Understanding convictions, your own included

Offering a way out avoids manufacturing opinions, but it also attracts those who have one. Methodologists have been debating this trade-off for decades.

The way a question is asked changes what a young child reports, and this holds for research surveys as much as for testimony. Research on suggestibility has specified under what conditions.

People speak of a shortage as soon as an employer struggles to recruit. Statistics nevertheless distinguish hiring intentions, job vacancies and labour market tightness, which do not measure the same thing.

Time-use surveys record what people do, interval by interval, on a given day. They offer a very different view of sociability from that of questionnaires.

The word was coined at the end of the seventeenth century by a physician to designate an ailment considered serious. Today it designates an ordinary state, which research describes as rather gentle.

Becoming a couple also means entering into a relationship with people one has not chosen. Expectations towards them vary a great deal, and they are rarely put into words.

Almost everyone expects the state not to favour any conception of the good life. The agreement ends as soon as one has to say what neutrality requires in practice.

France long ranked among the countries where pupils most often repeated a year. The decline of the practice preceded the most rigorous studies of its effects.

A person's status depends not on what their contract says but on the conditions under which they work. Digital platforms have put this old rule back at the centre of debate.

The death of a spouse is one of the transitions most studied by life-course research. Surveys describe a reshaping of relationships rather than a simple withdrawal.

An instrument can give the same result every time it is administered and measure something other than what it claims. Psychometrics has distinguished these two qualities since its beginnings.

People readily say that we pair up with someone who resembles us. Sociology has been measuring this for a long time, and the difficulty lies less in the finding than in its interpretation.

Feeling pushed towards an opinion is sometimes enough to move away from it. The mechanism was described in the 1960s, and it weighs on every attempt at persuasion.

A series of experiments from 1998 made the form of a compliment a research topic in its own right. Later work confirmed a mechanism and markedly reduced its size.