andrea sciandra - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by andrea sciandra
This paper explores various strategies for self-presentation used on Facebook, among a sample of ... more This paper explores various strategies for self-presentation used on Facebook, among a sample of 1330 Italian students aged 14-19 years. Based on two social network site practices, the production of text material and the publication of personal photos, we have constructed a model embracing four types of categories and behaviors. We examined the categories according to structural variables, variables regarding self-narration, and two psychological scales. The results show the validity of the four categories in distinguishing different styles of Facebook use and allowing us to define those styles in greater depth. In particular, the publication of photos by those who do not contribute written text seems to indicate the need to maintain one\u2019s real-life social network; the production of text alone seems to reflect the need to deepen one\u2019s most passionate interests; while the combination of the two communicative modes tends to reveal a greater capacity in planning for the future
Review of Behavioral Finance, 2021
Purpose This paper focuses on the influence of social, cultural and religious factors on investor... more Purpose This paper focuses on the influence of social, cultural and religious factors on investors' attention. In particular, the authors examined if the attention-grabbing mechanism works on Sundays, that is, if the Italians' Sunday activities and habits lead to a lower attention to second-hand financial news, compared to Saturdays. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyzed the market reaction to equivalent stale events published on the Saturday and Sunday editions of an Italian financial newspaper and conducted a standard event study on abnormal returns and abnormal volumes for Saturday and Sunday columns and a multivariate analysis on abnormal returns for columns reporting positive recommendations. As a robustness check, the authors performed a sentiment analysis of the columns and included this variable in the regression analysis, but sentiment proved to be not significant in the final model. Findings The study’s results confirmed that the attention-grabbing mecha...
Journal of Open Source Software, 2019
TextWiller is the development version of a R package that collects some text mining utilities int... more TextWiller is the development version of a R package that collects some text mining utilities intended for the Italian language. It's available at https://github.com/livioivil/TextWiller. The aim of TextWiller is to help to deal with the pre-processing of a corpus and it also provides some functions about word classification and polarity.
Research in Learning Technology, 2019
Recent studies indicate that Internet skills have a positive impact on academic achievement. This... more Recent studies indicate that Internet skills have a positive impact on academic achievement. This article presents a national study that seeks to validate an Internet skills scale that was already tested in other EU countries (the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) to understand the competence level of the population as a whole as well as across population sectors. The scale questionnaire was completed by a sample of the Italian population stratified by gender, age and geographical area. The result is globally consistent at the empirical level as well as at the cross-national level. All the five scales showed excellent internal consistency.
PLOS ONE, Apr 26, 2023
The article aims to understand the process through which scientific experts gain and maintain rem... more The article aims to understand the process through which scientific experts gain and maintain remarkable media visibility. It has been analysed a corpus of 213,875 articles published by the eight most important Italian newspapers across the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. By exploring this process along the different phases of the management of the emergency in Italy, it was observed that some scientific experts achieve high media visibilityand sometimes notwithstanding their low academic reputation-thus becoming a sort of "media star". Scientific literature about the relationship between experts and media is considerable, nonetheless we found a lack of theoretical models able to analyse under which conditions experts are able to enter and to remain prominent in the media sphere. A Media Experts Evolutionary Model (MEEM) is proposed in order to analyze the main conditions under which experts can acquire visibility and how they can "survive" in media arena. We proceeded by analysing visibility of experts during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and considering both their individual credentials previously acquired and the media environment processes of selection; MEEM acts hence as a combination of these two levels. Regarding the credentials, we accounted for i) institutional role/position, ii) previous media visibility, and iii) matches between scientific credentials and media competence. In our analysis, we collected evidence that high visibility in newspapers can be seen as evolutionary in the sense that some profiles-i.e. a particular configuration of credentials-are more adapt to specific media environments.
Scientometrics
The aim of this paper is to study the role of citation network measures in the assessment of scie... more The aim of this paper is to study the role of citation network measures in the assessment of scientific maturity. Referring to the case of the Italian national scientific qualification (ASN), we investigate if there is a relationship between citation network indices and the results of the researchers’ evaluation procedures. In particular, we want to understand if network measures can enhance the prediction accuracy of the results of the evaluation procedures beyond basic performance indices. Moreover, we want to highlight which citation network indices prove to be more relevant in explaining the ASN results, and if quantitative indices used in the citation-based disciplines assessment can replace the citation network measures in non-citation-based disciplines. Data concerning Statistics and Computer Science disciplines are collected from different sources (ASN, Italian Ministry of University and Research, and Scopus) and processed in order to calculate the citation-based measures us...
