Publikationsliste KOPS

Though the extent of wealth inequality across many nations is now well attested, along with the social and political challenges this might entail, there appears to be relatively little popular support for increased taxation of wealth. We argue that a sociological ‘phenomenological’ perspective of wealth can shed light on this conundrum. Such a perspective accounts for how wealth is experienced and understood by people, revealing its qualitative, extra-economic nature. Though its pecuniary value is certainly salient, wealth is rarely perceived in purely financial terms. This phenomenological perspective draws out that wealth has temporal and relational features that exceed purely economistic calculations. Wealth has temporal features as it conveys future potential and it is relational because acquiring wealth entails familial and social relationships, rather than individualistic and strategic ones. It is seen as taking responsibility for oneself and one’s family. We schematically contrast this with historical periods where wealth was more clearly bound up with visible exclusive relations associated with slavery and the conspicuous consumption of landed estates to suggest that this form of ordinary wealth is not generally perecieved in such exclusionary terms. In a time of welfare retrenchment and anxiety surrounding social safety nets, the temporal and familial qualities of wealth are particularly salient as they connect to private insurance against risk. This orientation helps us to understand why certain forms of wealth may not be identified as socially undesirable or problematic today, even though they may be deeply unevenly distributed.

We use German KiGGS data to add to existing knowledge about trends in vaccination-related attitudes and behavior. Looking at vaccinations against measles, we assess whether a low confidence in vaccination and vaccination complacency is particularly prevalent among parents whose children were born somewhat recently, as compared to parents whose children belong to earlier birth cohorts. We further analyze how these attitudes relate to vaccination rates in the corresponding birth cohorts, and which sociodemographic subgroups are more likely to have vaccination-hesitant attitudes and to act upon them. Results show that the share of parents who report "deliberate" reasons against vaccination has decreased across birth cohorts; at the same time, the children of these parents have become less likely to be vaccinated. This suggests that vaccination-hesitant parents became more willing to act upon their beliefs towards the turn of the millennium. Regarding efforts to convince parents and the public about the benefits of vaccination, the number of parents who think that vaccinations have serious side effects, or that it is better for a child to live through a disease, may have become smaller-but these parents are more determined to follow their convictions. Interestingly, the trend we describe started before the Internet became a widespread source of health-related information.

Coupled women typically have lower earnings than their male partners. This gender income gap within couples has declined over time, but we lack information about the drivers behind the decline. Here, we analyze the role of increased participation in education and the labor market, as well as changes in social policies, on the decline of the gender income gap within couples in West Germany from 1978 to 2011, using Microcensus data. We show that women’s increased labor market participation and their increased transfer incomes are the major sources of the reduction in the gap. Both trends are strongly connected to family policies. We also shed light on the role of men in the overall trend. Their increased full-time premiums and educational attainment are important counter-trends that outweigh the role of increased unemployment and part-time employment levels among men in reducing the gap.

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The COVID-19 lockdown measures have challenged individuals to reconcile employment, childcare, and housework. This article addresses whether these challenges have reduced life satisfaction among German women by focusing on their labor market status and drawing upon a topical online survey (Kantar) collected in Germany at two points in time: May 2020 and November 2020. We find that part-time employed women were better protected against a decline in life satisfaction, but only during the first lockdown. Economically inactive women were most likely to experience a decline in life satisfaction during the first lockdown, but least likely during the second lockdown. Life satisfaction has further decreased between the first and the second lockdown, and the likelihood of a decrease has converged for full-time, part-time, and economically inactive women.

Background
Participation in sports and physical activity (PA) is a critical resource for children’s health and social development. This study analyzes how the parental socioeconomic status (SES) of children and adolescents affects their PA in sports clubs (organized sports) and outside of sports clubs (unorganized sports) and tests whether the potential impact of parental SES is mediated by the opportunity structure of their residential area (walkability, infrastructure, etc.) and by family and peer support for PA. Furthermore, PA is analyzed respecting differences by gender and migration background.

Methods
Using representative data from the MoMo/KiGGS study (2009–2012 and 2014–2017), we take into account about 8000 measurements from about 7000 subjects. We estimate hurdle regression models to analyze the minutes per week spent on sports activities.

Results
Results show that children with a higher parental SES, children living in areas with many opportunities for PA, and children receiving family and peer support are more physically active than children without these features. Controlled for opportunities and support, status effects are small but visible. The differences regarding parental SES are much more apparent for organized sports than for unorganized sports, indicating the relevance of economic resources. Boys are more active than girls, whereas there is no clear effect of migration background.

Conclusions
The coefficient of parental SES on organized sports most probably relates to the resources needed to participate in sports clubs, including fees and equipment. Lower membership fees might potentially help to integrate children with low parental SES into sports clubs and thereby make organized sports more accessible to all social classes.

