This research note presents the findings of changes in the gender gap in informal care provision and caregiver burden during the Spring 2020 COVID‐19 lockdown in the Netherlands. Government measures in response to the pandemic strongly restricted informal caregivers in providing help and care to persons with health‐related needs. At the same time, formal care was scaled back and informal caregivers' urge to help their loved ones was likely higher than before the pandemic. Generally, women pick up a larger share of informal care and experience more caregiver burden. We assessed whether the COVID‐19 pandemic affected the gender gaps in informal caregiving by analyzing unique data on Dutch informal caregivers (N = 1672 caregiving situations in 1196 respondents). Results showed that women, compared to men, were more likely to have stopped and reduced caregiving, but also to have cared more during the pandemic. Moreover, based on longitudinally comparing levels during and before the lockdown, we found that the gender gap in caregiver burden narrowed down, especially because burden decreased for women. This means that the caregiver burden was more equally distributed among women and men during the Spring 2020 COVID‐19 lockdown than before.

Due to the growing significance of international studies, the need for tools to assess the equivalence of items is pressing. Web probing, which is implementing verbal probing techniques traditionally used in cognitive interviewing in online surveys, is a method to complement quantitative techniques to establish equivalence of items in crosscultural research. We illustrate this approach by assessing the question of 'how important it is that government authorities respect and protect the rights of minorities', which was originally used in the International Social Survey Program, for respondents in five countries (Germany, Britain, the U.S., Mexico, and Spain). First, participants answered this question using a 7-point Likert scale. Then they wrote freely what types of minorities they had thought of. Whether country differences in the response patterns can be interpreted substantially depends partially on how similarly the term 'minorities' is understood across these five contexts. Our results show that people in the participating countries have slightly different kinds of 'minorities' in mind.

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Informal caregiving, meaning taking health-related care of an older and/or disabled person in the personal network, often has consequences for paid work. Classically scholars focus on two strategies of informal caregivers to adapt employment: stopping and reducing working hours. Two other, but neglected, plausible strategies may similarly have career consequences, namely changing jobs and becoming self-employed. We first assess the theoretical idea that a work-care conflict is a condition for choosing a work adaption strategy. Second, we theoretically and empirically explore a life course (i.e., timing) and gender perspective on strategies to adapt paid work. We use detailed Dutch retrospective data on informal caregiving, collected within LISS panel (N=3,676 caregiving episodes of 2,114 caregivers). Based on multilevel logistic regression models, we find that caregivers who felt that they had difficulties combining work and care, were more likely to choose any strategy. Especially caregivers who started to provide care at the age of 24 or younger were more likely to reduce working hours or change jobs. In the early family formation stage (25-34 years), women were more likely to reduce working hours, while in early middle age (45-54 years) men were more likely to stop working.

Web probing is a valuable tool to assess the validity and comparability of survey items. It uses different probe types—such as category-selection probes and specific probes—to inquire about different aspects of an item. Previous web probing studies often asked one probe type per item, but research situations exist where it might be preferable to test potentially problematic items with multiple probes. However, the response behavior might be affected by two factors: question order and the visual presentation of probes on one screen versus multiple screens as well as their interaction. In this study, we report evidence from a web experiment that was conducted with 532 respondents from Germany in September 2013. Experimental groups varied by screen number (1 versus 2) and probe order (category-selection probe first versus specific probe first). We assessed the impact of these manipulations on several indicators of response quality, probe answer content, and the respondents’ motivation with logistic regressions and two-way ANOVAs. We reveal that multiple mechanisms push response behavior in this context: perceived response burden, the focus of attention, the need for justification, and verbal context effects. We find that response behavior in the condition with two screens and category-selection probe first outperforms all other experimental conditions. We recommend this implementation in all but one scenario: if the goal is to test an item that includes a key term with a potentially too large lexical scope, we recommend starting with a specific probe but on the same screen as the category-selection probe.