Research
Research
In its research and teaching, the Department of Government primarily focuses on comparative and Austrian politics. Its research is concerned with political behaviour, political actors, such as political parties and politicians, political institutions, the processes governed by these institutions, as well as their outcomes. It includes work on political participation, voting behaviour, parties and party competition, coalition politics and Austrian politics in general and is mostly based on rationalist and behavioural approaches.
Our goal is to conduct high-level, internationally competitive research in the area of Comparative Politics with the collaboration of international project partners and research networks. At the Faculty of Social Sciences the department is mainly engaged in the key research area ''Political Competition and Communication: Democratic Representation in Changing Societies'.
The department’s approach places it in the discipline’s empirical-analytical core and is mostly based on quantitative social science methods. To map empirical phenomena accurately, researcher in the department focus on the continuous development of survey design, as well as on the analysis of empirical data by applying the best suited statistical model. The department aims to achieve the best work on Austrian politics and to make important contributions to the international academic literature on Comparative Government and Politics.
An overview of current publications and activities at the department can be found below and on the personal websites of our team.
Publications
Random intercept EFA of personality scales
- Author(s)
- Julian Aichholzer
- Abstract
Previous research suggests that simple structure CFAs of Big Five personality measures fail to accurately reflect the scale’s complex factorial structure, whereas EFAs generally perform better. Another strand of research suggests that acquiescence or uniform response bias masks the scale’s “true” factorial structure. Random Intercept EFA (RI-EFA) captures acquiescence as well as the complex item-factor structure typical for personality measures. It is applied to the NEO-FFI and the BFI scale to test whether an accurate model-to-data fit can be achieved and whether the “clarity” of the factorial structure improves. The results lend confidence in the general effectiveness of RI-EFA whenever acquiescence bias is an issue. Example Mplus code is provided for replication.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Journal of Research in Personality
- Volume
- 53
- Pages
- 1-4
- No. of pages
- 4
- ISSN
- 0092-6566
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.07.001
- Publication date
- 12-2014
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 504 Sociology, 501018 Psychological diagnostics, 501004 Differential psychology
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Psychology, Social Psychology
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/a5190323-d8dc-4ca0-a985-b98db6fb56e0