1,720,959 research outputs found
The power of language : the use, effect, and spread of gender-inclusive language
No full textDefence date: 08 November 2024Examining Board: Prof. Arnout van de Rijt (European University Institute); Prof. Klarita Gërxhani (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); Prof. Katrin Auspurg (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München); Prof. Lena Hipp (WZB Social Science Research Center Berlin; University of Potsdam)This dissertation investigates a new social phenomenon: the use of gender-inclusive language (GIL). Leveraging language as a strategic research site, this dissertation contributes to understanding a current social phenomenon in Germany and advances the sociological understanding of how behavioural change occurs and is experienced. As the title suggests, the thesis has three distinct contributions. First, it traces the use of GIL in news media in Germany since 2000. It documents an unexpectedly rapid increase in GIL and explores how this may be explained based on the patterns of use in different news media over time. Second, it tests the effect of GIL using a digital field experiment on a crowd-working platform. It finds no change in behaviour when GIL is used. Third, it quantitatively establishes that the use of GIL in the German media has plateaued as of 2022, which is referred to as incipient change, i.e. a situation where two competing behaviours exist. It, therefore, turns to qualitative interviews to explore how individuals experience and navigate this situation of two competing behaviours. Overall, this dissertation empirically establishes and documents the rise of a new phenomenon, tests its behavioural effect, and explores how individuals navigate a state of incipient change.Chapter 2 'Words of change : the increase of gender-inclusive language in German media' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Words of change : the increase of gender-inclusive language in German media' (2024) in the journal 'European sociological review'
Words of change : the increase of gender-inclusive language in German media
Get PDFPublished online: 16 September 2023Everyday observations seem to indicate an increase in gender-inclusive language (GIL) in Germany; however, previous research on the prevalence of GIL suggests that it is a marginal phenomenon. Moreover, from a theoretical side, an increase in GIL seems unlikely because of the cognitive challenge language change holds, the existence of multiple GIL variants, and the antagonistic environment that Germany poses for language change. This study empirically measures the use of GIL in five media sources in Germany. Over four million articles from 2000 to 2021 are analysed using the IDS Deutscher Referenzkorpus (DeReKo), supplemented by an in-depth analysis of 500 newspaper articles scraped in 2021. A fine-grained analysis along the dimensions of political orientation of the outlet, type of GIL, and author’s gender is conducted. In addition to observing an unexpectedly rapid increase in GIL, two different trends are identified: whilst non-binary inclusive forms of GIL are increasingly used in the left-leaning newspaper, GIL that adheres to a binary notion of gender is favoured in the mainstream and right-leaning media. This sheds light on how difficult behavioural change can occur.This article was published with the support from the EUI Article Processing Charges (APCs) fund
Rezension: Ariane Brenssell und Andrea Lutz-Kluge (Hg.): Partizipative Forschung und Gender - Emanzipatorische Forschungsansätze weiterdenken
Get PDFBridging the Gap: Making Sense of the Disaccord between Migrants’ Education and Occupation
Get PDFSocial mobility is a central topic of interest within sociology and whilst it has been theoretically linked to spatial mobility, there is still little empirical research on the interplay between the two. Using a subsample of highly educated family migrants from a German mixed-methods project, this study qualitatively analyses the impact of geographical mobility on objective social position and on its subjective perception. Six qualitative interviews are analysed and supplemented with descriptive quantitative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to firstly, reconstruct the spatial mobility trajectories of the individuals and secondly, determine their social position in Germany and ascertain whether they experienced occupational downgrading. These two analyses are integrated to explore how respondents experienced their change in social position. Across the board, respondents migrated as young adults, before or shortly after labour market entry. Five of the participants experienced occupational downgrading. Strikingly, this objective downgrading, whilst acknowledged, was not perceived negatively. The participants constructed a narrative that employed three legitimation strategies to cast their current social position in a positive light: (1) emphasising the rights, stability and security that they experience in Germany, (2) drawing attention to the economic improvement that they experienced and (3) displaying an inner attitude that is marked by modest life aspirations and a high regard for leisure time. By drawing on multinational frames of reference and thus drawing comparisons between their home country and Germany, participants highlighted the experienced benefits
Career Trajectories of Female Academics at a German University of Applied Sciences: Barriers and Enablers on the Road to a Professorship
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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