Abstract
For decades, scientific surveys have served as "workhorse methods" in the social sciences. When studying inter-ethnic relations, however, survey methods are fundamentally constrained due to difficulties in sampling minority populations and potential response biases. As an alternative, this talk argues for using administrative data to study relations between ethnic groups. These data offer advantages in terms of their size and longitudinal coverage. However, since they were not designed with our specific research questions in mind, conceptual validity remains a challenge. We illustrate these issues via examples from our recent work on (i) military service and immigrant integration, (ii) cultural responses to terrorist attacks, and (iii) childhood exposure to ethnic outgroups and subsequent marriage decisions.
Speaker
Nan Zhang is an Interim Professor ("Vertretungsprofessor") of Evidence-based Political Research at the University of Mannheim, where he also leads the Emmy-Noether research group Making Diversity Work at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). His work spans both Political Science and Sociology, with a focus on the study of group relations, language and identity, social norms, and civic behavior. Major applications include research on immigration, ethnic diversity, and state- and nation-building. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the American Journal of Sociology, the European Sociological Review, and Sociological Science, amongst other outlets. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and has held prior positions at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and the European University Institute.
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