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open thread on critical realism
Folks at the Chicago ethnography conference (and this blog) were not happy with critical realism. Use this as an opportunity to defend/attack. Or even just to explain it in terms that humans can...
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economists and survey skepticism
Over at Evil Twin, Nicolai Foss gently chides Bloom and Van Reenen for publishing a paper in the AER proceedings called “New Approaches to Surveying Organizations.” The issue is the validity of survey...
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kieran healy on the philosophy profession
Our friend Kieran has a series of posts on his research at Leiter Reports, the leading academic philosophy blog. Aside from writing on economic sociology, Kieran has begun an ambitious project...
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the 2016 presidential race
Over at Salon, Alex Pareene made fun of people who try to guess presidential politics. Fair enough, there are a lot of lame guesses. However, there are patterns. It’s not as hard as you think....
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code for the add health data set
Michael Bishop, of the Permutations blog, has set up a web site to archive R code for Add Health. Rather than have every Add Health researcher reinvent the wheel, he wants to sponsor an open source...
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two performativity questions
These questions came up during orgtheory training last week. I did not have good answers: A lot of performativity research focuses on stock options, less on futures. Why? Are there good studies of...
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event history analysis question
Let’s say you are doing discrete logit event history analysis. You are simply pooling all cases and time periods and just estimating a logit , where Y = failure event. See Yamaguchi’s (1991) book,...
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stupid statistician tricks
Here’s a conversation I’ve had a few times with statisticians: Statistician: ” … and these simulations show how my results work.” Me: “What does your research tell us about a sample of, say, a few...
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a response to andrew gelman on the statistics discipline, but not scott...
On Friday, I write a semi-humorous post about the interaction between statisticians and non-statisticians. The issue that brought it up was that sometimes statisticians like to work on asymptotic...
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ethnography is totally generalizable
I’m still mulling over some of the issues raised at the Chicago ethnography and causal inference conference. For example, a lot of ethnographers say “sure, we can’t generalize but ….” The reason they...
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hey, it’s scale free and … and …
A focus of network research since, say 1999 or so, has been to identify “laws” that generate large networks with certain properties.* For example, the small world network is built by rewiring a grid....
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response to gelman on retractions in science
Last week, I argued that retractions are good for science. Thomas Basbøll correctly points out that retractions are hard. Nobody wants to retract. Good point, but my argument wasn’t about how easy it...
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stata bleg: text matching
Attention Stata people (esp. Sr. Rossman): Let’s say I have a data base of articles. I have a variable with the author’s name. Then I want to match the author’s name with other data (e.g., Fabio Rojas...
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america is not getting lonelier
A key empirical question in social network analysis is whether Americans have more or less friends over time. Famously, Robert Putnam argued that indeed, we were “bowling alone.” In contrast, critics...
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problems vs. theory
What makes a study interesting? Is it the empirical phenomena that we study or is it the theoretical contribution? For those of who are really paying attention (and I applaud you if you are), you’ll...
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selection bias in surverys – recent developments?
A common problem in social research is selection bias – the people who choose to respond to your survey may be systematically different than the population. We have some methods, like the Heckman...
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congressional district data bleg
What is the go to source for 2008 or 2010 Congressional district demographic data? A nice table with summary stats for each district would be great. Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz
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take this orgtheory survey!
Jesse Fagan, an orgtheory PhD student, asked that we publicize a pilot study that he’s conducting. He wants to know how orgtheory scholars percieve journals. Please use Firefox or Chrome to complete...
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why obama may lose the popular vote in one simple picture
A few days ago, I noted that Obama is slightly behind in the polls mainly because of the South. If it weren’t for the South, Obama would easily have about 51% of the vote in rest of the country. Kieran...
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