via GIPHY The EBRD Life in Transition survey from 2015 asked participants about their childhood – “About how many books were in your childhood home? Do not count magazines, newspapers, or school books.” Books in the childhood home is frequently used as a predictor of future educational attainment. But I’m curious for another reason. Some…
I’ve been playing with the 2015 EBRD Life in Transition survey dataset for the past few days. I saw an interesting question about political system preferences. Whereby people were asked to agree most with one of these statements: * Democracy is preferable to any other form of political system * Under some circumstances, an authoritarian…
The EBRD Life in Transition survey changed their wording on this question quite a bit this wave, so it is difficult to compare to the past. But here I present the frequency of Azerbaijanis using various media as an information source. The question says: “People use different sources to learn what is going on in…
The EBRD Life in Transition survey changed their wording on this question quite a bit this wave, so it is difficult to compare to the past. But here I present the frequency of Armenians using various media as an information source. The question says: “People use different sources to learn what is going on in…
The EBRD Life in Transition survey changed their wording on this question quite a bit this wave, so it is difficult to compare to the past. But here I present the frequency of Eurasians using the Internet and social media as an information source. The question says: “People use different sources to learn what is…
A few years ago I made a graphic blog post about household Internet in Europe and Eurasia. It is time for an update with the 2015 EBRD Life in Transition dataset. They’ve changed the wording to ask people if they have any household Internet access, including from a smartphone. They also asked why they do…
A few years ago I made some graphics and a blog post showing personal computer ownership in Europe and Eurasia based on the EBRD’s Life in Transition survey. Last week I presented these data to some graduate students and that reminded me that I should update this! There are 2015-2016 data available and the picture…
Interpersonal trust is, arguably, the most important concept for a society. Interpersonal trust is understood as the general inclination of people to trust their fellow citizens (Hall, 2002). Interpersonal trust is related to EVERYTHING – democratization, economic wellbeing… you name it. I did an analysis of some of the trust measures in the ERBD Life…
Demand for democracy is one of my favorite outcome (dependent) variables. It isn’t perfect, but it is used frequently in public opinion surveys and has been shown to be correlated with all sorts of interesting things. In a transitional society, popular demand for democracy (or legitimation) takes the form of a choice between competing regime…
Last year I wrote a blog post about triangulating different data sources. I used the example of mobile phone ownership and the ITU, Caucasus Barometer, and Gallup. In that post I said: “The point I’d like to make is that these statistics are complicated and it is hard to get at the “right” number. That’s…