Publications

Abstract: The cost of housing in Ontario has steadily increased over the past decade, although the most dramatic increase occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the average Ontarian who did not already own their own home, this dramatic surge in prices effectively locked them out of the housing market. This […]

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a three-item test that is widely used in survey research and by academic researchers to measure cognition, specifically reflection. In recent years, researchers have grown increasingly concerned about the utility of the CRT, developing several alternatives tests that strongly warrant consideration.

Headline Findings 1. Liberals lead in Waterloo Region in spring, federally and provincially. Federally, 28% of all respondents and 49% of all decided respondents said they would vote Liberal. The latter number is an increase of 11 percentage points over the Liberals’ 2019 results in Waterloo Region. 2. Provincially, the […]

Informed Consent Forms (ICFs) are an essential component of survey research used to provide participants with necessary information and the impact of participating in the study. This methods note explores the impact of ICF length on participant outcomes and participant preferences.

Elections such as the UK “Brexit” referendum, Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, and the growth of the Alternative for Germany party in Germany have led to concerns about the viability of liberal democratic institutions. Voters appear increasingly drawn to populists. However, before Brexit, and before Trump, there was Toronto […]

Fear of crime is studied extensively as a potential contributor to the decline of a community. People who fear crime are expected to stay indoors and seek shelter, which then encourages more crime, setting in motion a vicious cycle that ultimately bodes ill for community engagement. However, there is little […]

Survey-based evidence gathered over the past several decades suggests that substantial minorities of the Canadian public associate immigrants with crime and crime with immigrants. In this note, we ask whether the myth of immigrant criminality imputed to the public is not itself a myth. We question whether the connection is […]

In this work we offer results drawn from a dataset of a post-provincial election survey in eight Canadian provinces to assess the impact of party system congruency on partisanship. We postulate that partisanship will be more likely and stronger in provinces that share a similar political party system to the […]

Unnever and Cullen (2010) argue that there is a “culturally universal” relationship between racial/ethnic/immigrant animus and general punitiveness.  Because this thesis seems ill-fitting to Canada’s multicultural society, we re-examine the connection in Canada between punitiveness and intolerance associated with new immigrants. We do this by expanding their multivariate analyses of […]

City-county separation is a form of governance in which rural and urban areas are formally separated. Although these areas were once thought to be distinct because of their diverse sets of values, economies, labour trends, and ways of life, more recently, and in response to regional growth, governments have begun […]