UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYE: USERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF ONLINE PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE

Author(s):  
Alecea Irene Standlee

This project seeks to contribute to the question, “How do internet users navigate data privacy in a digitally surveilled online world?” I augment this ongoing discussion by examining the perceptions and practices concerning privacy and self-representation in digital spaces among young adults, 18-22. This qualitative work utilizes in-depth interviews of college students in the United States to collect both behavioral and attitudinal patterns. Specifically, I consider the impact of the strategic interventions of corporate and governmental platforms to collect, distribute, and utilize individual level data on research participants’ information consumption, individual identity representation, and group affiliation. A preliminary analysis of the data finds participants engage in narrative rationalizations to help them navigate the cultural expectations of online engagement within a surveilled environment. Patterns of strategic self-representation are shaped by such rationalizations and justifications, including a fundamental shift in what the concept "privacy" means in an online world.

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rune J. Sørensen

In an influential study, Matthew Gentzkow found that the introduction of TV in the United States caused a major drop in voter turnout. In contrast, the current analysis shows that public broadcasting TV can increase political participation. Detailed data on the rollout of television in Norway in the 1960s and 1970s are combined with municipality-level data on voter turnout over a period of four decades. The date of access to TV signals was mostly a side effect of geography, a feature that is used to identify causal effects. Additional analyses exploit individual-level panel data from three successive election studies. The new TV medium instantly became a major source of political information. It triggered political interest and caused a modest, but statistically significant, increase in voter turnout.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Oshio ◽  
Hiromi Kimura ◽  
Toshimi Nishizaki ◽  
Takashi Omori

Abstract Background Area-level deprivation is well known to have an adverse impact on mortality, morbidity, or other specific health outcomes. This study examined how area-level deprivation may affect self-rated health (SRH) and life satisfaction (LS), an issue that is largely understudied. Methods We used individual-level data obtained from a nationwide population-based internet survey conducted between 2019 and 2020, as well as municipality-level data obtained from a Japanese government database (N = 12,461 living in 366 municipalities). We developed multilevel regression models to explain an individual’s SRH and LS scores using four alternative measures of municipality-level deprivation, controlling for individual-level deprivation and covariates. We also examined how health behavior and interactions with others mediated the impact of area-level deprivation on SRH and LS. Results Participants in highly deprived municipalities tended to report poorer SRH and lower LS. For example, when living in municipalities falling in the highest tertile of municipality-level deprivation as measured by the z-scoring method, SRH and LS scores worsened by a standard deviation of 0.05 (p < 0.05) when compared with those living in municipalities falling in the lowest tertile of deprivation. In addition, health behavior mediated between 17.6 and 33.1% of the impact of municipality-level deprivation on SRH and LS, depending on model specifications. Conclusion Results showed that area-level deprivation modestly decreased an individual’s general health conditions and subjective well-being, underscoring the need for public health policies to improve area-level socioeconomic conditions.


2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay P. Greene ◽  
Marcus A. Winters

In 2002, Florida adopted a test-based promotion policy in the third grade in an attempt to end social promotion. Similar policies are currently operating in Texas, New York City, and Chicago and affect at least 17 percent of public school students nationwide. Using individual-level data on the universe of public school students in Florida, we analyze the impact of grade retention on student proficiency in reading one and two years after the retention decision. We use an instrumental variable (IV) approach made available by the relatively objective nature of Florida's policy. Our findings suggest that retained students slightly outperformed socially promoted students in reading in the first year after retention, and these gains increased substantially in the second year. Results were robust across two distinct IV comparisons: an across-year approach comparing students who were essentially separated by the year in which they happened to have been born, and a regression discontinuity design.


Author(s):  
Anastasia Kozyreva ◽  
Philipp Lorenz-Spreen ◽  
Ralph Hertwig ◽  
Stephan Lewandowsky ◽  
Stefan M. Herzog

AbstractPeople rely on data-driven AI technologies nearly every time they go online, whether they are shopping, scrolling through news feeds, or looking for entertainment. Yet despite their ubiquity, personalization algorithms and the associated large-scale collection of personal data have largely escaped public scrutiny. Policy makers who wish to introduce regulations that respect people’s attitudes towards privacy and algorithmic personalization on the Internet would greatly benefit from knowing how people perceive personalization and personal data collection. To contribute to an empirical foundation for this knowledge, we surveyed public attitudes towards key aspects of algorithmic personalization and people’s data privacy concerns and behavior using representative online samples in Germany (N = 1065), Great Britain (N = 1092), and the United States (N = 1059). Our findings show that people object to the collection and use of sensitive personal information and to the personalization of political campaigning and, in Germany and Great Britain, to the personalization of news sources. Encouragingly, attitudes are independent of political preferences: People across the political spectrum share the same concerns about their data privacy and show similar levels of acceptance regarding personalized digital services and the use of private data for personalization. We also found an acceptability gap: People are more accepting of personalized services than of the collection of personal data and information required for these services. A large majority of respondents rated, on average, personalized services as more acceptable than the collection of personal information or data. The acceptability gap can be observed at both the aggregate and the individual level. Across countries, between 64% and 75% of respondents showed an acceptability gap. Our findings suggest a need for transparent algorithmic personalization that minimizes use of personal data, respects people’s preferences on personalization, is easy to adjust, and does not extend to political advertising.


