Research Methods & Sociology of Knowledge

Before becoming professor of German Politics and Political Sociology, I was professor of Empirical Political Science, which sounded much more cool and comprehensive. I’m still very interested in all aspects of collecting and analysing data, i.e. research methods.

Measurement and Postal Panel Response Rates

Some of my very early work is on the adequate measurement of value orientations and on improving the response rate in mail panel surveys (that was before the internet).

Bias in Surveys

Together with Jocelyn Evans, I have developed a new measure for bias in the survey-based measurement of multinomial variables. We have also created a free add-on for Stata, surveybias. surveybias has recently been updated. The new version (1.3b) has many new features and runs considerably faster. Click here to see what surveybias can do for you.

Sociology of Knowledge

Citation analysis is a hobby-horse of mine and Harald Schoen.

Spatial Analysis

I’m very much interested in research methods that bring spatial information into models of electoral choice. Two papers on spatial effects in England are here and here.