Individual values, cultural embeddedness, and anti-immigration sentiments: Explaining differences in the effect of values on attitudes toward immigration across Europe

During the last decade, many European countries have faced sizeable immigration inflows accompanied by high prevalence of negative sentiments toward immigrants among majority members of the host societies. We propose that basic human values are one important determinant of such negative attitudes, and we seek to explain variation across countries in the strength of the effects of values. Based on Schwartz' (1992, 1994) basic human value theory, we hypothesize that universalism values are conducive to positive attitudes toward immigration, while conformity-tradition reinforce anti-immigration sentiments. We furthermore hypothesize that these value effects are moderated by two contextual variables. Both value effects are expected to be weaker in countries with a higher level of cultural embeddedness. Furthermore, negative effects of conformity-tradition values are hypothesized to be cushioned by a lower proportion of immigrants in the country. A multilevel analysis of data from 24 countries from the fourth round of the European Social Survey (2008-2009) supports these hypotheses. Moreover, we demonstrate that the measurement properties of the theoretical constructs exhibit equivalence across countries, thereby justifying statistical comparisons

Potential and Availability of Market Research Data for Empirical Social and Economic Research

The potential of market research data for secondary analyses lays mainly in the fields of consumer behaviour, consumption patterns and media usage. Their availability for empirical social and economic research depends on the professional rules as well as on the readiness of the market research agencies and their clients to make them available. Many market research projects are focused on specific target groups. This focuses their potential for secondary analyses on representative insights regarding these groups as well as on basic and methodological research. In most cases it is necessary that public availability of market research data is agreed contractually with the client of the research project. For a number of market research projects access to the official statistical data is important for methodological reasons. Therefore private research agencies should have the same privileged access to them as academic research institutions. As long as this access has not been established it is unlikely that their readiness to make market research data publicly available will increase

Makes religion happy or makes happiness religious? An analysis of a three-wave panel using and comparing discrete and continuous-time techniques

Item does not contain fulltextThe reciprocal effects of religiosity and life satisfaction are examined in a three-wave panel study of German former high school students at ages 30, 43 and 56. Religiosity is measured as church attendance and Christian belief such that three measures are followed up over three time points. Analyses by structural equation modelling in discrete time and continuous time are compared. According to both methods, church attendance has the strongest autoregression/auto-effect, followed by Christian worldview, and next by life satisfaction; furthermore, all cross-regressions/cross-effects are slightly negative. The answer to both questions in the title is therefore negative. In contrast to the cross-regressions in the discrete-time analysis, the continuous-time analysis reveals significance of all negative cross-effects and reverses the strength order of the cross-effects between the two dimensions of religiosity. Continuous-time analysis also enables to compute and display the complete autoregression and cross-regression functions as well as the development of means and variances of the three variables across continuous time