Two Awards for Social Scientists at the University of Mannheim

Dr. Leah von der Heyde, computational social scientist and survey methodologist at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, has been granted this year’s Lorenz von Stein Award for her thesis titled “Who Counts? Survey Data Quality in the Age of AI”. The Lorenz von Stein Foundation annually awards the prize for the best dissertation from the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim. The prize money is 1,000 euros.

In her dissertation, Leah von der Heyde investigates whether and under which conditions Large Language Models (LLMs) can be leveraged in survey research by providing empirical evidence of the potentials and limits of their applications in European contexts. The dissertation finds that, without customization, LLMs appear infeasible for the prediction and classification of public opinion not just in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of efficiency. 

MZES project director Dr. Sandra Morgenstern has been awarded this year’s prize from the Prof. Dr Anna and Prof. Dr Jörg Jiri Bojanovsky Foundation. The Bojanovsky Foundation supports early-career researchers at the University of Mannheim in the field of empirical research into social, inter-individual or cultural processes. 

The social scientist was honoured for her study “Credibility and/or anxiety – The moderators of political information on migration” (open access). The paper, published in the internationally renowned journal Social Science Research, is based on Morgenstern’s field research in Nigeria for her doctoral thesis. Her study tests a theoretical model from psychology in application to political sociology using experimental methods. A key finding is that irregular migration can be reduced with the help of information campaigns in countries of origin. However, according to Morgenstern, the decisive factors are the content, the emotions conveyed and most of all, the credibility of the source of the message.