Assembling datasets is crucial for advancing social science research, but researchers who construct datasets often face difficult decisions with little guidance. Once public, these datasets are sometimes used without proper consideration of their creators’ choices and how these affect the validity of inferences. To support both data creators and data users, we discuss the strengths, limitations, and implications of various data collection methodologies and strategies, showing how seemingly trivial methodological differences can significantly impact conclusions. The lessons we distill build on the process of constructing three cross-national datasets on education systems. Despite their common focus, these datasets differ in the dimensions they measure, as well as their definitions of key concepts, coding thresholds and other assumptions, types of coders, and sources. From these lessons, we develop and propose general guidelines for dataset creators and users aimed at enhancing transparency, replicability, and valid inferences in the social sciences.

Debates about the nature of a deepening educational divide in politics tend to focus on education as an individual-level characteristic, whether as a marker of skill endowment, an experience instilling certain values, or the consequence of self-selection based on earlier socialization. We instead look at how education (both level and field) relates to political outcome variables as a feature of social networks. We take cleavage-theoretical perspectives on the educational divide one step further by treating individuals not as atomistic entities but as embedded in social structure. Using original surveys from Germany, the UK, and Switzerland, we show that educational divides are diminished in the presence of countervailing networks. Looking at vote preference and indicators of social closure like group identity, this study suggests that segregated social networks contribute to stabilizing contemporary cleavage structures, even as the mass social and political organizations that shaped twentieth century cleavage politics have declined.

We construct moduli spaces of objects in an abelian category satisfying some finiteness hypotheses. Our approach is based on the work of Artin and Zhang [Algebr. Represent. Theory 4 (2001), 305–394] and the intrinsic construction of moduli spaces for stacks developed by Alper, Halpern-Leistner and Heinloth [Invent. Math. 234 (2023), 949–1038].

In this paper, it is shown that for every lattice $\Gamma \subset PSL_2(\mathbb {R})$, there exists a $c>0$ such that for any $0 \leq \gamma <c$, the sequence $p h(n^{1+\gamma })$ equidistributes for any $p \in \Gamma \backslash PSL_2(\mathbb {R})$, where h is the horocycle flow. This makes modest progress towards a conjecture of Shah and generalizes a result of Venkatesh [Sparse equidistribution problems, period bounds, and subconvexity. Ann. of Math. (2) 172(2) (2010), 989–1094], who established the same equidistribution for co-compact lattices. The proof uses a dichotomy between good equidistribution estimates and approximability of $\{p h(t), t \leq T \}$ by closed horocycles of small period.

The ongoing development of a Swiss Health Data Space (SHDS) presents an opportunity to transform health delivery and care by enabling large-scale secondary health research. The successful implementation of the SHDS depends on its trustworthiness, as public trust is closely linked to public participation in data-sharing initiatives. We conducted four focus groups across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland to identify public expectations and requirements related to the attributes that define a trustworthy SHDS. The participants discussed four fictitious case studies on: (1) consent management; (2) record linkage via the national social security number; (3) national data coordination center; and (4) cross-border data exchange. To best inform Swiss policy, we held a panel discussion with patient experts and healthcare professionals to translate the focus group findings into governance and public communication recommendations. Policy recommendations are proposed based on insights from the fictitious case studies discussed with participants, accompanied by guidance on implementation measures that contribute to proactively building trust in the development of the SHDS. Communication recommendations are further provided, highlighting that the success of the SHDS will depend on early and continuous trustworthy public communication efforts that actively engage the Swiss public, address their concerns, and foster support throughout its development. Overarching these efforts will be a foundational governance approach that meaningfully involves relevant stakeholders and members of the Swiss public, while allocating appropriate responsibility to maintain trustworthiness of the SHDS.

The study explored monolingual German-speaking preschoolers’ skills in accusative and dative case marking with local prepositions, the types of errors they made, and whether age can explain their performance. To test the ability of preschoolers (n = 59, age range 4;5–6;5) to mark case assigned by one-case and two-case prepositions, a comprehension and a production task were designed. The children in general performed more accurately on accusative than on dative and on case marking with one-case prepositions than with two-case prepositions. A general production/comprehension asymmetry was not attested. However, the participants revealed the most difficulty in producing dative case and overgeneralized accusative to dative case contexts. Age affected the children’s case marking skills, with older children performing more accurately on one-case prepositions than younger children. Thus, the ability to mark case assigned by prepositions in German, especially dative case, is not completed by school entry.