While methodologies are often presented as standardised procedures which, under specified conditions, should lead to the same conclusions, this case study presents the complex and deeply personal process of research (Addey and Piattoeva 2022). We analyse our application of network ethnography -- an approach presented by Ball (2016) -- to the study…

Impact of science is one of the most important topics in scientometrics. Recent developments show a fundamental change in impact measurements from impact on science to impact on society. Since impact measurement is currently in a state of far reaching changes, this paper describes recent developments and facing problems in this area. For that, the…

Measuring race and ethnicity for administrative data sets and then analyzing these data to understand racial/ethnic disparities present many logistical and theoretical challenges. In this chapter, we conduct a synthetic review of studies on how to effectively measure race/ethnicity for administrative data purposes and then utilize these measures…

Education entails conflicting perspectives about its subject matter. In the late 1980s, the conflict developed into a war between interpretive and causal paradigms. Did the confrontation result in a balance between these warring sides? We use text analysis to identify research trends in 137,024 dissertation abstracts from 1980 to 2010 and relate…

Mobile technologies, specifically smartphones, offer social scientists a potentially powerful approach to examine the social world. They enable researchers to collect information that was previously unobservable or difficult to measure, expanding the realm of empirical investigation. For research that concerns resource-poor and hard-to-reach…

In his opening statements, Humphry takes a critical attitude with respect to psychometric modeling. As he advances and discusses Michell's well-known criticisms, the reader is certain that this paper must have something on offer that deviates considerably from conventional psychometrics. After all "most psychometricians have either explicitly or…

To explain country differences in an analytical or structural dependent variable, the application of a macro-micro-model containing contextual hypotheses is necessary. Our methodological study examines whether empirical studies apply such a model. We propose that a theoretical base for country differences is well described in multilevel studies,…

Numerous ways to meta-analyze single-case data have been proposed in the literature, however, consensus on the most appropriate method has not been reached. One method that has been proposed involves multilevel modeling. This study used Monte Carlo methods to examine the appropriateness of Van den Noortgate and Onghena's (2008) raw data multilevel…

Unlike in elementary schools, high school teacher effects may be confounded with unobserved track-level treatments (such as the AVID program) that are correlated with individual teachers. I present a strategy that exploits detailed course-taking information to credibly estimate the effects of 9th grade Algebra and English teachers on test scores.…

National average happiness and the difference in happiness between women and men are positively correlated in European countries. This study focuses on this cross-country relationship and tests (1) whether, after controlling for socio-economic factors, the correlation is attributed to their direct relationship, or, alternatively, explained by the…

Income is regarded as one of the clearest indicators of socioeconomic status and wellbeing in the developed world and is highly correlated with a wide range of outcomes. Despite its importance, there remains an issue as to the best way to collect income as part of surveys. This paper examines differences in how income is collected in a nationally…

Many see trust as an important social resource for the welfare of individuals as well as nations. It is therefore important to be able to identify trust and explain its sources. Cross-country survey analysis has been an important tool in this respect, and often one single variable is used to identify social trust understood as trust in strangers,…

This study compares work time data collected by the German Time Use Survey (GTUS) using the diary method with stylized work time estimates from the GTUS, the German Socio-Economic Panel, and the German Microcensus. Although on average the differences between the time-diary data and the interview data is not large, our results show that significant…

This paper challenges Hanushek and Woessmann's (2008) contention that the quality and not the quantity of schooling determines a nation's rate of economic growth. I first show that their statistical analysis is flawed. I then show that when a nation's average test scores and average schooling attainment are included in a national income model,…

Instrumental variable estimators hold the promise of enabling researchers to estimate the effects of educational treatments that are not (or cannot be) randomly assigned but that may be affected by randomly assigned interventions. Examples of the use of instrumental variables in such cases are increasingly common in educational and social science…