SIS 2021 - 50th Meeting of the Italian Statistical Society, 2021
2020 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2020
EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020, 2020
In this contribution we describe the system (i.e. a statistical model) used to participate in Eva... more In this contribution we describe the system (i.e. a statistical model) used to participate in Evalita conference 2020, SardiStance (Tasks A and B) and Haspeede2 (Tasks A and B). We first developed a classifier by extracting features from the texts and the social network of users. Then, we fit the data through an extreme gradient boosting, with cross-validation tuning of the hyper-parameters. A key factor for a good performance in SardiStance Task B was the features extraction by using Multidimensional Scaling of the distance matrix (minimum path, undirected graph) applied on each network. The second system exploits the same features above, but it trains and performs predictions in twosteps. The performances proved to be lower than those of the single-step model.
The focus of this paper is to understand whether the words contained in a text corpus improves th... more The focus of this paper is to understand whether the words contained in a text corpus improves the explained variance of stock returns better than the use of the polarity of the same texts, obtained through a sentiment analysis using a generic ontological dictionary. The empirical analysis is based on the content of a weekly column in the most important Italian financial newspaper, which published past information and analysts’ recommendations on listed companies. The use of textual data clearly increases the explained variance of stock returns but, through comparisons between data mining techniques, we observed minor differences in terms of MSE, by adding a selection of specific terms as features. In this context, the text mining approach proved to be very useful to improve the explanatory power of forecasting models, while it emerged the limited explanatory power of an automatic sentiment analysis based on a generic lexicon. Abstract Il focus di questo contributo è capire se le pa...
Italian Sociological Review, 2011
Journal of Risk Research, 2021
Abstract This study examined the social representation (SR) of nanotechnologies and its relations... more Abstract This study examined the social representation (SR) of nanotechnologies and its relationships with those of science and technology. It aimed to understand the role of pre-existing and neighbouring forms of shared knowledge in orienting the way laypeople autonomously develop ideas about an unfamiliar issue, and related implications for its perceived risks and public acceptance or rejection. The study involved 489 Italian participants, stratified according to gender, age and education level. They completed an ad-hoc questionnaire with multiple free association tasks to the word-stimuli nanotechnologies, science and technology, and close-ended questions to gauge ‘familiarity’ levels with nanotechnologies and ‘engagement’ in nanotechnologies through media. The results suggested the presence of a rather shared and organised SR of nanotechnologies whose content is cautiously enthusiastic. The biomedical domain seems to be the most easily accepted field of application for nanotechnologies, indicating a ‘preferential channel’ through which they could be more welcome and trusted. Concerning inter-representation relationships, comparisons among SRs identified a strong connection among these three objects, indicating the existence of a coherent representation system where the SR of nanotechnologies is nested in those of science and technology, which, in turn, are in a reciprocal relationship. Fine-grained comparisons allowed for grasping further insights. The results showed that the SR of nanotechnologies is the least enthusiastic, highlighting critical voices among laypeople, although peripherally. Specifically, it presents elements of perceived risks and rejection on one hand, and elements indicating a detached approach in which individuals struggle to detect potentialities and advantages on the other, contrary to what has been found for science and technology at large.
