Panel Conditioning or SOCRATIC EFFECT REVISITED: 99 Citations, but is there Theoretical Progress?

In a paper published as early as 1987 by Jagodzinski, Kühnel and Schmidt on attitude measurement in a three wave panel study, we established empirically a general orientation toward foreign employees in Western Germany called “Gastarbeiter”. These items have been continuously used from 1980 till now in the ALLBUS studies (Wasmer and Hochman 2019). In this paper, we have analyzed how the citation, explanation and modeling of the Socratic effect for explaining changes in panel data developed over time starting with the original paper of Jagodzinski et al. (1987). According to Google Scholar retrieved at 24.1.2019, 99 citations were found, which are all listed in the Online Supplementary. From the beginning on, there were discussions on eight different alternative model specifications derived from varying theoretical backgrounds, which all fitted the data (Jagodzinski et al. 1987, 1988, 1990; Steyer and Schmitt 1990; Saris and van der Putte 1988; Saris and Hartmann 1990). Till 2018, these authors continued with their model specifications in their publications, whereas the other authors citing the Socratic effect completely ignored the issue of the most adequate model specification. They used just the standard autoregressive model and in most cases did not discuss in a detailed way how the Socratic effect should guide the parameter restrictions in the model. In this paper, we take into account the criticism of Hamaker et al. (2015) of the autoregressive and the autoregressive cross-lagged model and their proposal of an random intercept autoregressive model as a more adequate alternative to separate within and between variance. We have used the attitude toward foreigners module of the GESIS ACCESS panel (Wagner et al. 2014) to specify and test how the Socratic effect can be taken into account in this model. The differences between the results of the autoregressive model and the random intercept model are substantial. Those differences refer to the sign, the strength and the significance of the coefficients and are similar to those found by Hamaker et al. (2015) and Kühnel and Mays (2019).