Education is a key variable in survey-based research, impacting various outcomes and serving as a cornerstone in social stratification research. However, measuring education in cross-national surveys is challenging due to the complexity and variability of educational systems across countries. For comparative research, the education variable does not only need to be valid, but also comparable across countries, which implies a similar degree of validity in different countries. Simultaneously, education measures need to be parsimonious, especially for self-administered surveys. This study, expanding on previous research, evaluates the validity and comparability of 16 alternative education coding specifications using nearly 400 dependent variables …

This research note examines the implications of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) for the measurement of ethnic segregation in Hamburg, Germany, utilizing 2011 census data and a simulation-based approach that incorporates 10 distinct spatial operationalizations. The results indicate that spatially adjusted global segregation estimates demonstrate a marked resilience to MAUP, despite the correlations between German and foreign populations exhibiting pronounced volatility, which undermines the reliability and comparability of the findings. Moreover, local segregation measures are found to be acutely sensitive to scale and zoning choices, particularly in areas distinguished by heterogeneous distributions of characteristics. In contrast, regions exhibiting homogeneous …

In this paper we document our experience with conducting the Perceptions of Inequality and Redistribution Survey (PIRS), which is an online, multi-round survey conducted among Nigerian adults who were recruited via a Facebook ad campaign. The paper discusses our initial and unsuccessful recruitment strategy as well as our subsequent revised strategy in which we were able to effectively address the problems and pitfalls which caused our initial recruitment strategy to be unsuccessful. By discussing both strategies in detail, we provide original methodological and practical insights into how best to conduct online surveys with compensation in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) …

Many surveys have changed modes because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Surveys using mailed letters and/or reminders may have been adversely affected by staff shortages affecting the delivery times of the United States Postal Service (USPS). In this study, we analysed daily USPS mail delivery reports for each of 21 National Distribution Centers (NDCs) for two specific mailings that were sent to a national probability sample of addresses in 2020. We linked concurrent aggregate rates of COVID-19 infection and mortality to each of the NDCs and examined the variability in cumulative delivery rates across the NDCs as a function of these …