Merlin Schaeffer

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Copenhagen

The “integration paradox” posits that seemingly well‐established immigrants and their descendants tend to report more discrimination compared to their more marginalized peers. This study investigates one potential mechanism for this paradox, namely, the increasing awareness of their group's enduring ethno‐racial minority status. Through a survey ex...

Does immigration erode the social integration of contemporary mass-scale societies? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic, racial, and religious diversity have prompted this important and highly controversial question. This article gives a brief introduction to the scientific literature on this question and derives from it the foll...

In this article we report evidence from a series of semi-structured interviews with a broad sample of people living in Denmark ( n = 21), about their perspectives on the future during the first months of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The thematic and discursive analyses, based on an abductive ontology, illustrate imaginings of the future along two...

Social science research has produced evidence of an “integration paradox”: immigrants and their descendants who appear to have greater access to mainstream middle-class society, as indicated by their education or labor market success, often report experiencing more discrimination. Several explanations have been put forth to account for this counter...

Trust is highlighted as central to effective disease management. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, Denmark seemed to embody this understanding. Characterizing the Danish response were high levels of public compliance with government regulations and restrictions coupled with high trust in the government and other members of society. In this article, we...

Social science research demonstrates that dispersal policies and restrictions on the freedom of residence have inhibited refugees’ socio-economic integration. The dominant explanation is that such policies prevent refugees from moving to places where they can employ their skills most fruitfully. However, previous studies of refugees’ actual residen...

This study explores how researchers' analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic resulted in several acute shortages of healthcare provision and thereby posed a challenge to solidarity among citizens of welfare states. One example was the limited number of vaccine batches at the outset of European COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. This resulted in a rare constellation in which citi...

Urban research assigns immigrant enclaves an ambiguous role. While such areas are seen as rich in beneficial ethno-religious infrastructures and networks, they also tend to be located in deprived and stigmatised inner-city neighbourhoods. Research on neighbourhood attainment provides evidence for both, a desire to attain mainstream middle-class nei...

The paper reports findings from a crowdsourced replication. Eighty-four replicator teams attempted to verify results reported in an original study by running the same models with the same data. The replication involved an experimental condition. A “transparent” group received the original study and code, and an “opaque” group received the same unde...

Findings from 162 researchers in 73 teams testing the same hypothesis with the same data reveal a universe of unique analytical possibilities leading to a broad range of results and conclusions. Surprisingly, the outcome variance mostly cannot be explained by variations in researchers’ modeling decisions or prior beliefs. Each of the 1,261 test mod...

Social science research has produced evidence of welfare chauvinism whereby citizens turn against social policies that disproportionately benefit immigrants and their descendants. Some policymakers advocate welfare chauvinism as a means to incentivize fast labour market integration and assimilation into the mainstream more generally. These conteste...

A significant share of employees in Europe has less formal training than is required by their job; they are undereducated. We use harmonized panel data from the United Kingdom and Germany to investigate the skills and resources allowing the undereducated to develop careers in occupations supposedly beyond their reach. Our theoretical approach compl...

Research shows that children of immigrants, the “second generation,” have comparatively high educational aspirations. This “immigrant optimism” translates into ambitious educational choices, given the second generation’s level of academic performance. Choice-driven (comprehensive) education systems, which allow the children of immigrants to follow...

Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield biased point estimates and severely anti-conservative inf...

Rejoinder to Daniel Stegmueller's Comments - Martin Elff, Jan Paul Heisig, Merlin Schaeffer, Susumu Shikano

Does ethnic diversity erode social trust? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity have prompted this essential question for modern societies, but few clear answers have been reached in the sprawling literature. This article reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrat...

Does ethnic diversity erode social trust? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity have prompted this essential question for modern societies, but few clear answers have been reached in the sprawling literature. Taking this as point of departure, this article reviews the existing literature on the relationship between ethnic...

Online Supplement to "Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust A Narrative and Meta-Analytical Review"

Mixed-effects multilevel models are often used to investigate cross-level interactions, a specific type of context effect that may be understood as an upper-level variable moderating the association between a lower-level predictor and the outcome. We argue that multilevel models involving cross-level interactions should always include random slopes...

