Journals/Reviews/Reports

Anamnèse - Mémoire des auteurs oubliés

Une nouvelle association et une nouvelle revue ont récemment vus le jour. Il s’agit d’Anamnèse, Mémoire des auteurs oubliés. Selon ses statuts, son but est :

Son Bureau est composé de : Président, Bruno Pequignot; Secrétaire, Claude Ravelet ; Trésorier, Francis Farrugia. Chaque année, un auteur important, mais trop oublié, sera étudié et réédité. Les premiers auteurs sur lesquels nous avons travaillé sont : 1. le sociologue Georges Gurvitch ; 2. l’anthropologue Lucien Lévy-Bruhel ; 3. les sociologues Paul Fauconnet, Georges Davy et Célestin Bouglé, trois figures de l’École durkheimienne ; 4. le sociologue Henri Desroche ; 5. les linguistes Antoine Meillet, Ferdinand Brunot et Sylvain Lévy ; 6. le sociologue Lucien Goldmann ; 7. les sociologues/anthropologues sous Vichy (voir Jean-Paul Grémy (2012) Enquêtes sociales et sondages politiques sous l’Occupation. Anamnèse, Mémoire des auteurs oubliés 7 : 49-84, dans la rubrique « Articles » de ce numéro du BMS) ; 8. Jean Duvignaud.

Le numéro 7 (décembre 2012), « Les sociologue sous Vichy », coordonné par Jean Ferrette, comprend : Jean Ferrette, La sociologie sous Vichy - Rupture ou continuité ? Retour sur un impensé historique ; Cécilia Benevides Dos Santos, Marcel Granet, Georges Dumézil, l’École Pratique des Hautes Études - Situation d’une recherche pendant les années noires ; Jean-Paul Grémy, Enquêtes sociales et sondages politiques sous l’Occupation ; Jean-Paul Callède, L’enseignement de la sociologie à la Faculté des lettres de Bordeaux (1930-1946) ; Nicolas Simon, Marcel Mauss, un sociologue dans la tourmente ; Catherine Peyrard, Le point aveugle de la construction de la sociologie du travail au sortir de la Seconde guerre mondiale ; Raymond Polin, La sociologie française pendant la guerre ; Franck Dubosc, Le présupposé vertuiste de l’existence d’une race française.

Sociological Methods & Research

The February 2013 issue of Sociological Methods & Research was not a special thematic issue on statistics and survey data analysis, but nonetheless published three very interesting articles on the subject.

David Melamed, Ronald L. Breiger and Eric Schoon (2013) The Duality of Clusters and Statistical Interactions, Sociological Methods & Research 42: 41-59. We contend that clusters of cases co-constitute statistical interactions among variables. Interactions among variables imply clusters of cases within which statistical effects differ. Regression coefficients may be productively viewed as sums across clusters of cases, and in this sense regression coefficients may be said to be “composed” of clusters of cases. We explicate a four-step procedure that discovers interaction effects based on clusters of cases in the data matrix, hence aiding in inductive model specification. We illustrate with two examples. One is a reanalysis of data from a published study of the effect of social welfare policy extensiveness on poverty rates across 15 countries. The second uses General Social Survey data to predict four different dimensions of ego-network homophily. We find support for our contention that clusters of the rows of a data matrix may be exploited to discover statistical interactions among variables that improve model fit.

Rebecca M. Kuiper, Vincent Buskens, Werner Raub and Herbert Hoijtink (2013) Combining Statistical Evidence from Several Studies: A Method Using Bayesian Updating and an Example from Research on Trust Problems in Social and Economic Exchange, Sociological Methods & Research 42: 60-81. The effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable is often evaluated with hypothesis testing. Sometimes, multiple studies are available that test the same hypothesis. In such studies, the dependent variable and the main predictors might differ, while they do measure the same theoretical concepts. In this article, we present a Bayesian updating method that can be used to quantify the joint evidence in multiple studies regarding the effect of one variable of interest. We apply our method to four studies on how trust in social and economic exchange depends on experience from previous exchange with the same partner. In addition, we examine five hypothetical situations in which the results from the separate studies are less clear-cut than in our trust example.