Germany historically responded to student diversity by tracking students into different schools beginning with grade 5. In the last decades, sociopolitical changes, such as an increase in “German-as-a-second-language” speaking students (GSL), have increased diversity in all tracks and have forced schools to consider forms of individualization. This has opened up the scientific debate in Germany on merits and limitations of individualization for different student groups within a tracked system and heterogeneous classes. The aim of the present exploratory study was to examine how individualized teaching (i.e., teacher self-reported individualized teaching practices and individual reference norm orientation) is related to student-perceived teaching quality. Additionally, we considered moderation effects of classroom composition in relation to achievement and proportion of GSL students. Longitudinal data came from 35 mathematics classes with 659 9th and 10th grade students. Results showed significant relation between teacher self-reported individualized teaching practices and individual reference norm orientation and monitoring. Regarding the composition effects, the proportion of GSL students in class moderated the relation between teacher self-reported individual reference norm orientation and cognitive activation. Our findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that classroom composition can differentially impact the relation between teachers’ behaviors and students’ perceptions of teaching quality.

In this overview, we seek to provide a comprehensive resource for scholars of female immigrant labor market integration in Europe, to act both as a reference and a roadmap for future studies in this domain. We begin by presenting a contextual history of immigration to and within Europe since the Second World War, before outlining the major theoretical assumptions about immigrant women’s labor market disadvantage. We then synthesize the empirical findings from quantitative studies published between 2000 and 2020 and analyze how they line up with the theoretical predictions. We supplement the review with descriptive analyses using data from 2019, which expose any discrepancies between the current situation in European countries and the situation during the time periods considered in the reviewed studies. Our review has three main take-aways. First, the theoretically relevant determinants of immigrant women’s labor market integration are generally supported by empirical evidence, but the unexplained heterogeneity that remains in many cases between immigrant women and other groups on the labor market calls for more systematic and comprehensive investigations. Second, quantitative studies which take a holistic approach to studying the labor market disadvantages of immigrant women—and all the considerations related to their gender and nativity that this entails—are rare in this body of literature, and future studies should address this. Third, fruitful avenues for future contributions to this field include expanding on certain overlooked outcomes, like immigrant women’s self-employment, as well as geographic regions that until now have received little attention, especially by employing the most recent data.

Economic inequality at the local level has been shown to be an important predictor of people’s political perceptions and preferences. However, research on these questions is hampered by the fact that local inequality is difficult to measure and systematic data collections are rare, in particular in countries of the Global South. We propose a new measure of local inequality derived from nighttime light (NTL) emissions data. Our measure corresponds to the local inequality in per capita nighttime light emissions, using VIIRS-derived nighttime light emissions data and spatial population data from WorldPop. We validate our estimates using local inequality estimates from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for a sample of African countries. Our results show that nightlight-based inequality estimates correspond well to those derived from survey data, and that the relationship is not due to structural factors such as differences between urban and rural regions. We also present predictive results, where we approximate the (survey-based) level of local inequality with our nighttime light indicator. This illustrates how our approach can be used for new cases where no other data are available.

Objective: This article investigates the role of motivation in female immigrants' labour force participation. Focusing on recently-arrived immigrants (who have resided in the host country for 18 months or less), we compare the outcomes of two different ethnic groups in Germany: Poles and Turks.

Background: The immigrant integration literature tends to focus on the role of resources in immigrant labour market integration. However, when examining particularly the labour force participation of female immigrants, their motivation for joining the labour force is also important. Previous studies of female immigrants in Germany have often neglected this consideration, which includes aspects like culturally-specific gender values and perceived ethnic discrimination.

Method: We use data from the SCIP project (Diehl et al., 2015) to conduct logistic regressions on female immigrants’ labour force participation. Our sample includes 829 female immigrants from Poland and Turkey between the ages of 18-60, who were either active in the labour force or were 'at risk' of entering.

Results: In line with previous studies, our analysis shows that female immigrants' labour market resources, mainly their prior work experience and German proficiency, greatly reduce the ethnic gap in labour force participation rates. Moreover, motivational factors have a large impact on this outcome for both groups, and greatly enhance the picture that our empirical models present. However, we find no evidence that perceived ethnic discrimination plays an important role.

Conclusion: Our analysis indicates that when seeking to understand the labour market participation of female immigrants, their resources and motivation should be seen as key components of a gender-sensitive analysis.

Objective: This paper draws on data from the Microcensus to provide a long-term overview of the labour market performance of different arrival cohorts of non-German women and men who immigrated to (western) Germany.

Background: While there is a large body of research on the labour market outcomes of migrants to Germany, a long-term and gender-specific overview is missing.

Method: We provide descriptive analyses of the employment rates, working hours, and occupational status levels of different arrival cohorts by gender, calendar year, and duration of stay. The data cover the time period 1976-2015.

Results: With the exception of the earliest cohort, migrant women and men were consistently less likely to be employed than their German counterparts. While the average working hours of migrant women of earlier cohorts were longer than those of German women, this pattern reversed due to a considerable decline in the average working hours of migrant women across subsequent cohorts. The occupational status levels of female and male migrants increased across the arrival cohorts, corresponding to higher levels of education. Analyses by duration of stay indicate that the occupational status of the arrival cohorts tended to decline during their initial years of residence, and to stagnate thereafter. This pattern seems to be due in part to selective outmigration.

Conclusion: Our results clearly show that the labour market performance of immigrants varied greatly by arrival cohort, reflecting the conditions and policy contexts during which they entered Germany. This conclusion applied especially to migrant women.