PLOS ONE, 2021
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emerged as one of the most dramatic health crises of recent decades. ... more The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emerged as one of the most dramatic health crises of recent decades. This paper treats mainstream news about the current pandemic as a valuable entry point for analyzing the relationship between science and politics in the public sphere, where the outbreak must be both understood and confronted through appropriate public-health policy decisions. In doing so, the paper aims to examine which actors, institutions, and experts dominate the SARS-CoV-2 media narratives, with particular attention to the roles of political, medical, and scientific actors and institutions within the pandemic crisis. The study relies on a large dataset consisting of all SARS-CoV-2 articles published by eight major Italian national newspapers between January 1, 2020 and June 15, 2020. These articles underwent a quantitative analysis based on a topic modeling technique. The topic modeling outputs were further analyzed by innovatively combining ad-hoc metrics and a classifier based on...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
Background: A secure attachment style could promote more intimacy in romantic relationships, whil... more Background: A secure attachment style could promote more intimacy in romantic relationships, while an insecure attachment style could be correlated with less positive romantic relationships in adulthood. Numerous studies have noted that a secure attachment to parents was correlated with lower levels of aggression, whereas insecure attachments were associated with higher levels of aggression. We aimed to investigate the role of the attachment system as a mediator of the expression of aggressiveness during adolescence. Specifically, we considered that the attachment to parents and peers could influence one's attachment to a romantic partner. Methods: We empirically tested whether there were relationships of parent and peer attachment on aggressiveness mediated by romantic attachment style. Participants of the study included 411 students. Results: Results indicated that for males an insecure father-child attachment style seems to be associated with higher levels of anxiety and avoidance in romantic attachments and then with aggressiveness. For females, an insecure mother-child attachment style seems to be associated with higher levels of aggressiveness. Conclusion: The attachment to parents and to peers plays a key role in defining romantic attachment according to gender, and these dimensions in turn tend to affect the levels of aggressiveness.
Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 2011
This paper shows the results of part of an empirical study which was developed in the sphere of t... more This paper shows the results of part of an empirical study which was developed in the sphere of the PACT EU project (Pathways for Carbon Transitions). The performed analysis concerns the social capital of young Europeans in terms of trust, size of personal networks, volunteering activities and usage of social network sites (SNS). The purpose of the work is, on one hand, exploratory, especially in aspects related to the comparison between relational context of social networks and virtual networks. At the same time, the research aims to confirm on this particular population some of the hypothesis coming from the literature on social capital, and to verify the existence of differences between European countries regarding relational characteristics.
Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 2013
This paper explores various strategies for self-presentation used on Facebook, among a sample of ... more This paper explores various strategies for self-presentation used on Facebook, among a sample of 1330 Italian students aged 14-19 years. Based on two social network site practices, the production of text material and the publication of personal photos, we have constructed a model embracing four types of categories and behaviors. We examined the categories according to structural variables, variables regarding self-narration, and two psychological scales. The results show the validity of the four categories in distinguishing different styles of Facebook use and allowing us to define those styles in greater depth. In particular, the publication of photos by those who do not contribute written text seems to indicate the need to maintain one's real-life social network; the production of text alone seems to reflect the need to deepen one's most passionate interests; while the combination of the two communicative modes tends to reveal a greater capacity in planning for the future.
Frontiers in psychology, 2015
This study investigated the role of co-parenting alliance in mediating the influence of parents&#... more This study investigated the role of co-parenting alliance in mediating the influence of parents' trait anxiety on family system maladjustment and parenting stress. A sample of 1606 Italian parents (803 mothers and 803 fathers) of children aged one to 13 years completed measures of trait anxiety (State Trait Anxiety Inventory-Y), co-parenting alliance (Parenting Alliance Measure), family system maladjustment (Family Assessment Measure-III), and parenting stress (Parenting Stress Inventory-Short Form). These variables were investigated together comparing two structural equations model-fitting including both partners. A model for both mothers and fathers was empirically devised as a series of associations between parent trait anxiety (independent variable), family system maladjustment and parenting stress (dependent variables), mediated by co-parenting alliance, with the insertion of cross predictions between mothers and fathers and correlations between dependent variables for both...
SOCIOLOGIA E POLITICHE SOCIALI, 2012
The Position Generator is a popular measurement instrument for individual level social capital. E... more The Position Generator is a popular measurement instrument for individual level social capital. Empirical studies have tested or discussed measurement properties of the instrument, but not the underlying response process. In 35 semi-structured cognitive interviews across gender, education, and age groups, we asked respondents to reflect on the 1999/2000 Social Survey of the Dutch (SSND) Position Generator. Effects found were unfamiliarity with occupations, interpretation of occupations, unknown occupations of alters, forcing alters into occupations, speculation, forgetting single alters and groups of alters, but not detectable misrepresentation of alters. In only 6 interviews all alters were working in a paid job (as the PG assumes); most remarkable alternatives were retired, unemployed, or deceased alters. An overall impression of the responses is that recalling alters to fit occupations feels counterintuitive to how relationships are memorized. Item validity and reliability are therefore likely to be negatively affected, but whether all combined ambiguities affect social capital measures is difficult to predict. Yet, an underestimation of social capital seems likely. Implications and ideas for future development of PGs are discussed.
