Overview
- This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
Part of the book series: Sozialstrukturanalyse (SSA)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This open access publication deals with the operationalisation of the welfare state as an independent variable.
To study how welfare states affect social inequality, individual behaviour, attitudes and more in different countries, an empirical operationalisation of the welfare state or specific elements of social policy is required. However, this operationalisation is fraught with some important problems. These problems essentially relate to one point: while there are a large number of contributions dealing with the measurement of differences between welfare states per se and as a dependent variable, there is a lack of feasible recommendations for a standardised operationalisation of welfare stateness as an independent variable.
So far, there has been no systematic investigation of how such different approaches may affect the results and their comparability. Also missing is an in-depth conceptual discussion of which features of the welfare state are particularly relevant for explaining certain effects.This book fills both gaps. First, it exposes the pitfalls of existing approaches and shows how much empirical results can vary depending on the operationalisation chosen. Second, it proposes a framework for a standardised conceptualisation and operationalisation of social policies as independent variables that constrains operational decisions in a theoretically meaningful way.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Katharina Kunißen worked as a research associate at the Institute of Sociology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her main research interests include social inequality and comparative welfare state research. She has been working at the Federal Statistical Office since 2019.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Independent Variable Problem
Book Subtitle: Welfare Stateness as an Explanatory Concept
Authors: Katharina Kunißen
Series Title: Sozialstrukturanalyse
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39422-6
Publisher: Springer VS Wiesbaden
eBook Packages: Social Science and Law (German Language)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-658-39421-9Published: 13 November 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-658-39422-6Published: 12 November 2022
Series ISSN: 2662-2947
Series E-ISSN: 2662-2955
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 224
Number of Illustrations: 35 b/w illustrations
Topics: Political Sociology, Public Policy, Social Sciences, general