In Defense of Formal Modeling in the Social Sciences

Conveying Social Change: Some Formal Considerations

The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville ◽

10.3138/ttr.8.187 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 8 (x) ◽

pp. 187-209

Author(s):

John Modell

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

United States ◽

Social Change ◽

Network Analysis ◽

Data Collection ◽

The United States ◽

Event History ◽

Formal Modeling ◽

The Social

Over live past two decades the social sciences in the United States have experienced a remarkable period of methodological enrichment. Numerous advances in statistics, in formal modeling, in computation, and in data collection have fueled this happy methodological surge. Substantively. demography, network analysis, event history and a number of other quite generalized analytic perspectives have revised the ways we can describe and account for change, and have made the social sciences powerfully relevant to policy in a way they were not only a while ago.

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Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences

10.1017/cbo9780511801938 ◽

2008 ◽

Cited By ~ 88

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

The Social

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What Can We Learn From Factorial Surveys About Human Behavior?

Methodology ◽

10.1027/1614-2241/a000161 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 19-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Knut Petzold ◽

Tobias Wolbring

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Behavioral Intentions ◽

Actual Behavior ◽

Full Time ◽

Factorial Survey ◽

Survey Experiment ◽

Intended Behavior ◽

The Social ◽

Survey Experiments ◽

High Level

Abstract. Factorial survey experiments are increasingly used in the social sciences to investigate behavioral intentions. The measurement of self-reported behavioral intentions with factorial survey experiments frequently assumes that the determinants of intended behavior affect actual behavior in a similar way. We critically investigate this fundamental assumption using the misdirected email technique. Student participants of a survey were randomly assigned to a field experiment or a survey experiment. The email informs the recipient about the reception of a scholarship with varying stakes (full-time vs. book) and recipient’s names (German vs. Arabic). In the survey experiment, respondents saw an image of the same email. This validation design ensured a high level of correspondence between units, settings, and treatments across both studies. Results reveal that while the frequencies of self-reported intentions and actual behavior deviate, treatments show similar relative effects. Hence, although further research on this topic is needed, this study suggests that determinants of behavior might be inferred from behavioral intentions measured with survey experiments.

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