrick Präg, who left his editorial role slightly earlier but contributed enormously to the journal's direction and to the everyday work that makes a journal function. His intellectual judgment, practical ambition, and commitment to fairness and transparency shaped many of the changes implemented during our tenure, and the journal is stronger because of his contributions. We also thank our associate editors, without whom our work would have been impossible: Plamen Akaliyski (Lingnan University), Çetin Çelik (Koç University), Roxanne Connelly (University of Edinburgh), Ivana Dobrotić (University of Zagreb), Marta Dominguez Folgueras (Sciences Po), Magne P. Flemmen (University of Oslo), Pablo Gracia (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Mobarak Hossain (London School of Economics and Political Science), Mathieu Ichou (INED), Katya Ivanova (Tilburg University), Cyril Jayet (Sorbonne University), Agnieszka Kubal (University of Oxford), Anna K…
An era has come to an end
04.02.2026 10:30 — 👍 61 🔁 5 💬 6 📌 4Thanks Patrick and the team. This was an outstanding performance. Really an inspiration for other editors.
04.02.2026 19:52 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Mean life satisfaction in the survey years 2010, 2015 and 2023, separately for female and male gender. In general, girls have lower scores but in 2023, they are drifting even further down
The city of Leipzig in Germany conducts large-scale school surveys of adolescents in secondary education schools. Following the regular surveys in 2010 and 2015, the 2020 survey had to be rescheduled to 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this latest survey wave, the gender gap in general life satisfaction has significantly grown. While in 2010 and 2015 girls were somewhat less satisfied than boys (0.26 to 0.33 SD), in 2023 this gender gap had doubled (with girls 0.57 SD less satisfied). Why? Here, we probe various explanations, aiming to provide a template for researchers who are asking reverse causal questions (“What caused this?”). First, we find that the widening of the gender gap is much more pronounced among students with a migration background. This could plausibly be explained by a shift in the composition of the underlying population, with a strong increase of Syrian students, and a relative decrease of Vietnamese ones. Second, among students without a migration background, part of the increasing gender gap could potentially be attributed to survey mode: In 2023, for the first time, the survey was conducted on tablets—and unexpectedly, girls (but not boys) reported significantly lower satisfaction when surveyed on tablet rather than on paper. Third, beyond these two patterns, we still find significantly widening gender gaps in satisfaction with leisure time activities and relationships to friends. Thus, there may be a substantive increase in the gender gap in satisfaction in those two domains that is not readily attributable to changes in population and survey mode.
New preprint 🥳
The city of Leipzig conducts large-scale surveys of adolescents. In 2023, the gender gap in life satisfaction has significantly widened, with girls declining more steeply than boys. What's up with that?>
(work with @rmcelreath.bsky.social and @gregork.bsky.social)
New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....
28.01.2026 09:23 — 👍 144 🔁 66 💬 5 📌 6She is a 3/3 stars but not preregistered.
26.01.2026 14:43 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1
Was hat die #Corona-Pandemie mit unserem sozialen Leben gemacht? #Einsamkeit #Exklusion
Dazu haben wir am @dza-berlin.bsky.social im Projekt #CoESI drei Jahre lang geforscht.
👉 Überblick über zentrale Erkenntnisse hier:
www.geistes-und-sozialwissenschaften-bmftr.de/de/News-Wie-...
#GSWRahmenprogramm
New OA In ESR
How do institutions and social norms affect tax payment?
@lucaspasin.bsky.social #Aaszekely @squazzoni.bsky.social find that in low-quality institutions contexts, social norms can trigger vicious cycles of evasion, even when evasion is socially disapproved
doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaf057
Beautiful business research people: The Leibniz Information Centre for Economics has created an accessible introduction to Open Science that you can download in both English and German here: expedition-open-science.org
You can even order the German print version for free!
Working with EU-SILC, but don't know which variables are available in each year?😵💫🤷🆘🏳️
🛟MISSY can help!🛟
Simply select years, data set, file type & concepts to quickly get an overview, with optional csv export.
Details like frequencies across countries also available!
🔗 www.gesis.org/en/missy/mat...
I'm gonna tell my kids that this was Heated Rivalry
16.01.2026 08:18 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Mit Jana Münkel im @deutschlandfunk.de.web.brid.gy Kultur Studio.
