Felix Bittmann

• Dr. rer. pol
• Research Assistant at Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories

Large multinational associations such as the International Association for the Development of Apnea (AIDA) or the Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (CMAS) hold freediving competitions regularly and provide the results to the general public. Their databases are a highly reliable source for analyzing overall freediving results in the...

When the effect of a treatment variable on an outcome variable differs between two groups, an interaction effect is present. Since this is one of the most common statistical analyses, Stata offers a wide variety of methods to investigate such effects. The present study outlines how these different analyses can be performed in Stata and provides a c...

Overweight and obesity represent significant public health challenges in many contemporary Western societies. In countries such as Germany, the majority of the population is classified as overweight. While being overweight is well-documented as a risk factor for adverse health outcomes, the relationship between overweight status and happiness remai...

International research has established that significant others, such as parents and peers, can influence a student’s educational or occupational aspirations. However, this research also reveals that influences differ by educational system, and the effects of peers are strongest in systems with low levels of stratification. For a long time, it was a...

Cultural knowledge is central to social participation and is particularly relevant for educational research. Based on Bourdieufs concept of capital, 14 items are presented to measure highbrow cultural knowledge in the German general population. These have been tested on a cross-sectional survey with more than 7000 participants. This instrument foc...

Do children with better reading competence read more, or do avid readers increase their reading competence? This highly relevant question has been discussed for many years, yet conclusive results are rare. Previous studies suffer from small sample sizes or omitted variable bias, rendering their findings questionable. We provide new insight using la...

In educational sociology, it is of greatest interest to explain why some students are more successful than others and obtain higher educational qualifications or receive better grades, which can have long-lasting consequences. The present study compares the influence of early academic performance, which can be regarded as a proxy of overall intelli...

Multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) is a popular and well-researched statistical approach to account for missing data in empirical research. However, applying the technique requires researchers to set dozens of smaller and larger parameters to build an adequate imputation model before estimating the analytical model of interest. It is s...

Regression models are highly popular in empirical research and come in many different forms to fit virtually any distribution, variable, or research question. Usually, these models also compute how much variation in the outcome variable can be explained by all predictors, which is relevant to understanding whether the predictors are, in sum, able t...

Multiple imputation with chained equations (MICE) is a widespread approach to account for missing data in empirical research. Combining MICE with bootstrapping, that is, repeatedly resampling with replacement from the data to estimate variances and confidence intervals of statistics of interest, is not straightforward. The current document provides...

Experiencing states of unhappiness is normal and part of human existence. Yet, if these states occur often or for longer periods of time, this can become a large burden and greatly reduce a person’s overall quality of life. I refer to these states as cumulative unhappiness, and I empirically investigated which factors and variables are correlated w...

Children’s educational aspirations have been shown to be highly relevant for their educational trajectories and, therefore, researchers have tried to understand how and when these aspirations are formed. The influence of parental aspirations on the development of children’s aspirations has often been the focus of such investigations in previous stu...

Selecting a school track after primary schooling is an early and highly influential decision families have to make in the German educational system. Usually, families with high educational aspirations choose the academic track since it is the direct pathway to higher education eligibility, yet there are families selecting another track. Explaining...

For a long time, there has been interest in the relationship between personality traits and life satisfaction. However, many previous studies suffer from small sample sizes or selective sampling, sometimes leading to biased or imprecise results. The current study, which focuses on the trait of extraversion, attempts to overcome these limitations by...

This chapter summarizes key findings from the research project Alternative Routes to Higher Education Eligibility (ARtHEE) . Based on data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we show that the expansion of alternative routes to higher education eligibility, which has followed from reforms in the 1960s, has been largely ineffecti...

Several studies have tried to estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning and the learning differences between social groups. Few studies have looked at the effects on other aspects of students’ educational achievement, especially grades. Institutionally, grades are essential for evaluating students’ ability, for tracking, for...