Jorre T. A. Vannieuwenhuyze and Geert Loosveldt (2013) Evaluating Relative Mode Effects in Mixed-Mode Surveys: Three Methods to Disentangle Selection and Measurement Effects, Sociological Methods & Research 42: 82-104. The authors investigate the advantage of mixed-mode (MM) surveys and selection effects between the modes which should be evaluated. Selection effects refer to differences in respondent compositions on the target variables between the modes. However, estimation of selection effects is not an easy task because they may be completely confounded with measurement effects between the modes (differences in measurement error). Publications concerning the estimation of these mode effects are scarce. This article presents and compares three methods that allow measurement effects and selection effects to be evaluated separately. The first method starts from existing publications that avoid the confounding problem by introducing a set of mode-insensitive variables into the analysis model. However, this article will show that this method involves unrealistic assumptions in most practical research. The second and the third methods make use of an MM sample extended by comparable single-mode data. The assumptions, advantages, and disadvantages of all three methods are discussed. Each method will further be illustrated using a set of six variables relating to opinions about surveys among the Flemish population. The results show large differences between the methods.

Reset. Social Science Research on the Internet/Recherches en Sciences sociales sur Internet (English/français)

We are pleased to announce the release of a new scientific online journal, Reset. Social Science Research on the Internet at http://www.journal-reset.org. It is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal publishing research articles (in French or in English) in which the Internet appears as a field and/or an object of study useful to the understanding of social phenomena. Reset aims at integrating the study of the Internet into the general social sciences rather than considering solely the singularity of this medium. Its first issue is devoted to the relevance of the social class notion. The table of contents is below.

Français - Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer la parution de la revue Reset. Recherches en Sciences sociales sur Internet à http://www.journal-reset.org. Elle est une revue scientifique semestrielle et publie des articles dans lesquels Internet apparait comme un terrain d’enquête ou un objet de recherche nécessaire à la compréhension du monde social. Son objectif, plutôt que de revendiquer la spécificité de ce média, est d’intégrer l’étude d’Internet aux sciences sociales généralistes. Le premier numéro est consacré à l'actualité de la notion de classe sociale. Vous trouverez ci-dessous le sommaire de ce volume.

Vol. 1, No 1 (2012) Des classes sociales 2.0 ? / Social Classes 2.0?, coordonné par/Special issue edited by Samuel Coavoux et Sébastien François, http://www.journal-reset.org/index.php/RESET/issue/current:

Survey Methods: Insights from the Field

FORS and GESIS are proud to announce their co-edited new open-access electronic journal, Survey Methods: Insights from the Field. It can be consulted online at http://www.surveyinsights.org. The goal of the journal is to promote professional exchanges in practical survey research issues as well as discussions on new and promising research in survey methodology. Articles can be equipped with all kinds of attachments (interactive graphs, recodification schemes, links to data sets, etc.), and discussion based on the published articles can be started using the comments field placed at the end of each article. You will find a more in-depth description of the journal on About Us at our Web site. For its first publication, Survey Methods: Insights from the Field has selected four articles: Understanding and Improving the External Survey Environment of Official Statistics, by Boris Lorenc, Geert Loosveldt, Mary H. Mulry, and Duncan Wrighte; Prevalence of Cell Phone Sharing, Britta Busse and Marek Fuchs; Measuring Interviewer Characteristics Pertinent to Social Surveys - A Conceptual Framework, Annelies G. Blom and Julie M. Korbmacher; Coverage Bias in European Telephone Surveys - Developments of Landline and Mobile Phone Coverage across Countries and over Time, by Anja Mohorko, Edith de Leeuw and Joop Hox. We have a continuous publication policy. You can submit your article to the journal at any time. You will find all the necessary information about submission at For Authors. You can address any questions to our executive editor, Martina Rothenbühler, by emailing to info@surveyinsights.org. The editors are: Henning Best, Peter Farago, Dominique Joye, Lars Kaczmirek, Martina Rothenbühler, Caroline Vandenplas and Christof Wolf.