Publikationsliste KOPS

In research on sensitive questions in surveys, the item count technique (ICT) has gained increased attention in recent years as a means of counteracting the problem of misreporting, that is, the under- and over-reporting of socially undesirable and socially desirable behaviors or attitudes. The performance of ICT compared with conventional direct questioning (DQ) has been investigated in numerous experimental studies, yielding mixed evidence. This calls for a systematic review.

For this purpose, the present article reports results from a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental studies comparing ICT estimates of sensitive items to those obtained via DQ. In total, 89 research articles with 124 distinct samples and 303 effect estimates are analyzed. All studies rely on the “more (less) is better” assumption, meaning that higher (lower) estimates of negatively (positively) connoted traits or behaviors are considered more valid.

The results show (1) a significantly positive pooled effect of ICT on the validity of survey responses compared with DQ; (2) a pronounced heterogeneity in study results, indicating uncertainty that ICT would work as intended in future studies; and (3) as meta-regression models indicate, the design and characteristics of studies, items, and ICT procedures affect the success of ICT. There is no evidence for an overestimation of the effect due to publication bias.

Our conclusions are that ICT is generally a viable method for measuring sensitive topics in survey studies, but its reliability has to be improved to ensure a more stable performance.

Most interdisciplinary analyses intuitively depict the judiciary as an actor promoting post- or transnational conceptions of membership and equality in contemporary debates about citizenship and immigration. A qualitative survey of prominent judgments of two powerful supranational tribunals on five central themes identifies an intriguing twist in the case law. Over the past decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg have frequently emphasised social affiliation with the host society, thereby cautiously embracing moderately communitarian narratives of membership, which tempered the traditional emphasis of both courts on equal treatment and residence security across borders. Institutionally, the outcome may be rationalised by a threefold limitation of the judicial function, which cannot bring about social change on its own, interacts with political actors and acknowledges the changing contours of the legal material.

In the literatures on the lived experience of poverty and richness temporal dimensions are underappreciated. Comparing qualitative interviews with those at opposite ends of the income and wealth distributions in the UK, we examine a temporal contrast: while “poor” participants experience money as flows of income which focus orientation to the present and constrain orientation to the future, “rich” participants experience money not only as flows of income, but also in the form of a stock of wealth which facilitates long‐term orientations. Highlighting the enduring nature of wealth and the comparative short‐termism of income, we argue that the way in which capital and income relates to individuals' orientations to the future is important for understanding how economic inequality is experienced. Put differently, the form which economic resources take matters for one's ability to plan and control the future. This insight contributes to our understanding of the experience of being economically advantaged or disadvantaged, with implications for (social) policy.

Recent research has shown that inequality between ethnic groups is strongly driven by politics, where powerful groups and elites channel the state's resources toward their constituencies. Most of the existing literature assumes that these politically induced inequalities are static and rarely change over time. We challenge this claim and argue that economic globalization and domestic institutions interact in shaping inequality between groups. In weakly institutionalized states, gains from trade primarily accrue to political insiders and their co-ethnics. By contrast, politically excluded groups gain ground where a capable and meritocratic state apparatus governs trade liberalization. Using nighttime luminosity data from 1992 to 2012 and a global sample of ethnic groups, we show that the gap between politically marginalized groups and their included counterparts has narrowed over time while economic globalization progressed at a steady pace. Our quantitative analysis and four qualitative case narratives show, however, that increasing trade openness is associated with economic gains accruing to excluded groups in only institutionally strong states, as predicted by our theoretical argument. In contrast, the economic gap between ethnopolitical insiders and outsiders remains constant or even widens in weakly institutionalized countries.

Background
Shared decision making requires evidence to be conveyed to the patient in a way they can easily understand and compare. Patient decision aids facilitate this process. This article reviews the current evidence for how to present numerical probabilities within patient decision aids.

Methods
Following the 2013 review method, we assembled a group of 9 international experts on risk communication across Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We expanded the topics covered in the first review to reflect emerging areas of research. Groups of 2 to 3 authors reviewed the relevant literature based on their expertise and wrote each section before review by the full authorship team.

Results
Of 10 topics identified, we present 5 fundamental issues in this article. Although some topics resulted in clear guidance (presenting the chance an event will occur, addressing numerical skills), other topics (context/evaluative labels, conveying uncertainty, risk over time) continue to have evolving knowledge bases. We recommend presenting numbers over a set time period with a clear denominator, using consistent formats between outcomes and interventions to enable unbiased comparisons, and interpreting the numbers for the reader to meet the needs of varying numeracy.

Discussion
Understanding how different numerical formats can bias risk perception will help decision aid developers communicate risks in a balanced, comprehensible manner and avoid accidental “nudging” toward a particular option. Decisions between probability formats need to consider the available evidence and user skills. The review may be useful for other areas of science communication in which unbiased presentation of probabilities is important.

This article investigates whether changes in women’s and men’s contributions to household income in Germany and Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic are associated with changes in unpaid work. The current health crisis represents a unique opportunity to explore these topics, because the restrictive measures imposed during the lockdown are likely to have generated an unexpected shock to both domestic work and individual ability to contribute to household income. Using data from two novel datasets collected in Germany and Italy during the pandemic, this article shows that changes to both contribution to household income and unpaid activities during the crisis have been gendered, affecting women more negatively than men. In addition, we suggest that economic disturbances during the pandemic are associated with gendered changes in unpaid work that seem to be driven by changes in bargaining power in both countries. Our results also show some support for enhanced traditionalization of domestic life among German couples during the crisis, as predicted by gender display theories, albeit only regarding childcare.

