Fast pace of technology changes makes conduction of high-quality web surveys increasingly easy, and performance of web surveys should be continuously monitored. In this article, a comparison is made of the results of telephone and web surveys of items measuring international news knowledge. The authors compare web surveys of general populations conducted in the United States and Norway in January 2009 with their telephone replications conducted in the same month. Results show rather small differences between web and telephone surveys, particularly in Norway. The authors discuss the results and make recommendations for use of web surveys and for future methodological research.
This article examines what the determinants of ethnic prejudice in Croatia were in the aftermath of the 1991-1995 war. The analysis is based on a nationwide survey (N = 2,202) conducted in March and April 1996, less than a year after the cessation of war activities in Croatia. The main focus of our analysis is on how war influences the ethnic prejudice of individuals. The influences of individual war-related experiences and the effects of regional differences in the level of war activities are analyzed simultaneously by conducting a multilevel analysis. The main findings are that individual war-related experiences have little impact on prejudice, but that the contextual influence of war is somewhat stronger. Variables that are not directly related to the conflict-such as education, religiosity and size of the place of residence-have the strongest effect on prejudice. Insofar as our results can be generalized to other large-scale ethnic conflicts, they indicate that a recent history of conflict is not in itself a major hindrance to the process of ethnic reconciliation.
The number of immigrants to Western Europe has been increasing, with immigration the subject of much controversy in contemporary Europe. In this article, we investigate the relationship between the size of the immigrant population, how natives perceive this size, and their anti-immigrant attitudes. We use data from the 2002/2003 European Social Survey covering 17 Western European countries, and we find that as a rule Western Europeans think that the immigrant population in their country is much larger than it actually is. The perceived size of an immigrant population has an impact on anti-immigrant prejudices, but the real size does not. Like many authors before us, we find that education reduces prejudice. However, we also find that around 10 percent of the total effect of education is a result of educated individuals' more accurate views about size of immigrant populations. In other words, the effect of education on prejudice is in part mediated by size perceptions.
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