GESIS Schriftenreihe Band 30
Charmaine Voigt
College Television: Practical Media Training in US and German Higher Education
Köln: GESIS 2024, 276 p. (English)
ISSN 1869-2869 | Softcover ISBN 978-3-86819-052-6 | eBook ISBN 978-3-86819-051-9
Softcover 15,- Euro

Following the international research field of college media, this dissertation focuses on German college television (abbreviated CTV). The dissertation aims to draw a comprehensive picture of the organizational and editorial conditions of German college television. Established CTV practices are investigated through qualitative expert interviews and non-participant observations in the USA, the pioneer country of college television, and a two-wave quantitative online survey in Germany. The survey data leads to a typology of German college television. A key distinction of CTV is its curricular affiliation. The extra-curricular outlets are far better equipped than their German counterparts. Within this group, the combination of peer learning and professional editorial structures creates an ideal training environment. In contrast, the intra-curricular projects, which are guided by instructors, simulate a real studio atmosphere. These CTV stations pursue a "two-fold mission" providing both higher education-based hands-on media training and informing a local or regional community. The German online survey identifies editorial heterogeneity that reflects regional higher education and media law infrastructures. The second survey wave finds that the COVID-19 pandemic significantly constrained CTV project workflows. CTV's digital environment was a key driver in allowing stations to continue under pandemic-related constraints. Overall, projects with intra-curricular links show a more stable continuity. In order to achieve homogeneous groups in the typology, the cluster analysis was reduced to three binary variables: curricular linkage, field specialization, as well as resources. This results in a four-cluster solution. The groundwork research enables further studies on the role of college media productions by students in the German higher education and media system.

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GESIS Series Volume 29
André Ernst
The Action-Generating Mechanisms of Rule-Breaking
Overcoming Methodological Challenges in Empirical Tests of Situational Action Theory and the Code of the Street
Köln: GESIS 2022, 122 p. (English)
ISSN 1869-2869 | Softcover ISBN 978-3-86819-050-2 | eBook ISBN 978-3-86819-049-6
Softcover 15,- Euro

Rule-breaking is an actor’s reaction to the behavioral setting to which they are exposed. Understanding this interplay between a person and their behavioral setting is significant for developing crime prevention measures and understanding crime as a social phenomenon. The action-generating mechanism explains rule-breaking via the interplay between actors’ criminal propensity and behavioral settings’ criminogeneity. It addresses what would have happened if a person’s criminal propensity and a setting’s criminogeneity had been different. Previous tests of the action-generating mechanism on observational data failed to control for actors’ exposure to different kinds of behavioral settings and, thus, also for selection. The selection mechanism precedes the action-generating mechanism and challenges previous findings while people are systematically exposed to different behavioral settings and also levels of criminogeneity. I control for selection and thus provide a more rigorous test by using fixed-effect estimation models and strategically using the school setting of the Friendship and Violence in Adolescent data. The research approach is applied to hypotheses derived from Anderson’s Code of the Street (study 1) and Wikström’s Situational Action Theory (study 2 and study 3). All-in-all, the results indicate that exposure matters net of the selection of kinds-of-people into kinds-of settings.

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GESIS Series Volume 28
Alice Melchior
Neu, wertvoll, kreativ
Die Generierung und Bewertung von Ideen im kreativen Prozess pharmazeutischer F&E Projekte
Köln: GESIS 2021, 144 p. (German)
ISSN 1869-2869 | Softcover ISBN 978-3-86819-048-9 | eBook ISBN 978-3-86819-047-2
Softcover 15,- Euro

This work adds to the interdisciplinary debate about the possibility of organizing creative processes. Using the example of pharmaceutical research and development projects the significance of valuations in creative process and the gap between two disciplinary approaches are examined. While economic geography and organizational research focus primarily on the conditions for the emergence of novelty and thereby neglect the relevance of val­uation, the second approach, which is shaped by an economic sociological tradition, focuses on the valuation of novelty („Valuation Studies“), whereby valuations are rarely addressed in connection with creativity. Against this background, this work explores three related research questions: When in the creative process does what kind of valuation take place; how do negative and positive valuations interact in creative processes; and where, in which places, is valuation happening? Based on the qualitative data (25 expert interviews and 116.5h observations), three main findings are formulated. First, that creative processes always include an interplay of generation and valuation, whereby the valuation of novelty is as central as the generation of novelty, so that the two integral parts of creativity should be considered together more often. Second, that negative and positive valuations exhibit fundamentally different intrinsic logics. In particular, negative valuations provide indispensable impulses for reinterpretation and thus enable a successful course of the creative process – at least for pharmaceutical R&D projects. Third, that the generation and valuation of novelty does not only take place socially but also locally situated, whereby analytically clearly differentiable patterns of generation, valuation and testing were detected. This in turn shows that even in terms of the analytical knowledge base, knowledge production does not exclusively follow universally valid protocols, but also has a performative character, which is shaped by the composition of the group of actors, their personal idiosyncrasies, preferences and aversions.