This paper explores various strategies for self-presentation used on Facebook, among a sample of ... more This paper explores various strategies for self-presentation used on Facebook, among a sample of 1330 Italian students aged 14-19 years. Based on two social network site practices, the production of text material and the publication of personal photos, we have constructed a model embracing four types of categories and behaviors. We examined the categories according to structural variables, variables regarding self-narration, and two psychological scales. The results show the validity of the four categories in distinguishing different styles of Facebook use and allowing us to define those styles in greater depth. In particular, the publication of photos by those who do not contribute written text seems to indicate the need to maintain one\u2019s real-life social network; the production of text alone seems to reflect the need to deepen one\u2019s most passionate interests; while the combination of the two communicative modes tends to reveal a greater capacity in planning for the future
Review of Behavioral Finance, 2021
Purpose This paper focuses on the influence of social, cultural and religious factors on investor... more Purpose This paper focuses on the influence of social, cultural and religious factors on investors' attention. In particular, the authors examined if the attention-grabbing mechanism works on Sundays, that is, if the Italians' Sunday activities and habits lead to a lower attention to second-hand financial news, compared to Saturdays. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyzed the market reaction to equivalent stale events published on the Saturday and Sunday editions of an Italian financial newspaper and conducted a standard event study on abnormal returns and abnormal volumes for Saturday and Sunday columns and a multivariate analysis on abnormal returns for columns reporting positive recommendations. As a robustness check, the authors performed a sentiment analysis of the columns and included this variable in the regression analysis, but sentiment proved to be not significant in the final model. Findings The study’s results confirmed that the attention-grabbing mecha...
Journal of Open Source Software, 2019
TextWiller is the development version of a R package that collects some text mining utilities int... more TextWiller is the development version of a R package that collects some text mining utilities intended for the Italian language. It's available at https://github.com/livioivil/TextWiller. The aim of TextWiller is to help to deal with the pre-processing of a corpus and it also provides some functions about word classification and polarity.
Research in Learning Technology, 2019
Recent studies indicate that Internet skills have a positive impact on academic achievement. This... more Recent studies indicate that Internet skills have a positive impact on academic achievement. This article presents a national study that seeks to validate an Internet skills scale that was already tested in other EU countries (the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) to understand the competence level of the population as a whole as well as across population sectors. The scale questionnaire was completed by a sample of the Italian population stratified by gender, age and geographical area. The result is globally consistent at the empirical level as well as at the cross-national level. All the five scales showed excellent internal consistency.
PLOS ONE, Apr 26, 2023
The article aims to understand the process through which scientific experts gain and maintain rem... more The article aims to understand the process through which scientific experts gain and maintain remarkable media visibility. It has been analysed a corpus of 213,875 articles published by the eight most important Italian newspapers across the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. By exploring this process along the different phases of the management of the emergency in Italy, it was observed that some scientific experts achieve high media visibilityand sometimes notwithstanding their low academic reputation-thus becoming a sort of "media star". Scientific literature about the relationship between experts and media is considerable, nonetheless we found a lack of theoretical models able to analyse under which conditions experts are able to enter and to remain prominent in the media sphere. A Media Experts Evolutionary Model (MEEM) is proposed in order to analyze the main conditions under which experts can acquire visibility and how they can "survive" in media arena. We proceeded by analysing visibility of experts during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and considering both their individual credentials previously acquired and the media environment processes of selection; MEEM acts hence as a combination of these two levels. Regarding the credentials, we accounted for i) institutional role/position, ii) previous media visibility, and iii) matches between scientific credentials and media competence. In our analysis, we collected evidence that high visibility in newspapers can be seen as evolutionary in the sense that some profiles-i.e. a particular configuration of credentials-are more adapt to specific media environments.
Scientometrics
The aim of this paper is to study the role of citation network measures in the assessment of scie... more The aim of this paper is to study the role of citation network measures in the assessment of scientific maturity. Referring to the case of the Italian national scientific qualification (ASN), we investigate if there is a relationship between citation network indices and the results of the researchers’ evaluation procedures. In particular, we want to understand if network measures can enhance the prediction accuracy of the results of the evaluation procedures beyond basic performance indices. Moreover, we want to highlight which citation network indices prove to be more relevant in explaining the ASN results, and if quantitative indices used in the citation-based disciplines assessment can replace the citation network measures in non-citation-based disciplines. Data concerning Statistics and Computer Science disciplines are collected from different sources (ASN, Italian Ministry of University and Research, and Scopus) and processed in order to calculate the citation-based measures us...
