Mathematical Models For The Interpretation Of Attitude And Behavior Change

Mathematical Models for the Interpretation of Attitude and Behavior Change

Sequence Analysis and Related Approaches

This open access book provides innovative methods and original applications of sequence analysis (SA) and related methods for analysing longitudinal data describing life trajectories such as professional careers, family paths, the succession of health statuses, or the time use. The applications as well as the methodological contributions proposed in this book pay special attention to the combined use of SA and other methods for longitudinal data such as event history analysis, Markov modelling, and sequence network. The methodological contributions in this book include among others original propositions for measuring the precarity of work trajectories, Markov-based methods for clustering sequences, fuzzy and monothetic clustering of sequences, network-based SA, joint use of SA and hidden Markov models, and of SA and survival models. The applications cover the comparison of gendered occupational trajectories in Germany, the study of the changes in women market participation in Denmark, the study of typical day of dual-earner couples in Italy, of mobility patterns in Togo, of internet addiction in Switzerland, and of the quality of employment career after a first unemployment spell. As such this book provides a wealth of information for social scientists interested in quantitative life course analysis, and all those working in sociology, demography, economics, health, psychology, social policy, and statistics.

Survey Research in the United States

Hardly an American today escapes being polled or surveyed or sampled. In this illuminating history, Jean Converse shows how survey research came to be perhaps the single most important development in twentieth-century social science. Everyone interested in survey methods and public opinion, including social scientists in many fi elds, will find this volume a major resource.Converse traces the beginnings of survey research in the practical worlds of politics and business, where elite groups sought information so as to infl uence mass democratic publics and markets. During the Depression and World War II, the federal government played a major role in developing surveys on a national scale. In the 1940s certain key individuals with academic connections and experience in polling, business, or government research brought surveys into academic life. By the 1960s, what was initially viewed with suspicion had achieved a measure of scientific acceptance of survey research.The author draws upon a wealth of material in archives, interviews, and published work to trace the origins of the early organizations (the Bureau of Applied Social Research, the National Opinion Research Center, and the Survey Research Center of Michigan), and to capture the perspectives of front-line fi gures such as Paul Lazarsfeld, George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Rensis Likert. She writes with sensitivity and style, revealing how academic survey research, along with its commercial and political cousins, came of age in the United States.