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This study analyzes the consequences of item nonresponse to the question about a household's total net income in the European Social Survey (2008–2018). We recognize two mechanisms in avoiding answering the income question: task complexity and question sensitivity, and apply multilevel logistic regressions to predict the probability of refusals or "Do not know" across respondents of different income levels. We find that the refusal to answer the income question is the highest for respondents with lower incomes, while the probability of selecting "Do not know" answers or refusal to answer is the same among respondents with higher incomes. The bias resulting from the correlation between response propensities and household income affects the accuracy of estimates for several attitudinal measures when income is included as an explanatory variable. We recommend reducing the risk of bias by limiting the complexity and sensitivity of the income question and accounting for nonresponse bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors move away from approaching generations as static categories and explore how ordinary people, as opposed to scholars, distinguish generations and justify their different responses to cultural diversity in terms of ethnicity, race and religion/belief. The analysis draws on 90 in-depth interviews with 30 residents in the Polish capital, Warsaw (2012–2013). Through approaching generation as an analytical category, the authors identify various differentiating narratives which the study participants employed to draw boundaries between generations, reinforcing the common belief that the youngest Poles are most accepting of diversity. Although generations are seen as the axis of difference, conditioning generation-specific responses to diversity, the accounts emerging from the interviews reveal their relational nature, as well as similarities and points of connection between their experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although immigration is one of key issues facing European societies today, many survey respondents do not reply to questions about immigration and ethnic minorities. Using data from the 2014 European Social Survey, this paper explores the characteristics of nonrespondents and the potential mechanisms which might lie behind their refraining from answering immigration-related questions. Item nonresponse to seven questions on the impact of immigration (impact items) and six questions on allowing ethnic/racial/religious minorities into the respondent's country (openness items) is analysed. The results indicate that nonresponse to these items is systematically related to respondents' profiles, their experiences, the characteristics of the interviewer, and the country context. Respondents with a moderate amount of contact with ethnic minorities and who are interested in politics are least uncertain about their attitudes and most likely to report them. Contrary to expectations, nonresponse is not lowest among the more educated – indeed, the nonresponse rate for the openness items is highest for the most highly educated. The results also point to the importance of the interviewer effect, as nonresponse to immigration-related items varies more between interviewers than between countries. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications for the design and analysis of surveys measuring attitudes towards immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic inequality, international migration and urban transformation have generated fresh interest in segregation and given new social significance to questions of socio‐spatial separation and interaction. At the same time, advances in data, methods and theory are opening up new avenues of inquiry that push the focus beyond simple measures of unevenness of residential patterns towards more nuanced analysis of spatial asymmetry, structure and scale. There is also a drive towards considering spaces and activities outside the neighbourhood, bringing new richness to our understanding of how various social groups interact in the various aspects of their lives. These processes and complexities form the backdrop for our special issue and we reflect on the implications for future priorities in research on segregation in the twenty first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the UK's socio-economic dependence on a chronically insecure migrant essential workforce. While risking their lives to offset the devastating effects of the pandemic, many migrant workers found themselves in precarious professional and personal circumstances (e.g. temporary zero-hours contracts, work exploitation, limited access to health and social services). This article explores the health, social, economic, and cultural impacts of the pandemic on migrant essential workers in the UK. It focuses on one of the largest non-British nationalities, the Polish community, who – while employed across a range of roles and sectors – are overrepresented in lower-paid essential jobs. The article discusses variegated and interconnected impacts of the pandemic on these workers. It illustrates how Covid-19 affects them in very uneven and sometimes contrasting ways depending on their individual positionalities. Methodologically, the article draws upon 1105 responses to an online survey, 40 interviews with Polish essential workers in the UK and 10 expert interviews with key stakeholders providing support to migrant workers in the country. It is based on the first major research project investigating lived experiences of migrant essential workers in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have been increasingly interested in how everyday interactions in various places with people from different ethnic/religious background impact inter-group relations. Drawing on representative surveys in Leeds and Warsaw (2012), we examine whether encounters with ethnic and religious minorities in different type of space are associated with more tolerance towards them. We find that in Leeds, more favourable affective attitudes are associated with contact in institutional spaces (workplace and study places) and socialisation spaces (social clubs, voluntary groups, religious meeting places); however, in case of behavioural intentions – operationalised as willingness to be friendly to minority neighbours – only encounters in socialisation spaces play a significant role in prejudice reduction. In Warsaw, people who have contacts with ethnic and religious minorities in public (streets, park, public services and transport) and consumption spaces (cafés, pubs, restaurants) express more positive affective attitudes towards them, but only encounters in consumption space translate into willingness to be friendly to minority neighbours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postcolonial theory has tended to focus on those spaces where European colonialism has had a territorial and political history. This is unsurprising, as much of the world is in this sense ‘postcolonial’. But not all of it. This article focuses on Poland, often theorised as peripheral to ‘old Europe’, and explores the application of postcolonial analyses to this ‘other’ place. The article draws upon reflections arising from a study of responses to ethnic diversity in Warsaw, Poland. In doing so we conclude that postcolonialism does indeed offer some important insights into understanding Polish attitudes to other nationalities, and yet more work also needs to be done to make the theoretical bridge. In the case of Poland we propose the ‘triple relation’ be the starting point for such work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the neglected issue of encounters with difference within the context of family life at a moment in time when families are increasingly characterised by dissimilarity as a product of mobility and individualisation. The study upon which this paper is based involved both a survey of social attitudes (survey n = 3021) and qualitative multi-stage research ( n = 60). The evidence of the findings is that intra-familial diversity does produce more positive attitudes in public life towards the specific social group that an individual family member