SIS 2021 - 50th Meeting of the Italian Statistical Society, 2021
2020 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2020
EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020, 2020
In this contribution we describe the system (i.e. a statistical model) used to participate in Eva... more In this contribution we describe the system (i.e. a statistical model) used to participate in Evalita conference 2020, SardiStance (Tasks A and B) and Haspeede2 (Tasks A and B). We first developed a classifier by extracting features from the texts and the social network of users. Then, we fit the data through an extreme gradient boosting, with cross-validation tuning of the hyper-parameters. A key factor for a good performance in SardiStance Task B was the features extraction by using Multidimensional Scaling of the distance matrix (minimum path, undirected graph) applied on each network. The second system exploits the same features above, but it trains and performs predictions in twosteps. The performances proved to be lower than those of the single-step model.
The focus of this paper is to understand whether the words contained in a text corpus improves th... more The focus of this paper is to understand whether the words contained in a text corpus improves the explained variance of stock returns better than the use of the polarity of the same texts, obtained through a sentiment analysis using a generic ontological dictionary. The empirical analysis is based on the content of a weekly column in the most important Italian financial newspaper, which published past information and analysts’ recommendations on listed companies. The use of textual data clearly increases the explained variance of stock returns but, through comparisons between data mining techniques, we observed minor differences in terms of MSE, by adding a selection of specific terms as features. In this context, the text mining approach proved to be very useful to improve the explanatory power of forecasting models, while it emerged the limited explanatory power of an automatic sentiment analysis based on a generic lexicon. Abstract Il focus di questo contributo è capire se le pa...
Italian Sociological Review, 2011
Journal of Risk Research, 2021
Abstract This study examined the social representation (SR) of nanotechnologies and its relations... more Abstract This study examined the social representation (SR) of nanotechnologies and its relationships with those of science and technology. It aimed to understand the role of pre-existing and neighbouring forms of shared knowledge in orienting the way laypeople autonomously develop ideas about an unfamiliar issue, and related implications for its perceived risks and public acceptance or rejection. The study involved 489 Italian participants, stratified according to gender, age and education level. They completed an ad-hoc questionnaire with multiple free association tasks to the word-stimuli nanotechnologies, science and technology, and close-ended questions to gauge ‘familiarity’ levels with nanotechnologies and ‘engagement’ in nanotechnologies through media. The results suggested the presence of a rather shared and organised SR of nanotechnologies whose content is cautiously enthusiastic. The biomedical domain seems to be the most easily accepted field of application for nanotechnologies, indicating a ‘preferential channel’ through which they could be more welcome and trusted. Concerning inter-representation relationships, comparisons among SRs identified a strong connection among these three objects, indicating the existence of a coherent representation system where the SR of nanotechnologies is nested in those of science and technology, which, in turn, are in a reciprocal relationship. Fine-grained comparisons allowed for grasping further insights. The results showed that the SR of nanotechnologies is the least enthusiastic, highlighting critical voices among laypeople, although peripherally. Specifically, it presents elements of perceived risks and rejection on one hand, and elements indicating a detached approach in which individuals struggle to detect potentialities and advantages on the other, contrary to what has been found for science and technology at large.
