Universität Mannheim: MAJOURNALS
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393 research outputs found
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The Role of Public Opinion Research in the Democratic Process: Insights from Politicians, Journalists, and the General Public
Full text linkThis study reveals the existence of a paradox in how the public views polling within the democratic process. Specifically, even though the public believes that it can influence policymaking, it considers public opinion polls not as useful as other, less representative forms of public input, such as comments at town hall meetings. Analyzing data from multiple surveys conducted in the United States of America, we find no evidence for the democratic representation hypothesis with respect to polling. Comparisons across stakeholders (public, journalists, and politicians) demonstrate that general perceptions of inputs into the democratic process are similar, which confirms the citizen-elite congruence hypothesis. However, unlike members of the public, experts are more likely to believe that public opinion polls are the optimal method by which the public can successfully inform policymaking, a finding consistent with the legitimization hypothesis. With respect to perceptions of politicians, we found substantial differences regarding party registration with Democrats and Independents favoring public opinion polling and Republicans preferring alternative methods (e.g., town hall meetings) of informing policymakers
Widerstand und Erinnerungskultur. Die Mannheimer Lechleiter-Gruppe und ihre Darstellung in Wikipedia
Full text linkDas Tandemseminar „Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus in der deutschen Wikipedia“: Ein Lehrexperiment mit forschendem Lernen im Open-Science-Format. Ergänzende Betrachtungen.
Full text linkEvaluating an Alternative Frame for Address-Based Sampling in Germany: The Address Database From Deutsche Post Direkt
Full text linkIn Germany, the population registers with addresses of individuals can be used for address-based sampling. However, unlike countries with a centralized register, municipalities in Germany administer their registers themselves. This not only makes sampling for a nationwide survey more costly and cumbersome but may also result in gaps in the gross sample, as selected municipalities may refuse to allow their registers to be used for sampling purposes. If substitute municipalities are not available, other sampling methods are required. The present study tested the feasibility of using the address database from Deutsche Post Direkt (ADB-DPD) as an alternative frame for address-based sampling in Germany. We simultaneously conducted two almost identical surveys in the German city of Mannheim with gross samples of equal size (N = 3,000). One sample was drawn from the city’s population register, the other from the commercial ADB-DPD. Our findings suggest that the ADB-DPD performs well both in terms of survey response and up-to-dateness. Due to relatively low costs and the fast provision of addresses, the ADB-DPD could be particularly attractive for survey projects with limited budgets and tight schedules. However, these benefits come at considerable cost. First, the use of the ADB-DPD is limited to self-administered surveys. More importantly, in the net sample of the DPD survey, women and young persons were considerably underrepresented. This indicates coverage issues about which DPD provided no further information. Based on our analyses, we offer practical insights into the feasibility of using the ADB-DPD for sampling purposes and suggest avenues for future research
‘The Gradeability of Causative Events’: A Combined Corpus-based and Dictionary-based Study of Middle English -isen Simplex Copies
Full text linkCausativity is one of the most extensively studied operations in linguistics. No matter whether on a morphological, phonological, semantic, or syntactic level, there seems to be nothing that has not already been explored about this notion (cf. Beavers & KoontzGarboden, 2020; Givón, 1975; Kemmer & Verhagen, 1994; Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995; Martin & Schäfer, 2014). The current study demonstrates that further insights into causativity and the semantics of English causative verbs can be gained by traveling back in time into the morphological history of Middle English. Causativity and the causativizing properties of verbal affixes are not comprehensively explored concerning previous stages of English (Dalton-Puffer, 1996; van Gelderen, 2018).
This study investigates Middle English -isen simplex copies, which came to English through the language contact situation with Anglo-Norman (Dalton-Puffer, 1996, p. 201). For this purpose, a combined corpus-based and dictionary-based investigation is carried out using three Middle English corpora. The concept of causativity is broken down into its component parts to investigate causative -isen simplex copies with the help of a classification schema that manifests three parameters of causativity. As a result of this investigation, the -isen simplex copies are classified into seven causative subclasses.
In addition, an event semantic analysis based on Piñón (2001a, 2001b) and Pizzolante (2017) allows for identifying fine-grained differences between different types of causative events. In this regard, it is demonstrated that causative events denote not only “varying degrees of causativity” but manifest different degrees of complexity on an event semantic level. This study does not only provide further insights into the extensively explored notion of causativity but must, at the same time, be considered as one of the long-awaited stories about the morphological history of English
Eine Analyse der Wikipedia-Artikelseite von Alfred Delp: Aufbau, Verlinkungen, Multimodalität und gemeinschaftliche Textproduktion
Full text linkDiese beispielhafte Analyse der Wikipedia-Artikelseite von Alfred Delp soll Studierenden zukünftiger Seminare als Anleitung dienen, eigene Analysen durchzuführen. Analysiert wurden die Verlinkung, die Multimodalität, die Interaktion und die gemeinschaftliche Textproduktion der Artikelseite mit der dazugehörigen Diskussionsseite und Versionsgeschichte