We use detailed administrative data to study the adjustment of local labor markets to industrial robots in Germany. Robot exposure, as predicted by a shift-share variable, is associated with displacement effects in manufacturing, but those are fully offset by new jobs in services. The incidence mostly falls on young workers just entering the labor force. Automation is related to more stable employment within firms for incumbents, and this is driven by workers taking over new tasks in their original plants. Several measures indicate that those new jobs are of higher quality than the previous ones. Young workers also adapt their educational choices, and substitute away from vocational training towards colleges and universities. Finally, industrial robots have benefited workers in occupations with complementary tasks, such as managers or technical scientists.

Several special questioning techniques have been developed in order to counteract misreporting to sensitive survey questions, for example, on criminal behavior. However, doubts have been raised concerning their validity and practical value as well as the strategy of testing their validity using the “more-is-better” assumption in comparative survey experiments. This is because such techniques can be prone to generating false positive estimates, that is, counting “innocent” respondents as “guilty” ones. This article investigates the occurrence of false positive estimates by comparing direct questioning, the crosswise model (CM), and the item count technique (ICT). We analyze data from two online surveys (N = 2,607 and 3,203) carried out in Germany and Switzerland. Respondents answered three questions regarding traits for which it is known that their prevalence in reality is zero. The results show that CM suffers more from false positive estimates than ICT. CM estimates amount to up to 15 percent for a given true value of zero. The mean of the ICT estimates is not significantly different from zero. We further examine factors causing the biased estimates of CM and show that speeding through the questionnaire (random answering) and problems with the measurement procedure—namely regarding the unrelated questions—are responsible. Our findings suggest that CM is problematic and should not be used or evaluated without the possibility of accounting for false positives. For ICT, the issue is less severe.

This paper examines the transnational dimensions of low-level conflict and state repression. In this regard, special emphasis is placed on the role of political regimes. Drawing on a simple model, we argue that democracy has opposing effects on conflict intensity. On one hand, democracy satisfies demand for political participation and thus reduces conflict potential, while, on the other hand, we highlight that domestic democracy may spur dissatisfaction and conflict abroad, which, in turn, may induce conflict spillovers. As a result, the net effect of democracy on low-level conflict and state repression is ambiguous and depends on the level of democracy in the neighborhood: We predict that democracy is more pacifying in democratic environments and may spur conflict in autocratic environments. By the symmetry of the model, we also predict that democratic environments are more pacifying for democratic countries and may spur conflict in autocracies. Empirical evidence using panel data on different types of low-level conflict and state repression for 160 countries in the period from 1950 to 2011 supports these hypotheses. Additionally, two case studies illustrate the mechanisms of our model.

Age heterogeneity in Western workforces is increasing, generating potential informational benefits as well as harmful age‐based social categorizations. When can firms benefit from age heterogeneity? Building on the categorization‐elaboration model, we propose the average age distance between employees as a fundamental contingency. Using a longitudinal archival sample of 3,336 Belgian firms (2012–2015), we find that firms with a high level of age heterogeneity are less productive when employees' average distance is great (Study 1). Through an online experiment with 260 US participants, we show that employees in age‐heterogeneous workforces are less willing to engage in inter‐age cooperative contact and knowledge exchange under a great level of average age distance (Study 2). Our findings support that great distances foster age‐based social categorizations that undermine the productive information elaborations between employees of different ages. This broadens our knowledge on the implications of workforce age diversity and helps organizations understand when they can(not) reap the productivity benefits of their age‐diverse workforce. Moreover, this study's theory and implications are relevant to other types of diversity for which both heterogeneity and distance are meaningful constructs. We also discuss the practical implications of this study.

Since 2015, an enormous number of refugees have migrated to Germany. To obtain qualifi ed jobs, many of them attend prevocational preparation classes. The aims of these classes are mainly the acquisition of German language skills and preparation for subsequent vocational education and training. This paper examines (1) the transitions of young refugees after prevocational preparation classes and (2) what factors predict the transition to the next educational step. Using data from the fi rst two measurement points of a longitudinal survey (t1 during the prevocational preparation class and t2 one year later), we surveyed 333 students in Southwest Germany (82% male; mean age = 18.9 years). Instruments included an online questionnaire, an online test of cognitive ability, and an online test of German language skills. Approximately 37 percent of the students repeated the prevocational preparation class, whereas 60 percent moved on to the next educational step. German language skills at t1 and contact with people helping refugees (t1) predicted the probability of the transition to a “regular” educational pathway. Other variables, such as the educational background of the young refugees and of their parents, personality, motivation, and aspirations, had no significant effects. The findings can be interpreted in terms of the primary (language skills) and secondary eff ects of refugees’ ethnic background (information about the education system through contact with locals).

Pandemics have historically shaped the world of work in various ways. With COVID-19 presenting as a global pandemic, there is much speculation about the impact that this crisis will have for the future of work and for people working in organizations. In this article, we discuss 10 of the most relevant research and practice topics in the field of industrial and organizational (IO) psychology that will likely be impacted by COVID-19. For each of these topics, the pandemic crisis is creating new work-related challenges, but also presenting various opportunities. The topics discussed herein include occupational health and safety, work-family issues, telecommuting, virtual teamwork, job insecurity, precarious work, leadership, human resources policy, the aging workforce, and careers. This article sets the stage for further discussion of various ways in which IO psychology research and practice can address the impacts of COVID- 19 for work and organizational processes that are affecting workers now and will shape the future of work and organizations in both the short and long term. This article concludes by inviting IO psychology researchers and practitioners to address the challenges and opportunities of COVID-19 head-on by proactively innovating the work that we do in support of workers, organizations, and society as a whole.