During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic expert commissions developed ethical guidelines for prioritizing assistance in the event of insufficient resources (triage). However, ethical principles may deviate from laypeople ' s moral standards. Our study aims to investigate which factors help laypeople justify for prioritizing a COVID-19 patient and which respondent characteristics - among them for the first time also values - moderate their impact on prioritizing decisions. The results of a factorial survey experiment conducted in Spain 2022 showed that the most important factors were the vaccination status and the smoking behavior of patients, contradicting ethical guidelines and revealing the need for better communication between experts and the public. Better communication also means incorporating laypeople's moral views in the process of developing ethical guidelines. Moreover, patients ' family obligations, patients ' origin, age, and social class were analyzed. Our results show that some of these factors depend on respondents' personal values (Schwartz values), vaccination context, and smoking behaviors.

This study examined the relationship between paranormal beliefs and right-wing ideology in a German quota sample (N = 1,139). We also explored whether individual differences in intuitive versus analytical cognitive styles explain these relationships. Results indicated that higher scores on right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO), but not right-wing identity, were positively associated with paranormal beliefs. However, both right-wing ideology and intuitive versus analytical thinking independently contributed to paranormal belief endorsement. The results suggest that right-wing ideology plays an important role in understanding paranormal beliefs. While cognitive styles are also relevant, they do not explain the affinity of right-wing individuals for paranormal phenomena.

This paper investigates whether transcendent worldviews-those oriented toward a beyond-decline while immanent worldviews-those oriented toward this world-increase. We draw on an inventory spanning positions from theism and deism to naturalism and existentialism, administered seven times in West Germany (1982-2023) and six times in East Germany (1992-2023). In West Germany, existentialist worldviews ranked first, followed by naturalist, theist, and deist ones. While existentialist worldviews remained stable, transcendent worldviews declined and immanent ones grew, producing a substantial and growing advantage for immanent over transcendent orientations. In East Germany, existentialist and naturalist worldviews were markedly dominant, well above transcendent ones throughout the observation period. Both remained stable, while transcendent worldviews increased only minimally, leaving the gap largely intact. To test whether these period effects persist under controls, we employ OLS regressions with robust standard errors, accounting for cohort, age, church attendance and belonging, community size, parenthood, work engagement, education, and gender. In West Germany, transcendent worldviews declined and immanent ones increased non-monotonically. In East Germany, the pattern reversed: transcendent worldviews increased and immanent ones decreased non-monotonically. While mean levels do not differ significantly between the two regions, the direction and structure of effects do. The discussion addresses why transcendent worldviews are better explained than immanent ones, and what accounts for the divergent trajectories between East and West Germany.

Hostile stances towards journalists and perceptions of media bias have become cornerstones of populist radical right identity formation. Despite a lively scholarly and public debate about the relation between populism and the media, a comprehensive account of the supply side of political information—radical right populist parties’ (RRPPs) communication—and the demand side—citizens’ information selection—is still missing. Focusing on the RRPP Alternative for Germany (AfD), this paper first establishes that its Twitter communication features more negative media-related cues and links to hyperpartisan news websites compared with the other major German parties. Self-reported media use from two high-quality surveys as well as a passive web tracking allow us to comprehensively characterize the information selection of AfD supporters. In line with the party’s media-related cues, people identifying with the AfD used alternative online sources more frequently amid less exposure to public broadcasting than supporters of other parties. Beyond Germany, media-related party cues and selective exposure by citizens might play an even more critical role in more polarized societies. More generally, the identified individual-level heterogeneity in media exposure is a scope condition that research on the aggregated societal effects of media coverage, e.g. on immigration, needs to consider.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the political and scholarly attention on conspiracy theories. Among other predictors, religious and spiritual influences on conspiracy beliefs have been widely discussed in the literature. We suggest analyzing the relationship between religion and spirituality on the one hand and conspiracy beliefs on the other hand from the perspective of religious information processing. Based on the Post-Critical Beliefs Scale (PCBS), we argue that literal interpretations of religious information are positively associated with conspiracy beliefs. Furthermore, we assume that individual differences in analytic cognitive style account for the relationship between religious attitudes, spirituality, and conspiracism. Using a quota sample of German adults, we find that literal interpretations of religious content positively correlate with conspiracy beliefs for the literal affirmation of transcendence (e.g., orthodoxy) and the literal disaffirmation of transcendence (e.g., atheism). These findings suggest that religious information processing is related to conspiracy beliefs for religious and nonreligious individuals. Moreover, our results show a stable association between holistic spirituality and conspiracy beliefs. The relationships between different types of religious attitudes, spirituality, and conspiracy beliefs hold, even after accounting for analytic (versus intuitive) thinking. The implications for the study of religious attitudes and conspiracy beliefs are discussed.

