CfP: Measuring Attitudes and Tendencies of Degradation (Article Collection)

Article Collection Editors: Ayline Heller (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany), Marius Dilling (Universität Leipzig, Germany), Peter Schmidt (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany)

Fired by a global dynamic of multiple and interrelated crises, right-wing populist movements and parties have been on the rise worldwide, advocating increasingly more antidemocratic and even extremist positions, and deepening the social divide by offering scapegoats and easy answers to complex problems. While some attitudes of degradation have a long history (e.g., authoritarianism, right-wing extremism, xenophobia, antisemitism) and much empirical research has been dedicated to measuring and explaining trends over time, some concepts are less well-established, seem to have been forgotten and reemerged (e.g., anti-intellectualism, antifeminism), or developed new dynamics due to our changing society (e.g., transphobia, skepticism towards media/science). Oftentimes it is unclear, however, how new scales conceptionally relate to established instruments, raising questions of model specification (e.g., using CFAs with higher order structures, bi-factor models, mixture CFA, or SEMs with separate models altogether).

Researchers face further difficulties when investigating attitudes and tendencies of degradation as it is unclear whether established instruments show measurement invariance over time and/or across certain groups. In particular, there seems to be a lack of evidence regarding longitudinal, panel data and the specific challenges associated with it. Moreover, response biases like social desirability biases or acquiescence may be especially pronounced in certain groups, and survey mode effects may lead to selective participation or response biases associated with certain modes.

Adequately capturing developments in derogatory attitudes is thus a multi-facetted issue and we would like to offer a platform and spark a discussion about this pressing topic by inviting researchers to submit their empirical work to this article collection. The following issues may be covered:

  • Development and validation of instruments investigating current forms and dynamics of derogatory attitudes and their relationship to established concepts (e.g., using and comparing SEMs and CFAs with higher order structures and/or bi-factor models, mixture CFAs, network models)
  • Further validation of established instruments, including studies on psychometric properties and measurement invariance (e.g., using methods of exact and approximate invariance, cognitive interviews, or mixed-method validation studies).
  • Methodological pitfalls related to the measurement of attitudes and tendencies of degradation (e.g., response biases or survey mode effects)

Studies investigating a combination of these topics and/or their interrelation are especially welcome.

Submission instructions

Abstracts of max. 250 words should be submitted through the journal submission system no later than June 30th indicating “Derogatory Attitudes” as a category. After acceptance, the final manuscript will be due November 30th . Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have carefully read the submission guidelines for Measurement Instruments for the Social Sciences (MISS). In addition, indicate within your cover letter and upon submission that you wish your manuscript to be considered as part of the paper collection on Measuring attitudes and tendencies of degradation. All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review and accepted articles will be published within the journal as a collection. MISS supports open science standards and strongly encourages authors to supplement their submission by statistical analysis code (R code, Mplus code, Stata code, etc.). To make your test instruments available for the scientific community you can publish all test relevant files in the Open Test Archive or ZIS.

If you are unsure of the suitability of your topic or have questions regarding a submission, please contact the guest editors (ayline.heller@gesis.org).