Socio-demographic and socio-economic variables in different data sources |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Silke Schneider (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) |
| Coordinator 2 | Professor Christof Wolf (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) |
Because many research questions in the social sciences revolve around questions of social differentiation and social inequality most data collections include measures of socio-demographic and socio-economic variables. In stark contrast to the theoretical importance of these dimensions stands the mostly missing national or international standards for measuring the respective concepts.
During the past years some work in this regard has been done with respect to some of these dimensions, e.g. education. But for most of the variables in the “background variables block” only little systematic work was carried out. Furthermore, the empirical research up to now has almost exclusively focused on measuring aspects of differentiation and inequality in social surveys. Because social research is increasingly also using other data sources, such as social media posts or data from tracking devises, the issue of measuring socio-demographic and socio-economic variables has become even more complex. For these new datatypes such variables are either available in very reduced form only, and thus have poor information value, or entirely absent. Inclusion of socio-demographic and socio-economic variables would, however, enormously increase the analysis potential of such data.
This session brings together contributions on the measurement of socio-demographic and socio-economic variables in surveys and other individual level data collections. Welcome issues to be discussed are, among others, measurement/detection of attributes, data quality, comparability (across data sources within countries, for data sources across time, as well as across countries), harmonization and standardization.