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 358-389
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Mayda ◽  
Giovanni Peri ◽  
Walter Steingress

This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote share for the Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 to 2016. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it. These effects are mainly due to the indirect impact on existing citizens’ votes, and this is independent of the origin country and race of immigrants. We find that the political effect of immigration is heterogeneous across counties and depends on their skill level, public spending, and noneconomic characteristics. (JEL D72, J15, J24, J61, R23)


Author(s):  
Mary Schmeida ◽  
Ramona McNeal

Government initiatives in the United States have been passed in an effort to increase citizen usage of e-government programs. One such service is the availability of online health insurance information. However, not all demographic groups have been equally able to access these services, primarily the poor and rural American. As more legislation is passed, including the advancement of broadband services to remote areas, infrastructure barriers are being removed, opening access to Medicare and Medicaid websites for these vulnerable groups. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze factors predicting the impact of recent government actions on citizen access to health insurance information online. This topic is explored using multivariate regression analysis and individual level data from the Internet and American Life Project. The findings suggest that healthcare needs and quality of Internet access may be playing a more important role in health insurance information services than other factors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne Halikiopoulou ◽  
Tim Vlandas

AbstractThis article contests the view that the strong positive correlation between anti-immigration attitudes and far right party success necessarily constitutes evidence in support of the cultural grievance thesis. We argue that the success of far right parties depends on their ability to mobilize a coalition of interests between their core supporters, that is voters with cultural grievances over immigration and the often larger group of voters with economic grievances over immigration. Using individual level data from eight rounds of the European Social Survey, our empirical analysis shows that while cultural concerns over immigration are a stronger predictor of far right party support, those who are concerned with the impact of immigration on the economy are important to the far right in numerical terms. Taken together, our findings suggest that economic grievances over immigration remain pivotal within the context of the transnational cleavage.


Social Forces ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary Parolin

Abstract Routine-biased technological change has emerged as the dominant explanation for the differential earnings growth of occupations at greater risk of automation, such as machine operators or office clerks, relative to less routine occupations. In contrast, this paper finds that the declining earnings returns to an occupation’s routine task intensity (RTI) can largely be attributed to the decline of organized labor. Using individual-level data on 3.3 million employed adults across the United States from 1983 to 2017, this paper finds that organized labor has two countervailing effects on occupations at greater risk of automation. First, higher union coverage within a state and industry inhibits the decline in earnings returns to an occupation’s RTI. Second, higher union coverage hastens the decline in employment shares of occupations with higher RTI. The result is that occupations at greater risk of automation experience more favorable earnings growth where unions are more resilient, but at the cost of accelerated declines in their employment shares. Counterfactual analyses demonstrate that if union coverage in the United States had remained stable at 1983 levels, the earnings returns to an occupation’s RTI might not have declined from 1983 to 2017, and the observed pattern of occupational earnings polarization in the 1990s might not have occurred. However, the mean RTI of occupations might have declined by an additional 21 percent from 1983 to 2017 relative to the observed decline. The findings suggest that the social consequences of automation are conditional on the strength of organized labor.


Author(s):  
Barbara O'Byrne

Blended course delivery has wide applications across diverse educational settings. By definition, it is multimodal and involves multiple delivery formats. However, scant research has examined the impact of multimodal, blended delivery on university pedagogy. This chapter makes the case for close examination of the theoretical and pedagogical foundation of blended learning and proposes that research is needed to establish and validate the constructivist principles associated with blended learning. A longitudinal analysis of surveys and in-depth interviews with instructors from a distance education graduate school in the United States identified and contextualized features of learner-centered pedagogy linked to blended learning.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-118
Author(s):  
Kadri Arrak ◽  
Anneli Kaasa ◽  
Urmas Varblane

This exploratory article aims to take first steps towards understanding whether a regional cultural background has, among other determinants, an influence on a person’s entrepreneurial behaviour, relying on the example of Germany. A multilevel approach is applied combining the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor individual-level data about entrepreneurship with up-to-date cultural dimensions indicators based on Hofstede’s original approach at the regional (NUTS 1) level. The results indicate that regional cultural context is an important determinant of entrepreneurial behaviour. At that, different cultural dimensions have different impacts, and the impact also differs across different stages of entrepreneurship. A lower level of uncertainty avoidance in a region could have a positive impact on early-stage entrepreneurship, whereas the established business ownership seems to be encouraged by a lower level of power distance.


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