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The ways in which privacy is understood, defined, perceived, and enacted are contingent on cultural, social, political, economic, and technological settings. Yet, privacy research is often criticized for not adequately accounting for these. A comparative perspective requires the contextualization of privacy through investigating similarities and differences across contexts. This article outlines the Comparative Privacy Research Framework, which involves (a) scrutinizing one's position (of power) and epistemological biases, (b) assessing the comparability of the object under study, (c) identifying and justifying meaningful units of comparison, and (d) reflecting on how these units of comparison interact in shaping privacy. We conclude by proposing a comparative privacy research agenda that informs efforts in privacy regulation, education, and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using census and survey microdata from 49 African countries across 415 subnational areas, we offer a comprehensive overview of household size and composition in Africa. The study emphasizes the potential of these data for understanding family dynamics through co-residential units. Clear regional patterns emerge, showcasing a wide range of household sizes across the continent. We find that household size is linked primarily to the number of children and secondarily to the presence of other family and non-family members beyond the nuclear household. The analysis of household composition also highlights the uneven influence of polygyny and extended families. This research is a first step in examining harmonized census and survey data to delve into the structure and dynamics of households across Africa from a demographic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a conceptual framework for analyzing competition in higher education, with a focus on competing as action. Drawing on Georg Simmel's sociological insights and behavioral decision theory, the framework captures key elements of competition. It distinguishes between observing and four forms of courting: performing, strategic informing, influencing valuation criteria, and attracting attention. To demonstrate its potential, the paper applies the framework to the German higher education system, particularly focusing on universities’ competition for third-party funding. This conceptual approach opens up avenues for comparative investigations of various forms of competition, enabling an analysis of both similarities and differences in the competitive actions of different actors within higher education, as well as across systems. The framework provides a valuable tool for exploring the complexity and multiplicity of competition in higher education and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing levels of public trust in the news are of deep concern to both researchers and practitioners. We use data from 2015 to 2023 in 46 countries to explore how trust in news has changed, while also exploring the links with sociodemographic variables, differences by media system, and changing patterns of news use. We find that (a) there has been a small overall decline in trust in news since 2015, but also that (b) there are different trends in different countries. More specifically, trust has declined more in media environments that have become less structured by television news use, and increasingly structured by social media news use. Our findings underscore how changing structures of media use may be central to explaining trust dynamics in recent years, which suggests new avenues for restoring trust where it has eroded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populist supporters have a complex relationship with journalism (e.g., embracing elites' negative rhetoric, yet consuming news profusely). This study explores this relationship. The notion of folk theories informs an inductive analysis of thirty-three in-depth interviews conducted in 2021 with right-wing and left-wing populist supporters in the United States and Spain to understand how they (RQ1) make sense of their news consumption habits and (RQ2) navigate the current high-choice media environment to stay informed. Findings reveal three interconnected folk theories that populist supporters drew from in explaining their news consumption: (1) "everything is biased," (2) "it's a way of seeing what other people think," and (3) "it's a pleasurable source of information." Findings additionally support an important role of emotion underlying these folk theories, which helped participants reconcile their negative views of journalism with the pleasure they derived from meeting ingrained normative democratic ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing and maintaining citizen trust is vital for the effectiveness and long-term viability of regulatory agencies. However, limited empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between regulatory action and citizen trust. This article addresses this gap by investigating the influence of various regulatory enforcement styles on citizen trust. We conducted a pre-registered and representative survey experiment in six countries (n  = 5,765): Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, and Norway. Our study focuses on three key dimensions of enforcement style: formalism, coerciveness, and accommodation. We hypothesize that a strict and punitive enforcement style with minimal accommodation will enhance citizen trust. Surprisingly, we found no overall effect of enforcement on trust. However, specifically high levels of formalism (strictness) and coerciveness (punitiveness) exhibited a small positive effect on trust. Furthermore, we observed no discernible impact of an accommodative enforcement style. Additional analyses revealed that the effects of enforcement style were not consistent across country and regulatory domains. This suggests we need to reconsider assumptions underlying enforcement theory, as our findings imply that public trust seems less conditional on heavy-handed enforcement than initially anticipated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades, many European educational systems have been reviewing the citizenship education model that they have been developing, trying to deepen the meaning of democratic citizenship practice today or the social demand inspired by the creation of adequate conditions for its exercise. Thus, it is challenging for educational systems to face education for global citizenship, and international organizations have been promoting the development of citizenship education and conducting research in this field. New research and educational practices are expected for global citizenship, and their meaning in our European societies is a point of reference for the study of the different policies that national and supranational institutions promote in this matter. The Council of Europe Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education from 2010 and its counterpart framework from UNESCO in 2015 have actively promoted the idea of citizenship education on a global scale through its Global Citizenship Education Model. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) conducted a series of reports on social and civic competencies to investigate the extent to which young people are prepared to assume their role as citizens, which recently has been reviewed by Schulz et al. Based on its main findings and the latest survey by the European EACEA/Eurydice from 2023 that covers 15 member countries of the Eurydice Network, this paper presents a cross-national study of the global citizenship education (GCE) between European Countries that updates recent national information and research developments in this field. Based on the analyzed data and the criteria established by UNESCO, the comparative study allows us to determine the dimensions and trends in global citizenship education in order to address its implications within the European education area.

There is a vast and ever-accumulating amount of behavioural data on individually recognised animals, an incredible resource to shed light on the ecological and evolutionary drivers of variation in animal behaviour. Yet, the full potential of such data lies in comparative research across taxa with distinct life histories and ecologies. Substantial challenges impede systematic comparisons, one of which is the lack of persistent, accessible and standardised databases. Big-team approaches to building standardised databases offer a solution to facilitating reliable cross-species comparisons. By sharing both data and expertise among researchers, these approaches ensure that valuable data, which might otherwise go unused, become easier to discover, repurpose and synthesise. Additionally, such large-scale collaborations promote a culture of sharing within the research community, incentivising researchers to contribute their data by ensuring their interests are considered through clear sharing guidelines. Active communication with the data contributors during the standardisation process also helps avoid misinterpretation of the data, ultimately improving the reliability of comparative databases. Here, we introduce MacaqueNet, a global collaboration of over 100 researchers (https://macaquenet.github.io/) aimed at unlocking the wealth of cross-species data for research on macaque social behaviour. The MacaqueNet database encompasses data from 1981 to the present on 61 populations across 14 species and is the first publicly searchable and standardised database on affiliative and agonistic animal social behaviour. We describe the establishment of MacaqueNet, from the steps we took to start a large-scale collective, to the creation of a cross-species collaborative database and the implementation of data entry and retrieval protocols. We share MacaqueNet's component resources: an R package for data standardisation, website code, the relational database structure, a glossary and data sharing terms of use. With all these components openly accessible, MacaqueNet can act as a fully replicable template for future endeavours establishing large-scale collaborative comparative databases., (© 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Animal Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.)