The re-use of research data is an integral part of research practice in the social and economic sciences. To find relevant data, researchers need adequate search facilities. However, a comprehensive, thematic search for research data is made more difficult by inconsistent or missing semantic indexing of data at the level of social science concepts (e.g., representing the theory language). Either the data is not documented at a granular level, or primary investigators use their ad-hoc terminology to describe their data. Consequently, researchers have to make great efforts to find relevant or comparable data. From the user's perspective, the lack of theory language in data documentation impedes effective data searches and thus significantly limits the research potential of existing data collections. Because there is currently no semantic model for indexing the data content, the specific challenge for improving data search lies in establishing concept-based indexing of research data. Research infrastructures need technology for the harmonized semantic indexing of their research data. The LORD concept registry aims at closing this gap by developing a registry of sociological and economic concepts and, following the FAIR principles, making this concept registry generally available to the scientific community. As a first step, we developed a basic data model for the Concept Registry using United Modeling Language (UML). All links between are created and managed in the form of so-called RDF triples. An annotation application allows for linking specific questions/variables to concepts. The application also includes the two SKOS-compliant thesauri, "Thesaurus Social Sciences" (TheSoz) and "Standard Thesaurus Economics" (STW) but could be extended to other resources like ELSST. We illustrate the application of the LORD concept registry with examples from three large-scale survey programmes (German Socio-Economic Panel, German General Social Survey, National Academics Panel Study). The initial focus is on variables and questions with overlapping content in the three survey programmes, as they form a sound basis for cross-linking with concepts.

Several researchers have questioned the reliability of pornography research's findings. Following a recent call to use more reliable data sources, we conducted two analyses to investigate patterns and predictors of online pornography use (OPU). Our analyses were based on data from a large-scale German online web tracking panel ( N = 3018) gathered from June 2018 to June 2019. The study we present here has two parts: In the first part, we looked at group differences (gender and age) in tracked OPU. Overall, this part's results confirm questionnaire-based research findings regarding sex and age differences. In the second part of our study, we combined the web tracking data with data from an online survey which was answered by a subset of the tracking participants ( n = 1315) to assess the relevance of various predictors of OPU that have been identified in previous research. Again, our results mostly echoed previous findings based on self-reports. Online pornography was used more by males and younger individuals, while relationship status, sexist attitudes, and social dominance orientation were not associated with OPU. However, we did find differences in OPU between members of different religious communities. Our study confirms some critical findings on OPU from previous questionnaire-based research while extending existing research by providing a more fine-grained analysis of usage patterns based on web tracking data.

In the historiography, older women in post-war West Germany have predominantly been depicted as passive, as embodiments of a contaminated past and hindrances to cultural change. This paper challenges these stereotypical narratives by investigating quantitative and qualitative social data from the Bonn Longitudinal Study of Aging (BOLSA) in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social inequality. The results of our correspondence analysis show that women aged over sixty led more active lifestyles than commonly assumed. They also compensated for their lower economic and cultural capital by investing in higher social and symbolic capital. This was particularly pronounced in the case of unmarried elderly women.

In the historiography, older women in post-war West Germany have predominantly been depicted as passive, as embodiments of a contaminated past and hindrances to cultural change. This paper challenges these stereotypical narratives by investigating quantitative and qualitative social data from the Bonn Longitudinal Study of Aging (BOLSA) in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social inequality. The results of our correspondence analysis show that women aged over sixty led more active lifestyles than commonly assumed. They also compensated for their lower economic and cultural capital by investing in higher social and symbolic capital. This was particularly pronounced in the case of unmarried elderly women.

