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Questions on voluntary association memberships have been used extensively in social scientific research for decades. Researchers generally assume that these respondent self-reports are accurate, but their measurement has never been assessed. Respondent characteristics are known to influence the accuracy of other self-report variables such as self-reported health, voting, or test scores. In this article, we investigate whether measurement error occurs in self-reports of voluntary association memberships. We use the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) questions on voluntary associations, which include a novel resource: the actual organization names listed by respondents. We find that this widely used voluntary association classification scheme contains significant amounts of measurement error overall, especially within certain categories. Using a multilevel logistic regression, we predict accuracy of response nested within respondents and interviewers. We find that certain respondent characteristics, including some used in research on voluntary associations, influence respondent accuracy. Inaccurate and/or incorrect measurement will affect the statistics and conclusions drawn from the data on voluntary associations., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Service and advocacy organizations have long struggled to find the appropriate language to name traumatic experiences when working with vulnerable populations. Organizations have been pressed to adopt either "victim"-based language or "survivor"-based language, with both terms seen as having mutually exclusive meanings. However, despite academic and popular debates, no recent studies have documented trends in language used to describe traumatic experiences, whether of sexual and relationship violence, or of experiences of war, disaster, or major illness. In this research note, we use administrative data from the Internal Revenue Service to analyze how 3,756 service and advocacy organizations use trauma-related language between 1998 and 2016. Descriptive analysis shows that survivor language has been on the rise as victim language declined. Victim remains a common way to name trauma, however, and survivor tends to join, rather than displace, victim terminology. Further analysis also points to gendered use of both terms. Victim and survivor are used together most often in organizations that work with trauma experienced by women and in the field of sexual and relationship violence. We suggest these findings indicate a more complex story of how communities of language users emerge, which aligns with recent sociological treatments of discourse., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs has been to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community effects remains an open question. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel and change-score models from 2005 to 2013, this study explores whether communities with national service programs exhibit greater subjective well-being. We use novel measures of subjective well-being derived from tweeted expressions of emotions, engagement, and relationships in 1,347 U.S. counties. Results show that national service programs improve subjective well-being primarily by mitigating threats to well-being and communities that exhibit more engagement are better able to attract national service programs. Although limited in size, these persistent effects are robust to multiple threats to inference and provide important new evidence on how national service improves communities in the United States., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

We are delighted to introduce the Socius Gender and Politics Special Collection. The need for a special collection on gender and politics has never been timelier, evidenced both by gains in women's political participation and leadership around the world and the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Here, we introduce the timeliness of the topic with a review of the remarkable progress women have made in political representation over the past 150 years, a reiteration of the importance of women's political representation to democracy, and a brief discussion of the 2016 U.S. election cycle. We then introduce the eight papers that make up the special collection, emphasizing their contributions to ongoing debates in the field.

This article is an empirical evaluation of the choice of fixed cutoff points in assessing the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) test statistic as a measure of goodness-of-fit in Structural Equation Models. Using simulation data, the authors first examine whether there is any empirical evidence for the use of a universal cutoff, and then compare the practice of using the point estimate of the RMSEA alone versus that of using it jointly with its related confidence interval. The results of the study demonstrate that there is little empirical support for the use of .05 or any other value as universal cutoff values to determine adequate model fit, regardless of whether the point estimate is used alone or jointly with the confidence interval. The authors' analyses suggest that to achieve a certain level of power or Type I error rate, the choice of cutoff values depends on model specifications, degrees of freedom, and sample size.