Hat - wie immer - einen Heidenspass gemacht.
And you're saying AI has no positive use cases
11.01.2026 11:52 — 👍 36 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 0
“These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk simply cannot be trusted.”
08.01.2026 20:46 — 👍 292 🔁 108 💬 11 📌 21Weil die Kinder noch eine Note brauchen, müssen sie im Fach Technik die Computertastatur binnen einer Woche auswendig lernen - und mehr muss man über das Schulsystem nicht wissen.
08.01.2026 06:10 — 👍 651 🔁 98 💬 62 📌 12
Does social media harm everyone?
No. But it harms *most* adolescents.
However, not all platforms are harmful.
An analysis of 44,211 diaries from 479 adolescents over 100 days finds that 60% of adolescents experienced small, negative effects of social media
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Korrelation, Ursache, dies, das.
www.zeit.de/arbeit/2025-...
Buchmesse-People (und Leute mit TV): Heute um 14:50 bin ich auf der ARD/ZDF/3Sat-Literaturbühne für den DLF Kultur Literaturherbst und spreche über DA. WO ICH DICH SEHEN KANN. Kann man dann auch in der Mediathek nachgucken.
Forum Ebene 0!
Check out the #LINEup Education Data Explorer — a new open-source map of longitudinal datasets across Europe! 🇪🇺
→ Explore what data exist, where, and on what topics.
Great tool for comparative education research www.lineup-project.eu/map/
Vergleiche von COVID und AIDS werden oft sehr populistisch verwendet oder pauschal als "Fear monging" delegitimiert. Dieser Review bietet hingegen eine hervorragende, fundierte Annäherung. V.a. den kurzen sozialpolitischen Abriss finde ich sehr gelungen und gut platziert.
1/
Herbstliche Bäume mit Discokugel im Vordergrund
16.10.2025 10:20 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Elucidating some common biases in randomized controlled trials using directed acyclic graphs Although the ideal randomized clinical trial is the gold standard for causal inference, real randomized trials often suffer from imperfections that may hamper causal effect estimation. Stating the estimand of interest can help reduce confusion about what is being estimated, but it is often difficult to determine what is and is not identifiable given a trial’s specific imperfections. We demonstrate how directed acyclic graphs can be used to elucidate the consequences of common imperfections, such as noncompliance, unblinding, and drop-out, for the identification of the intention-to-treat effect, the total treatment effect and the physiological treatment effect. We assert that the physiological treatment effect is not identifiable outside a trial with perfect compliance and no dropout, where blinding is perfectly maintained
Table 1 showing the Identifiability of target estimands depending on whether there is blinding, full compliance, and no drop-out
An example DAG from the paper. Fig. 4: A blinded trial with noncompliance. U are unobserved confounders, Z is treatment assignment, C is compliance, X is the realized treatment, S is the subject's physical and mental health status, Xself and Xcln are the treatment that the participant and the clinician believed the participant received, Y is the outcome.
Just finished reading this *excellent* article by Gabriel et al. which discusses which effects can be identified in randomized controlled trials. With DAGs!>
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Hilft ja nix.
22.09.2025 13:02 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Important research by our very own @alexbryson.bsky.social www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/se...
22.09.2025 10:40 — 👍 7 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 2Calling it a novel contribution bc "mildly different from three others but messier" was too long to fit the abstract
03.08.2025 14:37 — 👍 17 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Quite amazed by the articles that @sociologicalsci.bsky.social puts out on a regular basis -- this one here by Lewis Anderson: imaginative, bold, well-informed, an incredible eye for detail, this will really be moving the field forward
doi.org/10.15195/v12...
Sociology instructors, take note: classic sociological theory makes an appearance on the menswear guy's account!
(Actually, many of his posts have sociological content.)
Das ist echt kein Witz: Viele Frauen verzichten auf Kinder, weil die Aufwände der Elternschaft ungleich verteilt sind. Nach diesem Artikel müssten aber nicht die Männer mehr übernehmen, sondern die Frauen einsehen, dass sein höheres Gehalt doch auch was wert ist 😂 www.faz.net/aktuell/wirt...
09.09.2025 06:41 — 👍 174 🔁 28 💬 16 📌 1