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GESIS Schriftenreihe Band 27
Dirk Betz
Das Ende von Rational Choice?
Zur Leistungsfähigkeit der Rational-Choice-Theorie
mit einem Vorwort von Hartmut Esser
Köln: GESIS 2021, 204 p. (German)
ISSN 1869-2869 | Softcover ISBN 978-3-86819-046-5 | eBook ISBN 978-3-86819-045-8
Softcover 15,- Euro

This book examines selected theories from political science, economics, sociology, and psychology in different fields of applications using methodological tools from experimental game theory and empirical social research. The leading research question is whether the assumption of the underlying rational choice theory (RCT), for instance the selection of the utility-maximizing option by a central executive, has sufficient explanatory power for human decision behavior. Some of the five studies in this book reveal significant empirical evidence that is inconsistent with the RCT. Here, the deviations from the results predicted by the RCT are not random but systematic. The findings contradict the predictions of RCT more significantly, the more comprehensive and detailed individuals in the social field are observed, the more ambiguous and distant the situation from the economic context is, the lower the individual (financial) costs are (low-cost hypothesis), and the more heuristic information processes are observable. Furthermore, self-interest-maximizing motives and rational action can be identified recurrently. In the economic context and at the aggregate level, the great power of RCT and the economic behavioral paradigm becomes apparent. Against this background, it is shown that framing theories and alternative selection mechanisms can resolve these initially seemingly contradictory findings in a new, higher unity. Overall, the methodological and theoretical range of this research work allows the conclusion to conceptualize RCT as a special case of framing theories and to continue to use it pragmatically as well as context-specific.

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GESIS Series Volume 26
Sebastian E. Wenz
Discrimination in Education: Methodology, Theory, and Empirics of Teachers’ Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discriminatory Behavior
Köln: GESIS 2020, 252 p. (English)
ISSN 1869-2869 | Softcover ISBN 978-3-86819-044-1 | eBook ISBN 978-3-86819-043-4
Softcover 15,- Euro

In Discrimination in Education Sebastian E. Wenz makes methodological, theoretical, and empirical contributions to the study of discriminatory behavior by teachers towards students of different ethnicity, social class background, and gender. Wenz reviews different motivations to study discrimination in education and beyond, provides an in-depth discussion of numerous definitions of discrimination, and shows the potentials and limitations of theories from different disciplines to explain discrimination on the individual level and inequality between groups in the education system. In the empirical part of the book, Wenz examines the two major determinants of discrimination – prejudice and stereotypes – using data from the German General Social Survey (GGSS/ALLBUS) and the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). The major empirical contribution in Discrimination in Education is an experimental study with a random sample of over 200 elementary school teachers. In this study, Wenz addresses several shortcomings of prior research. After discussing the complex findings of his experiment, Wenz concludes by suggesting several routes future research should take to gather more evidence on discrimination in education, its determinants and consequences.

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GESIS Series Volume 24
Stefan Jünger
Using Georeferenced Data in Social Science Survey Research
The Method of Spatial Linking and Its Application with the German General Social Survey and the GESIS Panel
Köln: GESIS 2019, 208 p. (English)
ISSN 1869-2869 | Softcover ISBN 978-3-86819-040-3 | eBook ISBN 978-3-86819-039-7
Softcover 15,- Euro

This book demonstrates the use of georeferenced data for social science survey research which builds upon survey data enriched with geo-coordinates. It reviews the prerequisites and challenges of applying these data to different social science research questions, highlighting the different branches of an interdisciplinary effort. At the center of this presentation is the method of spatial linking: the combination of georeferenced survey data with information from auxiliary geospatial data sources. A collection of spatial linking methods is applied in this book’s empirical applications which underline these methods’ flexibility in different social science sub-disciplines, such as health and family, political attitudes, and environmental inequalities. For this purpose, georeferenced survey data from the German General Social Survey (GGSS) 2014 and the GESIS Panel are used. These empirical applications are part of an emerging field of research for social scientists, requiring new analytic skills from diverse and foreign disciplines, like ecology and engineering. Navigating the organizational and technical requirements for the analysis of georeferenced survey data enables researchers to answer new and innovative research questions.

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GESIS Series Volume 22
Dominique Joye, Marlène Sapin & Christof Wolf
Measuring Social Networks and Social Resources
An Exploratory ISSP Survey around the World
Köln: GESIS 2019, 206 p. (English)
ISSN 1869-2869 | Softcover ISBN 978-3-86819-036-6 | eBook ISBN 978-3-86819-035-9
Softcover 15,- EUR

This publication documents the development of the ISSP module for the year 2017 titled “Social Networks and Social Resources”. The authors begin by discussing instruments that have been developed to measure social relationships and networks. Subsequently, the conceptual framework underlying the module is presented. For the assessment and selection of items for the final module the authors can draw on a rich set of comparative survey data from pretests in China, Taiwan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Great Britain, United States and Venezuela. Based on these data measures for all concepts of the theoretical model are derived and preliminary analysis of their validity, reliability and cross-national equivalence are performed. The publication ends with a description of items finally selected for the 2017 ISSP module and some suggestions for analyzing these data.

Dominique Joye is Professor of Sociology at the University of Lausanne, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Institute for Social Sciences since 2006 and one of the Swiss delegates to the ISSP since 2000. He has a strong interest in life-course analysis and survey methodology.

Marlène Sapin is Senior Researcher at the Swiss Center of Expertise in Social Sciences FORS and one of the Swiss delegates of the ISSP. She is also Senior Researcher in the NCCR LIVES – Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives. Her research focuses on social networks and the life course.

Christof Wolf is President of GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Mannheim University. He is one of Germany’s delegates to and currently Secretary of the ISSP. He has a strong interest in social networks, health and survey methodology.

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GESIS Series Volume 21
Claudia Biniossek
Prosoziales Verhalten in großen Gruppen
mit einem Vorwort von Hartmut Esser
Köln: GESIS 2019, 122 p. (German)
ISSN 1869-2869 | Softcover ISBN 978-3-86819-034-2 | eBook ISBN 978-3-86819-033-5
Softcover 15,- EUR

Drawing on theories from economics, sociology and social psychology, this research on pro-social behavior addresses the perception, behavior and behavioral patterns of individuals in the context of large groups. It investigates whether the empirically observable behavior of individuals in large groups can be integrated into a unifying theoretical framework.

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