Toward a social psychology of survey methodology: An application of the approach and directions for the future

Survey methodology is a relatively new academic discipline focused on understanding sources of survey errors. As an interdisciplinary field, survey methodology borrows theoretical approaches from other disciplines and applies them to understand how survey respondents answer questions. One field in particular, cognitive psychology, has played a central role in the development of survey methodology. The cognitive approach has focused researchers' attentions on the sources of error at each stage of the cognitive process respondents use to answer a survey question: comprehension of the question, recollection of relevant information, estimation and judgment, and reporting an answer. Although this focus on the cognitive response process has been positive and fruitful, potentially strong social and interactional influences on the response process have been underinvestigated and undertheorized. Thus, this essay argues for a revitalized research program in the sociological social psychology of survey methodology, given its rich body of theory and research. The current strengths of social psychological and interactional approaches are highlighted, focusing primarily on recent work using identity theory to understand social desirability biases. Finally, potentially fruitful future directions for research are proposed, matching sociological social psychological theories to the survey errors upon which they may shed light.     

Age, period, and cohort effects on religious activities and beliefs

Despite the theoretical emphasis on religious decline in modern societies, sociologists remain divided over trends in religious activity and belief that support or refute claims of religious decline. Much of this disagreement stems from the inability to distinguish between period and cohort effects when analyzing repeated cross-sectional survey data. I use the intrinsic estimator, a recently developed method of simultaneously estimating age, period, and cohort effects, to examine changes in Americans’ religious service attendance, prayer, belief in the afterlife, and biblical literalism. Results show that regular service attendance declines, predominantly across cohorts. There are also period- and cohort-based declines in biblical literalism and a cohort-based decline in prayer. Belief in the afterlife is relatively stable across periods and cohorts. These results provide mixed support for theories of religious decline, and they demonstrate the importance of differentiating between period and cohort effects on social change.     

Population theory—A long view

Any attempt to take a long view of population research, its findings, and applications is bound to raise questions about the state of population theory. Recent research on the history of population thought enables us to include a much more complete account of classical and early modern sources, and of parallel and complementary developments in population biology. This paper considers four major shifts in the conceptual and empirical ambitions of population inquiry over the long term. In general, major conceptual developments in ideas about population reflect major shifts in political and biological theory. The nature of population in European science and society was substantially established before demography emerged as a twentieth-century academic discipline focused chiefly on fertility and mortality. A long view suggests that demography is currently in the course of a shift that constructively re-integrates it with the wider field of scientific and historical population thinking.     

Child care availability and first-birth timing in Norway

Both sociological and economic theories posit that widely available, high-quality, and affordable child care should have pronatalist effects. Yet to date, the empirical evidence has not consistently supported this hypothesis. We argue that this previous empirical work has been plagued by the inability to control for endogenous placement of day care centers and the possibility that people migrate to take advantage of the availability of child care facilities. Using Norwegian register data and a statistically defensible fixed-effects model, we find strong positive effects of day care availability on the transition to motherhood.     

Evaluation of auditor decisions: Hindsight bias effects and the expectation gap

Hindsight bias is said to exist when individuals overestimate the extent to which an outcome could have been anticipated prior to its occurrence. Ex post, litigants tend to blame auditors in hindsight for failing to foresee and anticipate subsequent financial problems of their audit clients. However, it is not known whether the blame attributed in hindsight is due to hindsight bias or other factors such as the generally hypothesized user-preparer expectation gap. A behavioral experiment was conducted with 65 federal and state general jurisdiction judges and 58 auditors from one of the Big-Six public accounting firms. Results indicate that judges provided significantly lower evaluations of auditors' performance than did auditors, reflective of an expectation gap. Of greater importance, our results reveal that evaluative judgments of auditors' performance are subject to hindsight bias. Additional analysis revealed that our results are consistent with a cognitive interpretation of hindsight bias.     

The quality of employment in the nonprofit sector: An update on employee attitudes in nonprofits versus business and government

Results from a survey of a national sample of 1,190 working adults update findings collected in 1977 (Mirvis and Hackett, 1983) on the characteristics and attitudes of people working in nonprofits. As in the earlier survey, it shows that people employed in the private nonprofit sector gain more satisfaction from their jobs than their counterparts in business and government and have more trust in their management. still, people working in nonprofits are just as concerned that their employers will “take advantage” of them and, in contrast to the 1977 survey, are no more psychologically committed to their organizations than are people in the other sectors.