This article adds an intergenerational perspective to the study of perceived ethnic discrimination. It proposes the conjecture that perceived discrimination tends to increase with parental education, particularly among those children of immigrants who have attained only mediocre levels of education themselves. I discuss that this conjecture may be...

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of sele...

This article adds an intergenerational perspective to the study of perceived ethnic discrimination. It proposes the conjecture that perceived discrimination tends to increase with parental education, particularly among those children of immigrants who have attained only mediocre levels of education themselves. I discuss that this conjecture may be...

Mixed effects multilevel models are often used to investigate cross-level interactions, a specific type of context effect that may be understood as an upper-level variable moderating the association between a lower-level predictor and the outcome. We argue that multilevel models involving cross-level interactions should always include random slopes...

Mixed effects multilevel models are often used to investigate cross-level interactions, a specific type of context effect that may be understood as an upper-level variable moderating the association between a lower-level predictor and the outcome. We argue that multilevel models involving cross-level interactions should always include random slopes...

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag untersucht, ob Menschen in einheimisch-homogenen Nachbarschaften, die an ethnisch-divers zusammengesetzte Nachbarschaften angrenzen oder von diesen sogar umgeben sind, besonders zu xenophoben Einstellungen neigen. Diese als „Halo“ (auf Deutsch „Ring“) bezeichnete sozial-räumliche Konstellation synthetisiert zwei promi...

Context effects, where a characteristic of an upper-level unit or cluster (e.g., a country) affects outcomes and relationships at a lower level (e.g., that of the individual), are a primary object of sociological inquiry. In recent years, sociologists have increasingly analyzed such effects using quantitative multilevel modeling. Our review of mult...

The question whether ethnic diversity is associated with declining social cohesion has produced much controversy. We maintain that more attention must be paid to cognitive mechanisms to move the debate ahead. Using survey data from 938 localities in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, we explore a crucial individual-level mechanism: perceptions o...

We investigate an often overlooked implication of the signaling model of statistical discrimination: if immigrant minorities' educational qualifications carry less signaling power, poorly-qualified minority members should experience positive statistical discrimination. We argue that the lower signaling power stems from disadvantages associated with...

Why and under which conditions do people employ ethnic categories rather than others (such as age, class, gender, and so on) to conceptually organize their social environment? This paper analyses an open-ended question on who is seen as responsible for neighbourhood problems taken from a recently conducted large-scale survey in Germany. Thereby, th...

Since Allport, social scientists emphasise the importance of personal inter-ethnic contact for overcoming prejudices and enhancing social cohesion in mixed societies. But why do some people have more contact to their neighbours of other ethnicity? Using new data from a large-scale German survey, I analyse the brokering roles of children and inter-e...

An ever-growing number of studies investigates the relation between ethnic diversity and social cohesion, but these studies have produced mixed results. In cross-national research, some scholars have recently started to investigate more refined and informative indices of ethnic diversity than the commonly used Hirschman-Herfindahl Index. These refi...

Comparative political science has long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Exacerbating these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that frequentist methods yield biased estimates and severely anti-conservative inference with small upper-level samples....

Dieses Kapitel stellt die statistische Erfassung von Diversity vor. Es umfasst zunächst konzeptionelle Überlegungen zur Definition von Diversität und führt die drei Dimensionen ein, aus denen Diversität sich zusammensetzt: Balance, Variabilität und Disparität. Es werden sodann statistische Diversitätsindizes erläutert, die diese drei Dimensionen in...

Dieses Kapitel stellt die statistische Erfassung von Diversity vor. Es umfasst zunächst konzeptionelle Überlegungen zur Definition von Diversität und führt die drei Dimensionen ein, aus denen Diversität sich zusammensetzt: Balance, Variabilität und Disparität. Es werden sodann statistische Diversitätsindizes erläutert, die diese drei Dimensionen in...

Studies on ethnic diversity and social cohesion are predominantly cross-sectional. Relying on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and applying a differences-in-differences design, this paper investigates how the event of moving to a more or less diverse neighbourhood affects people’s opinions about immigration up. This longitudin...