Academic achievement and educational decisions, which are strongly related to primary and secondary effects, are the two main drivers behind the emergence of social inequality in education. To understand this process in more detail, even before final decisions have to be made, the reciprocal influence of achievement and aspirations is of greatest i...

Explaining which factors influence educational attainment is a highly relevant topic in disciplines like psychology and sociology. While in the past especially parental socioeconomic status (SES) has been seen as the most relevant factor, newer studies put psychological aspects such as personality traits and cognitive ability into focus. A recent s...

Educational aspirations are known to be one of the most relevant predictors of secondary school choice after finishing elementary school in the German educational system. Since aspirations themselves mostly derive from the social background of a family, the question arises whether aspirations can be understood as a mediating factor explaining how s...

While there is plenty of research linking the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic to a drastic reduction of life satisfaction in the population, there is little information on the functional form of this relationship. Until now, one could suspect that this association is linear and a higher number of COVID-19 infections in a region leads to a c...

Controlling for confounding factors is one of the central aspects of quantitative research. While methods like linear regression models are common, their results can be misleading under certain conditions. We demonstrate how statistical matching can be utilized as an alternative that enables the inspection of post-matching balancing. This contribut...

Bildungsaspirationen von SchülerInnen können als Indikatoren des letztlich erreichten Schulabschlusses angesehen werden und sind daher aus einer Ungleichheitsperspektive betrachtet von großem Interesse. Gegenwärtig ist nur unzureichend bekannt, welche Faktoren dazu beitragen, dass sich Aspirationen nach dem Übergang in die Sekundarstufe positiv ode...

The extraordinary COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most severe disruptions of human life since the end of World War II, even in rich and industrialized countries like Germany. The introduction of a rather comprehensive “lockdown” and the restriction of multiple basic civil rights have affected the population in many areas of life, like employment, e...

Zusammenfassung Bildung ist ein zentraler Prädiktor des beruflichen Erfolgs. Da dies Eltern bekannt ist, versuchen sie meistens ihren Kindern den Gymnasialbesuch zu ermöglichen, da dort der höchste Bildungsabschluss erworben werden kann. Dazu wird mitunter die Übergangsempfehlung ignoriert. Wie sich dies auf die weitere Entwicklung des Kindes auswi...

In the 1960s, educational reforms have been initiated in Germany to make the rigid stratified school system more permeable. While maintaining between-school tracking in secondary education, several second-chance options have been introduced that established alternative routes to higher education. This study aims to evaluate whether these alternativ...

German secondary education is known for its early, strict selection of students into different schooling tracks based on prior academic performance, based on the assumption that students learn more efficiently when the learning environment is tailored to their individual abilities and needs. While much previous research has shown that entry into tr...

Classifying and explaining the causal and functional relationship between age and life satisfaction, especially in an international context, is still a major open question in demographics and happiness-research. Especially the debate whether to include sociodemographic control variables in these models has received much attention and deserves more...

Educational aspirations can be regarded as a predictor of final educational attainment, rendering this construct highly relevant for analysing the development of educational inequalities in panel data settings. In the context of the German tracked secondary school system, we analysed school-track effects on the development of educational aspiration...

Formal education is one of the most influential predictors of professional success. As parents in Germany are aware of the importance of education, they often try to enable their children to enrol in the prestigious academic schooling track (Gymnasium). This explains why the transition recommendation made by the teacher after the fourth grade is so...

Bootstrapping is a conceptually simple statistical technique to increase the quality of estimates, conduct robustness checks and compute standard errors for virtually any statistic. This book provides an intelligible and compact introduction for students, scientists and practitioners. It not only gives a clear explanation of the underlying concepts...

Current studies suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is worsening existing social inequalities in the field of education worldwide. We argue that the pandemic is especially challenging for students from socially disadvantaged and educationally deprived homes as parental engagement and resources are hugely important to guide and support the learning p...

According to the theory of liking, data quality might be improved in face-to-face survey settings when there is a high degree of similarity between respondents and interviewers, for example, with regard to gender or age. Using two rounds of European Social Survey data from 25 countries including more than 70,000 respondents, this concept is tested...

