Varia: On Thesis Methodology, Reviewers, and the GDPR

Abstract

This issue begins with two articles in ‘The methodology of my thesis’ section, one in English, the other in French. This section is particularly important to us because we are committed to publishing the work of all young researchers who propose an article, when both it and they are ready, and to reworking the text as much is necessary before publication. Yet when it comes to recounting the methodological adventure of a PhD, choices have to be made, and sometimes they are by no means simple. Ultimately the articles in this section are quite different from each other: some emphasize a specific methodological question or issue, while others explore the combination of techniques and fieldwork used during the doctoral research. In this issue, Pierre Blavier’s article falls into the second category. In it, he documents the way in which he combined the analysis of quantitative data on the effects of the economic crisis on Spanish households with an ethno-compatibility study. Julien Audemard’s article, on the other hand, is entirely dedicated to analyzing the way in which he implemented a survey technique rarely used in electoral analysis, a questionnaire administered by snowball sampling. Exchanges with the authors who accept this mode of operation and agree to rework their articles as a result are all the more fruitful because they draw on detailed and constructive comments proposed by the reviewers, who cannot be thanked enough. This first editorial of 2020 is the opportunity to personally thank all those colleagues who have given their time and their expertise to the BMS and its authors: Rolf Becker, Camille Bedock, Bruno Cautrès, François Dubet, Julien Duval, André-Paul Frognier, Andrew Gelman, Céline Gofette, Michael Grenfell, Catherine Guaspare, François Guillemette, Gary King, Anne Le Huerou, Iasonas Lamprianou, Christophe Lejeune, Moreno Mancosu, John Levi Martin, Nonna Mayer, Julian Mischi, Marianne Modak, Etienne Ollion, Adrien Papuchon, Tristan Poullaouec, Farah Ramzy, Mathew Stange, Isabelle Sommier, Romain Tiquet, Virginie Van Ingelgom, along with the members of the editorial committee. This issue also contains an article by Christophe Brochier who discusses a method often used to measure discrimination: Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and a collective article by Oliver Brust, Michael Hader and Sabine Hader, who document their work exploring one of the possible causes of nonresponse in survey studies: procrastination. Finally, this issue concludes with a short text in which Marie Plessz describes how she implemented the GDPR (General Data Protection Rules) as part of a masters course on quantitative sociology. She explains the choices she made developing a protocol, validated by the data protection delegate at her research institute, which allowed them to conduct their surveys in perfect accordance with the law. This text is particularly important to us because it has become essential that everyone take up the questions that the