This research examines the role of various forms of national identity in predicting anti-immigrant attitudes based on the national identity module of a large cross-national dataset (International Social Survey Programme 2013). We show, across 22 European countries, that the relationship between a general measure of national identity and out-group discrimination is mediated by two forms of national attachment: nationalism and patriotism. While both forms are positively related to national identity, they affect attitudes towards immigrants in different ways. Nationalism is positively associated with discriminatory intentions, while patriotism is negatively associated with them. Both effects cancel one another out.

Background:Oral diseases are among the most common health problems worldwide, and they are heavily influenced by social inequalities. Routine and secondary dental data can provide valuable insights into care provision and help identify gaps in care and risk factors. This work aims to analyze the current state of routine and secondary data use in the field, highlight research gaps, and develop implications. Method:This scoping review was conducted according to the method developed by Arksey and O'Malley, which was partially refined by Levac, Colquhoun, and O'Brien. Several databases were searched, including PubMed/MEDLINE, SCOPUS, and PubPsych. A total of 5,823 articles were identified, and 38 publications met the inclusion criteria. Three experienced reviewers evaluated the studies using criterion-guided codebooks. Results:Most publications (n=29; 76.3%) are international and were published within the last ten years (n=33; 86.8%). Most publications (n=34; 89.5%) focused on a single data source. Only four publications linked different data sets (data linkage). Most publications (n=15; 39.5%) dealt with cost-benefit analyses and economic aspects. Thirteen publications used routine and secondary data to describe utilization behavior and specific risk factors of vulnerable groups, with four focusing on children and adolescents. Discussion:Routine and secondary data analyses in dentistry offer great potential for identifying gaps in care, pinpointing specific needs, and determining risk factors. There appears to be a three-way division in the content-related objectives of routine and secondary data analysis in dentistry: 1) clinical questions, 2) economic efficiency, and 3) description or identification of vulnerable groups. The latter focuses on people with comorbid somatic diseases, older adults, people with disabilities, and children and adolescents in international discourse. To improve dental care, routine and secondary dental data in Germany must be made more accessible and usable.

Attitudes toward refugees (ATR) have become a pivotal concern in Germany following the substantial refugee influx of 2015. This study examines levels and changes in ATR in the German population between 2017 and 2021 across different sociodemographic groups. In contrast to previous studies investigating similar research questions, our approach captured within-individual changes across three dimensions of ATR-cognitive, affective, and behavioral-a perspective largely missing in existing research. Using the GESIS Panel and latent growth curve modeling, we found that after an initial increase in negative sentiments, attitudes gradually became more positive over time, with the strongest positive shift observed in the cognitive dimension, followed by the affective and behavioral dimensions. Women, West Germans, higher-educated, and politically left-leaning individuals held more positive ATR across all ATR dimensions. These sociodemographic differences remained largely stable without attenuating or intensifying over the 4 years. The uniform change patterns in ATR challenge assumptions that certain groups are more resistant to attitude change or that attitudes have polarized in Germany's post-2015 environment.

We study estimation of factor models in a fixed-T panel data setting and significantly relax the common correlated effects (CCE) assumptions pioneered by Pesaran (2006) and used in many papers since. This allows us to make three important contributions. First, our assumptions greatly extend the applicability of the CCEP estimator and allow it to be generalized in empirically relevant ways. Second, our assumptions considerably simplify the asymptotic analysis of the estimators. Third, we provide a straightforward asymptotic normality result that accounts for the sampling variability of the sample means of the explanatory variables, which is important in the fixed-T setting.

Antisemitism is a long-standing, yet recently escalating threat to Jews and social cohesion in general. While there are intense public debates on Muslim antisemitism, there is very little systematic research based on large-scale, representative data. We fill this gap by analysing approximately 8,500 respondents included in the German Integrationsbarometer 2020 survey. Our results demonstrate that antisemitism is significantly higher among Muslims compared to Christian or religiously unaffiliated respondents, and among immigrants from Turkey and the Middle East & North Africa compared to other groups. About 35 per cent of Muslims strongly agreed with classical antisemitic statements. Deeper analyses reveal that antisemitism is particularly high among Muslims who are very religious or less educated. On the other hand, antisemitism is much lower among Muslims who are less religious or highly educated. We find only limited support for the impact of the time since migration on the antisemitism levels of Muslims. The findings are robust to various operationalizations of classical antisemitism and modelling choices. We discuss the theoretical as well as political implications of our findings.