is perceived to represent. However, such positive attitudes are not translated beyond this specific 'difference' to challenge wider prejudices towards other groups. As such, this research contributes to literatures on geographies of encounter and the geographies of family life by exposing the limits of intimate contact with difference in changing the way social relationships are lived in the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on original empirical research to investigate popular understandings of prejudice in two national contexts: Poland and the United Kingdom. The paper demonstrates how common-sense meanings of prejudice are inflected by the specific histories and geographies of each place: framed in terms of ‘distance’ (Poland) and ‘proximity’ (United Kingdom), respectively. Yet, by treating these national contexts as nodes and linking them analytically the paper also exposes a connectedness in these definitions which brings into relief the common processes that produce prejudice. The paper then explores how inter-linkages between the United Kingdom and Poland within the wider context of the European Union are producing – and circulating through the emerging international currency of ‘political correctness’ – a common critique of equality legislation and a belief that popular concerns about the way national contexts are perceived to be changing as a consequence of super mobility and super diversity are being silenced. This raises a real risk that in the context of European austerity and associated levels of socioeconomic insecurity, negative attitudes and conservative values may begin to be represented as popular normative standards which transcend national contexts to justify harsher political responses towards minorities. As such, the paper concludes by making a case for prejudice reduction strategies to receive much greater priority in both national and European contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shifts discussion on social diversity from ethnic diversity to broader social diversity. We explore spatial social diversity and assess opportunities to encounter diversity in an urban context. In doing so, we prepared a description of diversity in the residential communities of two cities, Leeds and Warsaw, using census data for small areas (UK 2001, Poland 2002). Selected variables were used to represent the key social dimensions of difference: demographic, socioeconomic, ethnic, and disability. A cluster analysis using a k-means algorithm was implemented for each city separately and for the two cities combined using harmonized indicators. We selected eight cluster solutions for each city which had diff erent profiles and spatial distributions. A combined cluster analysis showed that there was little overlap in community types across the two cities. The paper illustrates that Leeds and Warsaw residents experience very different opportunities to encounter difference which need to be taken into account when local diversity policies are implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Social frontiers' – places of sharp difference in social/ethnic characteristics between neighbouring communities – have largely been overlooked in quantitative research. Advancing this nascent field first requires a way of identifying social frontiers in a robust way. Such frontiers may be 'open' – an area may contrast sharply with a neighbourhood in one direction, but blend smoothly into adjacent neighbourhoods in other directions. This poses some formidable methodological challenges, particularly when computing inference for the existence of a social frontier, an important goal if one is to distinguish true frontiers from random variation. We develop a new approach using Bayesian spatial statistical methods that permit asymmetries in spatial effects and allow for spatial autocorrelation in the data. We illustrate our method using data on Sheffield and find clear evidence of 'open' frontiers. Permutations tests and Poisson regressions with fixed effects reveal compelling evidence that social frontiers are associated with higher rates of crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to recent intensification in international mobility in Europe, its citizens are exposed to a much wider range of lifestyles and competing attitudes towards difference. Individuals are, therefore, increasingly likely to encounter ‘strangers’ and are, therefore, required to negotiate discontinuities and contradictions between the values that are transmitted through different sites. In response, the article explores the concept of the ‘stranger’ through original data collected in the UK and Poland. The article highlights that the construction of who is a stranger depends on national historical contexts, core values and related visions of the society. The UK and Poland have very different histories and experiences with social diversity, impacting on the ways in which individuals negotiate strange encounters. In both countries, the ‘stranger’ is often seen in a negative way and in relation to the minority groups that are perceived to be visibly different, distinct or ‘unknown’ in contemporary times. In Poland, this is now largely articulated through sexual prejudice (homophobia), whilst in the UK, attitudes towards the ‘stranger’ are largely conveyed through religious prejudice (Islamophobia). As such, the article offers a means of understanding how encounters with difference ‘produce’ strangers in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes ideas that emerged over the course of a 10-week symposium titled "Teaching Reproducible Research: Educational Outcomes" https://www.projecttier.org/fellowships-and-workshops/2021-spring-symposium that took place in the spring of 2021. The speakers included one linguist, three political scientists, seven psychologists, and three statisticians; about half of them were based in the United States and about half in the United Kingdom. The symposium focused on a particular form of reproducibility--namely computational reproducibility--and the paper begins with an exposition of what computational reproducibility is and how it can be achieved. Drawing on talks by the speakers and comments from participants, the paper then enumerates several reasons for which learning reproducible research methods enhance the education of college and university students; the benefits have partly to do with developing computational skills that prepare students for future education and employment, but they also have to do with their intellectual development more broadly. The article also distills insights from the symposium about practical strategies instructors can adopt to integrate reproducibility into their teaching, as well as to promote the practice among colleagues and throughout departmental curricula. The conceptual framework about the meaning and purposes of teaching reproducibility, and the practical guidance about how to get started, add up to an invitation to instructors to explore the potential for introducing reproducibility in their classes and research supervision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented which discusses the importance of reproducibility and responsible workflow in the data science and statistics curriculum. It mentions the importance of workflow and reproducibility in data science and statistics education and how it is increasingly being emphasized in many secondary and post-secondary classrooms. It also mentions the challenges in incorporating sound workflow and reproducible analysis in courses and programs.

This article discusses some of the challenges involved in conducting research with children and young people outside of the home and school environments. We respond to the need to develop new child-centred research techniques which move beyond existing power relations among children and adults by anchoring our approach in the idea of mystery. The paper reports on research utilising a mixed-method design which includes one new technique – the Big Brother diary room. We discuss the unpredictable nature of the fieldwork, reflect on the ‘messiness’ of the research process, and critically evaluate our own research design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]