While in the past the concept of resilience was used to explain psychological well-being in extreme situations like enduring poverty, abuse, or war, it has now found broad application in numerous fields of research. It can also be applied to examine how everyday challenges and problems are dealt with, for example in the educational and university c...

Cikkünkben ismertetjük a vignetta felmérések tulajdonságait. Ezek után bemutatjuk saját vignetta felmérésünket, melynek segítségével az idősebb munkavállalókkal szembeni kor szerinti diszkriminációt vizsgáljuk az állásinterjúra történő behívások során. A felmérést kitöltők többsége egyetemi hallgató volt, akik eljátszották a vállalatok személyzeti...

Zusammenfassung Praktika sind für Hochschulabsolventen eine weitverbreitete Möglichkeit bereits während des Studiums Arbeitsmarkterfahrung zu sammeln und berufsbezogene Fähigkeiten zu erwerben. Allerdings ist weitgehend unklar, wie groß der tatsächliche Nutzen dieser Praktika für den Arbeitsmarkteinstieg ist und ob Einkommen, Passung des Berufs sow...

If you have mastered the basics of Python and are wanting to explore the language in more depth, this book is for you. By means of concrete examples used in different applications, the book illustrates many aspects of programming (e.g. algorithms, recursion, data structures) and helps problem-solving strategies. Including general ideas and solution...

In jedem Bildungssystem, das sich an meritokratischen Standards orientiert, sollten Schulnoten vor allem auf der fachspezifischen Leistung basieren. Bekannt ist, dass dieses Ideal unterlaufen werden kann und andere Faktoren einen unabhängigen Effekt auf die Notengebung ausüben können. Somit stellt sich die Frage, welche Faktoren wie stark die Jahre...

Since the 1960s, more and more opportunities to reach higher education eligibilitybeyond the Abitur certificate from the traditional Gymnasium have been establishedin the German education system. We ask to what extent these alternative pathways are connected to social disparities along the way to higher education.We providea systematic theoretical...

Mandatory and voluntary internships present widespread opportunities for graduates of tertiary education to gain relevant work- and on-the-job experience during their years of study. However, it is questionable if these actually have positive effects on outcomes (income, job mismatch, and overall job satisfaction). By estimating linear and logistic...

Wer die Grundlagen von Python beherrscht und jetzt tiefer einsteigen möchte, kommt in diesem Buch auf seine Kosten. Mittels konkreter Anwendungsbeispiele aus verschiedenen Fachgebieten wird aufgezeigt, wie man Python produktiv zur Problemlösung einsetzen kann. Diskutiert werden dabei neben den allgemeinen Lösungsideen auch die Spezifika von Python...

Praktika sind für Hochschulabsolventen eine weit verbreitete Möglichkeit, bereits während des Studiums Arbeitsmarkterfahrung zu sammeln und berufsbezogene Fähigkeiten zu erwerben. Allerdings ist weitgehend unklar, wie groß der tatsächliche Nutzen dieser Praktika für den Arbeitsmarkteinstieg ist und ob Einkommen, Passung des Berufs sowie Zufriedenhe...

To better explicate the well-researched finding that taller individuals have higher wages on average, potential mechanisms should be studied in detail. The present analysis investigates the relationship between height and the probability of being in a leadership position in the workplace using multinational European Social Survey data from 19 count...

Stata is one of the most popular statistical software in the world and suited for all kinds of users, from absolute beginners to experienced veterans. This book offers a clear and concise introduction to the usage and the workflow of Stata. Included topics are importing and managing datasets, cleaning and preparing data, creating and manipulating v...

Pflichtpraktika im universitären Umfeld sind eine weit verbreitete und kostengünstige Möglichkeit, um Studierende bereits während des Studiums auf das spätere Berufs -leben vorzubereiten. Relativ unklar ist dabei jedoch, wie groß der Nutzen dieser Praktika ist. Eine erste Studie für Deutschland aus dem Jahr 2011 kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass vermutli...