Multilevel modelling (MM) is widely utilized in the social sciences, with over 20% of articles in leading sociological journals employing this technique. Despite its prevalence, few studies address whether the variables used in MM are invariant across groups or allow to construct reliable indicators. This study investigates the effects of both measurement noninvariance and random measurement error on MM using Monte Carlo simulations. Our findings reveal significant biases in MM results when random measurement errors are overlooked. Attaining high reliability in the indicators - above 0.94 - can mitigate these biases. While measurement noninvariance introduces bias in MM, its impact is smaller compared to that of the bias caused by unaddressed measurement error. Multilevel structural equation modelling (SEM), which controls for random measurement errors, performs effectively in complete measurement invariance (MI) scenarios. However, the absence of MI can create significant challenges. While multilevel SEM is a powerful analytical tool, it is not immune to the effects of MI assumption violations.

In this article, we investigate the question of whether political socialization in the German Democratic Republic before the fall of the Berlin Wall has had an effect on current attitudes toward German unification and the role of intra-German migration in this context. We used the data of the Saxon Longitudinal Study to measure gdr identification of the respondents in 1987 and to test their influence on attitudes toward unification more than 30 years later. Results show that a consolidation of gdr identity in adolescence shapes the affinity for socialism in the further course of life, but does not seem to play a role in the later approval of unification and in the feeling of being disadvantaged as an East German.

We consider tests of the hypothesis that two random variables X and Y have the same distribution. Standard tests of this hypothesis, like the Kolmogorov–Smirnov two-sample test and the Baumgartner–Weiss–Schindler test, assume that X and Y are independent, and we do not assume this. Instead we suppose that our sample consists of observations on pairs (x_i,y_i)_i=1^n , where we have random sampling (therefore independence) over i , but unrestricted dependence between X and Y . We provide a novel form of the bootstrap that provides asymptotically valid critical values for the Kolmogorov–Smirnov two-sample test and the Baumgartner–Weiss–Schindler test. We conduct some Monte Carlo simulations to assess the finite-sample properties of these tests.

This study examines the measurement and cross-national comparability of democratic values utilizing the Citizens’ Models of Democracy scale included in the European Social Survey round 10. Given the ambiguous understanding of psychological constructs in empirical legitimacy research, we propose a conceptualization drawing on Norris’s framework of political support to facilitate a decisive operationalization of survey indicators. Acknowledging the challenges inherent in comparative research, we emphasize the intentional differentiation between social identities, values, and attitudes as the underlying constructs of measurement. Applying this framework to the study of political support, we conceptualize democratic values as the underlying measurement of support for regime principles and empirically assess whether and how associated latent structures can be discovered. As it remains unclear whether the scale is intended to capture value dimensions or types of value holders that are consistent across countries, we employ both variable- and person-centered as well as current state of the art approaches on measurement quality and invariance. Our findings suggest a meaningful but overlapping structure of liberal, social-democratic, and populist democratic values, while the comparability across cultural contexts reveals to be hampered. Further, a meaningful structure of value-holder profiles does not occur, but rather clusters of respondents who consistently seize either most or few democratic regime principles as important. We conclude with implications for democracy research and recommendations for future empirical studies on political support.

