Welcome to my new, and still unfinished, personal homepage. I will use it to present my newest research, share slides of talks and maintain a list of links to all R and Stata programs that were used in my publications (see Replication Files).

Research Topics

My research covers topics in political sociology and the sociology of education:

• Potential effects of ethnic “diversity” on social cohesion
• Opinion polarization
• Family socialization of political attitudes
• Ethnic educational inequalities and educational aspirations

Methods Focus

I focus on arbitrating between statistical methods and applied research.

I advocate for state-of-the-art causal inference methodology, including clearly defined causal research questions, flexible estimation methods and the usage of causal graphs. The experimental turn towards survey experiments has thus far mainly provided answers to causal questions on the micro level, and large-scale societal interventions guided by social scientific interest are often unfeasible. Thus, answering big sociological questions require causal inference from observational data. In my opinion, promising approaches to that effect include the emulation of randomized trials with observational data and the comparisons of estimates that would occur under different causal models.

I am fond of an encompassing descriptive methodology. I believe that the wealth of data and computing power that is now available to social scientists allows us to approach descriptive questions such as “has society polarized?” in novel ways, pooling various data sources and using a multitude of indicators, while also maintaining an eye for the details of specific cases. This allows us to answer descriptive questions in a more definitive way.