Concerns about neighborhood erosion and conflict in ethnically diverse settings occupy scholars, policy makers, and pundits alike; but the empirical evidence is inconclusive. This article proposes the contested boundaries hypothesis as a refined contextual explanation focused on poorly defined boundaries between ethnic and racial groups. The author...

Ethnic diversity is typically measured by the well-known Hirschman-Herfindahl Index. This paper discusses the merits of an alternative approach, which is in our view better suited to tease out why and how ethnic diversity matters. The approach consists of two elements. First, all existing diversity indices are non-relational. From the viewpoint of...

We investigate an often overlooked implication of the signalling model of statistical discrimination: if immigrant minorities’ educational qualifications carry less signalling power, poorly qualified minority members should experience positive statistical discrimination. We argue that the lower signalling power stems from disadvantages associated w...

The question whether ethnic diversity is associated with declining social cohesion has produced much controversy. We maintain that more attention must be paid to cognitive mechanisms to move the debate ahead. Using survey data from 938 localities in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, we explore a crucial individual-level mechanism: perceptions o...

Dieses Kapitel stellt die statistische Erfassung von Diversity vor. Es umfasst zunächst konzeptionelle Überlegungen zur Definition von Diversität und führt die drei Dimensionen ein, aus denen Diversität sich zusammensetzt: Balance, Variabilität und Disparität. Es werden sodann statistische Diversitätsindizes erläutert, die diese drei Dimensionen in...

Context effects, where a characteristic of a higher-level unit or “cluster” (e.g., a country) affects outcomes and relationships at a lower level (e.g., that of the individual), are a primary object of sociological inquiry. During recent decades, sociologists have increasingly investigated context effects using quantitative methods. We show that qu...

Social scientists generally rely on three broad modelling strategies to test hypotheses about contextual effects: random intercept and slope (often simply referred to as “multilevel”) models, pooled OLS with cluster-robust standard errors, and two-step approaches. Econometric textbooks tell us that while random intercept and slope models are the mo...

According to existing studies, the persistence of ethnic inequalities on Western labour markets is largely due to ethnic differences in educational attainment. Empirically less important, but socially more relevant are differences in educational returns: why is education less beneficial for immigrant minorities in meritocratic societies? Apart of t...

What do inherited financial assets signify to heirs and testators and how does this shape their conduct? Based on grounded theory methodology and twenty open, thematically structured interviews with US heirs, future heirs and testators, this article explicates a theoretical account that proposes a moral ambivalence as the core category to understan...

Exploring the debate within social sciences on the consequences of ethnic diversity for social cohesion and the production of public goods, this book draws on extensive survey data from Germany to engage with questions surrounding the relationship between ethnic diversity and issues such as welfare provision and the erosion of public trust and civi...

Social scientists have long emphasised the importance of personal inter-ethnic contact for overcoming prejudices and enhancing social cohesion in mixed societies. But why do some people have more contact with their neighbours of other ethnicity? Using new data from a large-scale German survey, I analyse the brokering roles of children and inter-eth...

An ever-growing number of studies investigates the relation between ethnic diversity and social cohesion, but these studies have produced mixed results. In cross-national research, some scholars have recently started to investigate more refined and informative indices of ethnic diversity than the commonly used Hirschman-Herfindahl Index. These refi...

Why and under which conditions do people employ ethnic categories rather than others (such as age, class, gender, and so on) to conceptually organize their social environment? This article analyses an open-ended question on who is seen as responsible for neighbourhood problems taken from a recently conducted large-scale survey in Germany. By doing...

Zum Zusammenhang zwischen ethnischer Heterogenität, Sozialkapital (Vertrauen, freiwilliges Engagement, Mitgliedschaft in Organisationen und Vereinen etc.) und der Bereitstellungöffentlicher Güter lassen sich aus bislang vorliegenden Studien keine eindeutigen Befunde ableiten. Dies gilt insbesondere für den europäischen Kontext. Das Projekt Ethnisch...

Binnen de sociale wetenschappen is er discussie over de invloed van etnische diversiteit op de mate van sociale cohesie binnen een land. Merlin Schaeffer onderzocht de effecten van etnische diversiteit op de mate van sociale cohesie en het potentieel van collectieve actie in Duitsland. Uit zijn onderzoek blijkt dat etnische diversiteit samenhangt m...