Research on the role of goals in shaping pro-environmental behavior remains relatively underdeveloped. By integrating active procurement goals and approval goals into the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the theory of reasoned goal pursuit (TRGP), proposed by Ajzen and Kruglanski (2019), offers a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing the social cognition processes that mediate the effect of goals on behavior. The TRGP highlights the importance of goals by positing not only direct effects of goals on behavioral and normative beliefs, but also their moderating influence on the relationship between these beliefs and the constructs of attitude and subjective norm. Furthermore, the TRGP introduces motivation as a key mediating variable in the relationship between attitude, subjective norm, and behavioral intention, with the effect of attitude and subjective norm on motivation also expected to be moderated by activated goals. This paper presents the methodology and results of a pilot study (N = 49) aimed at identifying active procurement and approval goals, followed by a main study (N = 402) testing key assumptions of the TRGP in the context of avoiding purchasing products packaged in single-use plastic. Structural equation modelling was employed to assess the model, which accounted for 59 % of the variance in attitude, 44 % in subjective norm, 51 % in perceived behavioral control, 69 % in motivation, 83 % in intention, and 14 % in behavior. The results confirm most of the main effects postulated by the TRGP, though no empirical support was found for the proposed moderating effects of activated goals. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the TRGP and offers recommendations for enhancing its empirical implications through improved methodological approaches.

Only a little is known about the tooth brushing behaviors and oral health care of people with early childhood autism (P-EA). To remedy this, a survey was carried out with P-EA of all ages. In summer 2021, an online survey questionnaire with 124 questions, addressed only at caregivers of P-EA, was sent to all members of the Bundesverband Autismus Deutschland e.V. Our present study evaluated the 20 survey questions related to dental self-care. In total, 130 questionnaires were evaluated. The mean age of the P-EA was 22.7 years (min: 3y; max: 60y; SD ± 14.1y). Only 17.7

Contact hypothesis and threat hypothesis are among the most influential theories of xenophobia. The former proposes that intergroup contact may reduce prejudice. The latter suggests that a large outgroup may increase xenophobic attitudes.Using data of a 2018 German representative sample (N = 2,016), we employed multilevel analyses. As predictors, we looked at outgroup size, gross domestic product, and unemployment rate on a county level. On the individual level, we included authoritarianism and a wide range of sociodemographic variables.Individual authoritarianism was identified as the strongest predictor of xenophobic attitudes. On the county level, a higher proportion of migrants was associated with lower values of xenophobia. This serves as an indicator for contact hypothesis. Our results suggest that contextualizing social psychological and micro-sociological theories and employing multilevel analyses are valuable tools to detangle the interplay of individual and contextual influences on xenophobic attitudes.

Background: The current literature lacks scientific research on child and adolescent psychiatrists’ (CAPPS) perspectives on dental and oral health. This study aims to investigate the opinions and approaches of child and adolescent psychiatrists and their patients regarding oral and dental health. Methods: A questionnaire-based cross-sectional study was conducted among members of the Professional Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy in Germany. Results: Out of the association members, 10.9% (n = 109) participated, with 5.2% (n = 52; 38f/14m) completing the questionnaire. Dental and oral health topics were discussed with one-fifth of the patients (19.2%), while 11.5% reported that they were “never” a part of their therapy. Patient-related concerns about dental and oral health were primarily brought into the context of child and adolescent psychiatric work. Dental treatment anxieties were prominent. Only 3.8% of the participants regularly assigned diagnoses related to dental status. The CAPPS employ a bio-psycho-social model for the genesis of oral health-related conditions in Children and Adolescents with Special Needs. Conclusions: CAPPS have a foundation in relationship-based work for assessing oral and dental healthcare and providing recommendations for further dental care. Regional networking and science must be further developed.

In the metafrontier literature, firms are put into groups, generally defined by technology or geography. Each group has its own technological frontier, and the metafrontier is the upper bound of these group frontiers. The aim of this literature is to measure a firm’s inefficiency, and to decompose it into its inefficiency relative to its group’s frontier and the inefficiency of its group’s frontier relative to the metafrontier. A previous paper (Amsler et al., Empirical Economics 60:353–363, 2021) proposes a hierarchical stochastic frontier model to accomplish this, where the hierarchy is firms in groups in the overall set of groups. This chapter gives an empirical implementation of this model, with emphasis on computational issues.

Previous studies of the so-called frontier production function have not utilized an adequate characterization of the disturbance term for such a model. In this paper we provide an appropriate specification, by defining the disturbance term as the sum of symmetric normal and (negative) half-normal random variables. Various aspects of maximum-likelihood estimation for the coefficients of a production function with an additive disturbance term of this sort are then considered.