Medical treatments at the beginning and end of human life are highly contested in public discourse. Our study reveals factors shaping the acceptance of social egg freezing (or oocyte cryopreservation) as an assisted reproduction technology (ART) in the general public. Based on the theory of moral contextualism and the literature on medical ethics, we deduce potential factors influencing attitudes toward cryopreservation (for example, the number of oocytes used or the age up to which women plan to use the oocytes). The influence of these factors on individual attitudes is modeled using a factorial design embedded into a web survey. The results show that factors associated with potential harm to the children decrease acceptance of cryopreservation, whereas factors associated with potential harm to the women increase acceptance. The strongest effect has the age at which women plan to use the preserved oocytes.

Social research, qualitative and quantitative, has long been the preferred means of selfobservation in industrial societies. The social science data generated in the process are therefore rewarding sources for many fields of contemporary history. A large-scale integration of both quantitative and qualitative social science data into the contemporary historian’s practice will aid a fuller reconstruction of the agency of ordinary people and the relations between the social sciences, society, and politics of the past. This article addresses the challenges facing historians re-using social science data. It gives examples of relevant archives and research projects, discussing the historian’s method and practice and the ethical, legal, archival and metadata problems awaiting resolution.

Social research, qualitative and quantitative, has long been the preferred means of self-observation in industrial societies. The social science data generated in the process are therefore rewarding sources for many fields of contemporary history. A large-scale integration of both quantitative and qualitative social science data into the contemporary historian's practice will aid a fuller reconstruction of the agency of ordinary people and the relations between the social sciences, society, and politics of the past. This article addresses the challenges facing historians re-using social science data. It gives examples of relevant archives and research projects, discussing the historian's method and practice and the ethical, legal, archival and metadata problems awaiting resolution.

Combining surveys and digital trace data can enhance the analytic potential of both data types. We present two studies that examine factors influencing data sharing behaviour of survey respondents for different types of digital trace data: Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and health app data. Across those data types, we compared the relative impact of four factors on data sharing: data sharing method, respondent characteristics, sample composition and incentives. The results show that data sharing rates differ substantially across data types. Two particularly important factors predicting data sharing behaviour are the incentive size and data sharing method, which are both directly related to task difficulty and respondent burden. In sum, the paper reveals systematic variation in the willingness to share additional data which need to be considered in research designs linking surveys and digital traces.

In der Allgemeinen Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaften (ALLBUS) werden seit 1980 repräsentative Daten zu Einstellungen und Verhalten der Bevölkerung in Deutschland erhoben. Insgesamt zeigt sich, dass die durchschnittliche Zustimmung zu fremdenfeindlichen Aussagen seit 1980 beinahe kontinuierlich sank. Zugleich erzielte die Partei „Alternative für Deutschland“ (AfD), die ein rechtspopulistisches, nationalistisches Programm verfolgt, in der jüngeren Vergangenheit Wahlerfolge bei Landtagswahlen sowie der Bundestagswahl, zog in mehrere Länderparlamente ein und bildet im Bundestag inzwischen die drittstärkste Fraktion. Diese scheinbar gegensätzlichen Entwicklungen – zunehmend tolerante Einstellungen und gleichzeitig nationalistisches Wahlverhalten – werfen Fragen auf, etwa ob sich hinter dem Trend zu einer im Durchschnitt toleranteren Gesellschaft eine zunehmende Spaltung und Polarisierung der Gesellschaft in fremdenfeindliche und fremdenfreundliche Bürger*innen verbirgt. Dieser Band versammelt verschiedene Untersuchungen zu diesem Thema, die alle auf repräsentativen Bevölkerungsumfragen beruhen. Insgesamt verdeutlicht die Gesamtschau der Befunde der in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge die Bedeutsamkeit von (positiven) Kontakten zwischen der deutschen Aufnahmegesellschaft und der Migrantenpopulation. Sofern Migration nicht als Bedrohung für den eigenen Status wahrgenommen wird, kann verstärkter Kontakt dazu führen, dass die deutsche Bevölkerung insgesamt toleranter und offener wird. Im Gegenschluss kann eine wahrgenommene Bedrohung des eigenen Status und der eigenen Ressourcen zu einer gesellschaftlichen Polarisierung führen. Hinweise auf eine allgemeine Verschlechterung des Meinungsklimas gegenüber ethnischen Minderheiten ergeben sich aus den Studien folglich nicht. Es zeigt sich aber auch, dass der Wandel hin zu einer größeren Akzeptanz Zugewanderter nicht irreversibel ist und deshalb die „offene Gesellschaft“ in der Bundesrepublik ständig aktiv erarbeitet werden muss.