Ferruccio Biolcati

• University of Milan

According to cultural assimilation theories, immigrants generally tend to adopt the values and attitudes of the native population, as seen in areas such as gender equality, religiosity, and trust. This study analyzes immigrants' attitudes toward immigrant groups using European Values Study data, finding strong evidence for cultural assimilation. Ov...

This volume provides the most systematic study on the role of religion and religiosity in electoral politics in Catholic, Protestant, and religiously mixed countries across Western Europe and in the United States, from the Second World War until the second decade of the new century. The volume’s main argument is that, despite the expectations of se...

This volume provides the most systematic study on the role of religion and religiosity in electoral politics in Catholic, Protestant, and religiously mixed countries across Western Europe and in the United States, from the Second World War until the second decade of the new century. The volume’s main argument is that, despite the expectations of se...

This volume provides the most systematic study on the role of religion and religiosity in electoral politics in Catholic, Protestant, and religiously mixed countries across Western Europe and in the United States, from the Second World War until the second decade of the new century. The volume’s main argument is that, despite the expectations of se...

Nothing puzzles sociologists of religion more than the reasons and the patterns behind religious change. In the literature on secularization processes, it is broadly accepted that ongoing modernization has undermined many of the pillars of institutional religions, leading to widespread religious decline. While a considerable body of research invest...

Despite the long-lasting interest in religious change, debates on the topic have been heated and are still far from being settled. In order to provide a reliable data source through which to study these dynamics, the CARPE project harmonizes well-known international surveys containing items concerning religiosity (the ESS, Eurobarometer, EVS, ISSP...

While official science has given its answer to the question on the origin of the Coronavirus (animal to human transmission), alternative theories on human creation of the virus – purposely or inadvertently – have flourished. Those alternative theories can be easily located among the family of conspiracy theories, as they always assume some secretiv...

When analyzing the relationship between individual religiosity and attitudes toward immigration, empirical research often leads to contrasting findings. By focusing on contemporary Italy, our contribution aims to provide evidence of two opposite effects that religiosity can exert on attitudes toward immigration. On the one hand, belonging to a reli...

While scholars have often pointed to the fact that France might be an exceptionally irreligious country, this hypothesis has not yet been tested with longitudinal data; and nor have researchers tried to account for this alleged irreligiosity. The present article tries to fill this gap in the literature by comparing France to other Catholic countrie...

The social and political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic are receiving increasing attention in the literature. This article aims to contribute to this fast-growing research programme by focusing on the degree to which Italian citizens perceive democratic institutions as effective in coping with crises like the COVID-19 emergency. We put forwa...

Faced with an unforeseen event such as the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, social research is called to monitor its consequences on public opinion. The article briefly describes the ResPOnsE COVID-19 project (Risposta dell’Opinione Pubblica all’Emergenza COVID-19) that the SPS TREND laboratory at the State University of Milan developed with this aim. To recon...

The impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on the lives of many is indisputable. Among the possible strategies to cope with the feeling of insecurity that comes with this, religion can play a significant role. Using firsthand data from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 rolling cross-section survey, this article shows that Italian people who reported a COVID-19...

This article contributes to a better theoretical and empiric understanding of mixed results in the literature investigating the relationship between institutional confidence and adherence to recommended measures during a pandemic. The article relies on Structural Equation Models based on data from ResPOnsE Covid-19, a Rolling Cross-Section (RCS) su...

Monitoring of public opinion during Covid-19 pandemic in Italy

In this article, we present an application of the rolling cross-section (RCS) design to monitor changes in public opinion during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy (ResPOnsE Covid-19 project, University of Milan Statale). The RCS is a dynamic survey tool used predominantly in the analyses of public opinion during electoral campaigns. Because of its dyn...

Despite widespread use in survey research, the accuracy and validity of self-reported church attendance questions have often been debated. Since the seminal article by Hadaway et al. (1993), that this indicator leads to an overestimation of the number of regular churchgoers has entered common knowledge. However, no systematic work to improve the un...

Backgrounds The empirical evidence shows discordant results regarding the role of local contexts on individual health. This article considers the role of the municipal socio-economic contexts on self-rated health in Italy, taking into account some individual variables. Methods Multilevel model software (MlwiN) is used to fit multilevel linear regr...

The paper analyzes the main methodological innovations of the survey research, within the context of its historical development. Referring to the historical summary proposed by Groves in 2011, three eras of research surveys - the origins, the expansion and the challenges coming from the so-called organic data - are reviewed. The article illustrates...

Religious change continues to be a controversial topic that involves both theoretical and methodological issues. As to the European context, the main dispute is between secularization and individualization theory, especially considering the ‘believing without belonging’ thesis. This article will tackle this dispute given these three choices: firstl...

Google Scholar is an appealing data source for the measurement of scientific production in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) fields. Its appeal derives from its extensive coverage of the literature. This contrasts with issues of data quality, which are still quite controversial. This chapter aims to evaluate the reliability and validity of b...

The debate over religious change in Italy is far from having reached unanimous conclusions: some scholars point to an unbroken trend toward a decrease of religiosity, while others highlight the signs of a religious revival, especially in younger generations. Besides difficulties with definitions, different conclusions are also due to a lack of info...

In the last few years, much sociological debate has focused on individualisation theory, especially on Beck's risk society version. According to this theory, contemporary social change can be interpreted as the progressive weakening of the influence of social structures on individual behaviour. Individualisation theory has been adopted in many fiel...

The debate over religious change in Italy is far from having reached unanimous conclusions: some scholars underline an unbroken trend toward a decrease of religiosity, while other scholars highlight the signs of a religious revival especially in younger generations. Beside difficulties of definitions, such different conclusions are also due to the...

The aim of this article is to offer a contribution to a theoretically-oriented poverty investigation, starting from the idea that it is necessary to give a greater impulse to the definition of a theoretical reference-frame. Therefore, we first propose a brief discussion of the main approaches, based respectively on poverty persistence hypothesis, l...

L’approccio realista viene utilizzato in valutazione per l’attribuzione causale degli effetti di un intervento. Esso si propone di concettualizzare l’intervento in termini di una teoria che ne spieghi il funzionamento, e in particolare che illustri perché si è arrivati (o si conta di arrivare) a un certo esito. A differenza dell’approccio basato su...

- The paper introduces theory-oriented evaluation, a set of approaches that argue for a stronger role of theory in evaluation. Theory-oriented evaluation criticizes mainstream objectives-inputs-outputs evaluation for poor contribution to knowledge cumulation due according to these authors - to the overwhelming role played by method. The paper devel...

The paper consists of two parts. The first is more general: it introduces to university ranking, shows the leading international ranking, discusses the uses people make of rankings. The second focuses on Italian ranking Censis-la Repubblica developing two different kinds of analyses: after considering indicators validity and reliability, principal...