Alex Patzina
I am a social scientist working as an Assistant Professor (Akademischer Rat) at the Chair of Sociology, with special emphasis on Social Inequalities at the university of Bamberg. Moreover, I work as a senior researcher at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in an interdisciplinary group of economists and sociologists at the department “Education, Training and Employment over the Life Course”. In July 2019, I received my doctorate from the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. In February 2024, I received a postdoc scholarship from the Daimler and Benz foundation to foster my research on social trust in Germany.
With my research, I aim to increase our understanding of how social stratification processes in important life domains influence change and inequalities in society. In doing so, I mainly adopt a life course perspective to investigate how inequalities in educational decision-making, social trust, health (determinants) and well-being emerge. Moreover, I intensified my work on how inequalities in health and wellbeing interrelate with educational decision-making. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was able to acquire two grants (German Research Foundation (DFG) and Hans Böckler Foundation) enabling me to scrutinize how the pandemic influences health (determinants), social trust and educational decision-making. Results of my work have been published in peer-reviewed national (e.g., Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie or Zeitschrift für Soziologie) and international journals (e.g., Acta Sociologica, The British Journal of Sociology, European Sociological Review, European Societies or Socius).
On this website you can find information on my ongoing and past third-party funded projects, publications, teaching experience and my CV.
Current Research
COVID-19 and Gender Differences in Social Trust: Causal Evidence from the First Wave of the Pandemic
Socius
(together with: Matthias Collischon)
We use representative household panel data from Germany and employ a difference-in-difference design. Although social trust increased during the first phase of the pandemic, the difference-in-difference analysis reveals that high incidences have a negative effect on social trust. We show that females drive this effect. The negative effect is especially large among highly educated women and women with poor pre-COVID-19 health. Overall, our results suggest that increasing incidences signal noncompliance of unknown others.
Link to study: https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231221117
Assessing the Importance of Sample Choice and Selectivity for Sex Segregation in College Majors: A Replication of Ochsenfeld (2016)
Zeitschrift für Soziologie
(together with: Carina Toussaint)
Our replication study uses panel data (National Educational Panel Study, NEPS-SC4) that allow adjustment for the two sources of bias through the application of a pretransition preference measure and inverse probability weighting. Our analyses demonstrate the validity of prior research. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the explanatory power of the overall model and the role of constraints for sex segregation in majors vary across the propensity of sample inclusion, thereby demonstrating the importance of sample composition for testing sociological theories.
Link to study: https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsoz-2023-2029
Two pandemic years greatly reduced young people’s life satisfaction: evidence from a comparison with pre-COVID-19 panel data
European Sociological Research
(together with: Martin Neugebauer, Hans Dietrich, Malte Sandner)
We we compared the 2-year development of life satisfaction of German high school students during COVID-19 (N = 2,698) with the development in prepandemic cohorts (N = 4,834) with a difference-in-differences design. We found a decline in life satisfaction in winter 2020/2021 (Cohen’s d = -0.40) that was approximately three times stronger than that in the general population and persisted until winter 2021/2022. Young people found some restrictions particularly burdensome, especially travel restrictions, bans on cultural events, and the closure of bars/clubs.
Link to study: https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcad077