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It was recently suggested in a study published in Nature Human Behaviour that the historical loosening of American culture was associated with a trade-off between higher creativity and lower order. To this end, Jackson et al. generate a linguistic index of cultural tightness based on the Google Books Ngram corpus and use this index to show that American norms loosened between 1800 and 2000. While we remain agnostic toward a potential loosening of American culture and a statistical association with creativity/order, we show here that the methods used by Jackson et al. are neither suitable for testing the validity of the index nor for establishing possible relationships with creativity/order.
In a previous study published in Nature Human Behaviour, Varnum and Grossmann claim that reductions in gender inequality are linked to reductions in pathogen prevalence in the United States between 1951 and 2013. Since the statistical methods used by Varnum and Grossmann are known to induce (seemingly) significant correlations between unrelated time series, so-called spurious or non-sense correlations, we test here whether the statistical association between gender inequality and pathogens prevalence in its current form also is the result of mis-specified models that do not correctly account for the temporal structure of the data. Our analysis clearly suggests that this is the case. We then discuss and apply several standard approaches of modelling time-series processes in the data and show that there is, at least as of now, no support for a statistical association between gender inequality and pathogen prevalence.
The annual microcensus provides Germany’s most important official statistics. Unlike a census it does not cover the whole population, but a representative 1%-sample of it. In 2017, the German microcensus asked a question on the language of the population, i.e. ‘Which language is mainly spoken in your household?’ Unfortunately, the question, its design and its position within the whole microcensus’ questionnaire feature several shortcomings. The main shortcoming is that multilingual repertoires cannot be captured by it. Recommendations for the improvement of the microcensus’ language question: first and foremost the question (i.e. its wording, design, and answer options) should make it possible to count multilingual repertoires.
2017 gibt es im deutschen Mikrozensus zum ersten Mal seit etwa achtzig Jahren eine Frage zur Sprache der Bevölkerung in Deutschland. Diese Frage wird dann offenbar im entsprechenden Rhythmus des Mikrozensus jährlich wiederholt werden. Der Mikrozensus ist eine seit 1957 durchgeführte, repräsentative Befragung, bei der ungefähr 830.000 Menschen (das sind ca. 1 % der Bevölkerung) in rund 370.000 Haushalten befragt werden.1 Darin werden etwa Angaben zu den soziodemographischen Daten erfragt, zur familiären Situation, zur Wohnsituation, zur Aus- und Fortbildung und zur Arbeitssituation. Für die befragten Personen besteht Auskunftspflicht. Das Stellen einer Sprachfrage sieht, aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Sicht, zunächst nach einem sinnvollen und wünschenswerten Schritt aus. Nach näherer Betrachtung der gestellten Frage zeigen sich jedoch viele Unzulänglichkeiten und das, obwohl die Antworten und statistischen Auswertungen zu dieser Frage überhaupt noch ausstehen. Die Ergebnisse werden üblicherweise in der zweiten Hälfte des Folgejahres durch das statistische Bundesamt veröffentlicht.