PLOS ONE, 2021
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emerged as one of the most dramatic health crises of recent decades. ... more The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emerged as one of the most dramatic health crises of recent decades. This paper treats mainstream news about the current pandemic as a valuable entry point for analyzing the relationship between science and politics in the public sphere, where the outbreak must be both understood and confronted through appropriate public-health policy decisions. In doing so, the paper aims to examine which actors, institutions, and experts dominate the SARS-CoV-2 media narratives, with particular attention to the roles of political, medical, and scientific actors and institutions within the pandemic crisis. The study relies on a large dataset consisting of all SARS-CoV-2 articles published by eight major Italian national newspapers between January 1, 2020 and June 15, 2020. These articles underwent a quantitative analysis based on a topic modeling technique. The topic modeling outputs were further analyzed by innovatively combining ad-hoc metrics and a classifier based on...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
Background: A secure attachment style could promote more intimacy in romantic relationships, whil... more Background: A secure attachment style could promote more intimacy in romantic relationships, while an insecure attachment style could be correlated with less positive romantic relationships in adulthood. Numerous studies have noted that a secure attachment to parents was correlated with lower levels of aggression, whereas insecure attachments were associated with higher levels of aggression. We aimed to investigate the role of the attachment system as a mediator of the expression of aggressiveness during adolescence. Specifically, we considered that the attachment to parents and peers could influence one's attachment to a romantic partner. Methods: We empirically tested whether there were relationships of parent and peer attachment on aggressiveness mediated by romantic attachment style. Participants of the study included 411 students. Results: Results indicated that for males an insecure father-child attachment style seems to be associated with higher levels of anxiety and avoidance in romantic attachments and then with aggressiveness. For females, an insecure mother-child attachment style seems to be associated with higher levels of aggressiveness. Conclusion: The attachment to parents and to peers plays a key role in defining romantic attachment according to gender, and these dimensions in turn tend to affect the levels of aggressiveness.
Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 2011
This paper shows the results of part of an empirical study which was developed in the sphere of t... more This paper shows the results of part of an empirical study which was developed in the sphere of the PACT EU project (Pathways for Carbon Transitions). The performed analysis concerns the social capital of young Europeans in terms of trust, size of personal networks, volunteering activities and usage of social network sites (SNS). The purpose of the work is, on one hand, exploratory, especially in aspects related to the comparison between relational context of social networks and virtual networks. At the same time, the research aims to confirm on this particular population some of the hypothesis coming from the literature on social capital, and to verify the existence of differences between European countries regarding relational characteristics.
Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 2013
This paper explores various strategies for self-presentation used on Facebook, among a sample of ... more This paper explores various strategies for self-presentation used on Facebook, among a sample of 1330 Italian students aged 14-19 years. Based on two social network site practices, the production of text material and the publication of personal photos, we have constructed a model embracing four types of categories and behaviors. We examined the categories according to structural variables, variables regarding self-narration, and two psychological scales. The results show the validity of the four categories in distinguishing different styles of Facebook use and allowing us to define those styles in greater depth. In particular, the publication of photos by those who do not contribute written text seems to indicate the need to maintain one's real-life social network; the production of text alone seems to reflect the need to deepen one's most passionate interests; while the combination of the two communicative modes tends to reveal a greater capacity in planning for the future.
Frontiers in psychology, 2015
This study investigated the role of co-parenting alliance in mediating the influence of parents&#... more This study investigated the role of co-parenting alliance in mediating the influence of parents' trait anxiety on family system maladjustment and parenting stress. A sample of 1606 Italian parents (803 mothers and 803 fathers) of children aged one to 13 years completed measures of trait anxiety (State Trait Anxiety Inventory-Y), co-parenting alliance (Parenting Alliance Measure), family system maladjustment (Family Assessment Measure-III), and parenting stress (Parenting Stress Inventory-Short Form). These variables were investigated together comparing two structural equations model-fitting including both partners. A model for both mothers and fathers was empirically devised as a series of associations between parent trait anxiety (independent variable), family system maladjustment and parenting stress (dependent variables), mediated by co-parenting alliance, with the insertion of cross predictions between mothers and fathers and correlations between dependent variables for both...
SOCIOLOGIA E POLITICHE SOCIALI, 2012
The Position Generator is a popular measurement instrument for individual level social capital. E... more The Position Generator is a popular measurement instrument for individual level social capital. Empirical studies have tested or discussed measurement properties of the instrument, but not the underlying response process. In 35 semi-structured cognitive interviews across gender, education, and age groups, we asked respondents to reflect on the 1999/2000 Social Survey of the Dutch (SSND) Position Generator. Effects found were unfamiliarity with occupations, interpretation of occupations, unknown occupations of alters, forcing alters into occupations, speculation, forgetting single alters and groups of alters, but not detectable misrepresentation of alters. In only 6 interviews all alters were working in a paid job (as the PG assumes); most remarkable alternatives were retired, unemployed, or deceased alters. An overall impression of the responses is that recalling alters to fit occupations feels counterintuitive to how relationships are memorized. Item validity and reliability are therefore likely to be negatively affected, but whether all combined ambiguities affect social capital measures is difficult to predict. Yet, an underestimation of social capital seems likely. Implications and ideas for future development of PGs are discussed.