Leading social scientists consider cutting-edge quantitative and qualitative methodologies, analyse the logic underpinning an array of approaches to empirical enquiry, and discuss the practicalities of carrying out research in a variety of different contexts.
Most seminars run fortnightly, day and location to be confirmed. Half are held at the LSE (usually B813, which is on the eighth floor of Columbia House). Please see here for a map of the LSE|. The other half are held at the National Centre for Social Research, in Meeting Room A, 35 Northampton Square.
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Then Next MI Seminar
"Qualitative Validation of Quantitative Text Scaling"
Ken Benoit|
4pm Thursday, 24 May Columbia House 8.13. LSE
Statistical methods for scaling latent traits from political texts have received widespread attention in political science, typically for measuring the left-right policy positions of political actors. Validation and interpretation of these estimates typically involves a combination of a priori identification of dimensions present in texts examined, external comparison to independent data, as well as basic reasonability standards to establish face validity. In this paper, we apply a new benchmark to validating scaling estimates: qualitative human readings of the texts. Our validation compares human interpreted differences to statistical point estimates, as well as human perceptions of differences to statistically derived confidence intervals. For testing we draw on texts from a budget debate taking place in Ireland in late 2009, implementing a historically unprecedented level of austerity measures, represented by 14 speeches made in the Irish Dáil by key spokespersons from all of the major parties. We compare the human positioning of the texts to those of the “unsupervised” unidimensional Poisson scaling model of Slapin and Proksch (2008). We also compare human perceptions of difference to statistical conclusions reached by different approaches to computing statistical confidence intervals from the text scaling model, including non-parametric bootstrapping of the texts. Our results confirm the basic validity of the statistical estimates, and suggest that the most appropriate form of measuring error is non-parametric bootstrapping of the textual data rather than using confidence intervals that depend on unrealistic parametric assumptions of the model.
Upcoming MI Seminars
31 May
Benjamin Lauderdale| "Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation to Identify Many-Dimensional Item Response Models"
14 June
Svend Brinkmann|, "Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life"
28 June
Jen Tarr|, Title TBC
Previous MI Seminar
Jouni Kuha
4pm Thursday, 17 May Colombia House 8.13. LSE
(Joint work with Anders Skrondal and Stephen Fisher.)
Research questions for models for clustered data often concern the effects of cluster-level averages of individual-level variables. For example, data from a social survey might characterise neighbourhoods in terms of average income, ethnic composition etc. of people within each neighbourhood. Unless the true values of such averages are known from some other source, they are typically estimated by within-cluster sample estimates, using data on the subjects in the observed data. This incurs a measurement error bias when these estimates are used as explanatory variables in subsequent modelling, even if the individual observations are measured without error. The measurement error variance can, however, be estimated from within-cluster variation, using knowledge of the sampling design within each cluster, and we can then apply relatively standard measurement error methods to adjust for the error. This talk considers such estimation for multilevel models (generalised linear mixed models).
The methods are illustrated with models for political attitudes and behaviour, using data from the 2010 British Election Study.
"Does Direct Democracy Hurt Immigrant Minorities? Evidence from Naturalization Decisions in Switzerland"
Dominik Hangartner
|Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland, which were typically decided at the municipal level in citizen’ assemblies. Using panel data from 1,400 municipalities for the 1990-2010 period, we exploit recent Federal court rulings that led most municipalities to transfer the naturalization decision to an elected municipality council. We show that naturalization rates surged by 50% once legislatures, rather than citizens in popular referenda, decided on local naturalization applications. While citizens face no constraints against voting their prejudice, rejections are more costly for accountable legislators who are forced to justify potentially arbitrary rejections. Consistent with this mechanism, we find that the increase in naturalization rates caused by switching from direct to representative democracy was much stronger in areas where voters held stronger anti-immigrant preferences and among more marginalized immigrant groups from Yugoslavia and Turkey. Taken together our results suggest that direct democracy should no longer be used for naturalization decisions in order to reduce the risk of discriminatory rejections.
Highlights from previous seminars
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Patrick Sturgis, University of Southampton "The causal effect of schooling on social mobility: findings from a natural experiment"
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Francesco Lapenta, Roskilde Universitet "Geomedia based methods. Exploring the theoretical and methodological tenets of the localization and visualisation of mediated social relations with direct visualisations techniques."
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Arthur Spirling, Harvard University "Partisan Convergence in Executive-Legislative Interactions: Modeling Debates in the House of Commons, 1832–1915"
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Clive Seale, Centre for Health Sciences, Queen Mary University of London. Comparative Keyword Analysis: A Computer-Assisted Method for the Qualitative Analysis of Text.
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Uwe Flick, Alice Salomon University, Berlin. Triangulation Revisited – again: Challenges and Perspectives for Qualitative Research in Times of Mixed Methods
Speaker: Murray Lee, Sydney Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney School of Law. Police Image Work and the Manufacture of Public Confidence
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Jouni Kuha, LSE, Exit polls and seat predictions: Experiences from the 2010 General Election
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Nina Wakeford Reader in Sociology and ESRC Research Fellow, Goldsmiths College, University of London How far can we go? Experiments with visual methods
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Ahmet K. Süerdem, Professor of Business Administration, Istanbul Bilgi University, and visiting scholar, Institute of Social Psychology, LSE
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Dr Krista Gile (Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford) Network Model-Assisted Prevalence Estimation from Respondent-Driven Sampling Data.
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Carlos Barahona (Principal Statistician, Statistical Services Centre , University of Reading) Integrating statistical principles and participatory approaches in research: A recipe for getting the best of both worlds or the road to disaster?
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Bernd Beber (Assistant Professor of Politics, New York University)
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Raymond Duch (Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford)
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Andrew Gelman (Professor of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University) Why we (usually) don't have to worry about multiple comparisons.
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Dr Rajesh Shukla, National Centre for Applied Economic Research, Delhi; Probabilty Sampling India - the National Reading Habits Survey.
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Dr Ben Goldacre. 'Bad Science'.
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Stuart Shulman, University of Pittsburgh; Dr Matthias Trier, Technical University Berlin. 'Bridging methodologies? From collaborative coding to dynamic network analysis'
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Dr Rajesh Shukla, National Centre for Applied Economic Research, Delhi. 'Sampling strategies in India'
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Torun Dewan, LSE. 'The impact of individual and collective performance on ministerial tenure'
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Nikhil Shah, LSE (former MSc student). 'Rethinking genre and mapping musical taste: a multidimensional scaling analysis of web 2.0 data'
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Corinne Squire, University of East London. 'Using narrative methods: The case of HIV research'
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Peter Lynn, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex. 'The effect of interviewer continuity on measurement error in panel surveys'
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Patrick Lescure, IMAGE ALCESTE, Lyon. 'The ALCESTE content analysis method and its application in qualitative survey analysis'
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Colm O'Muircheartaigh, University of Chicago. 'Design decisions and disciplinary perspectives: the case of the US National Children's Survey'
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John Goldthorpe, University of Oxford and Jouni Kuha, LSE; 'Path Analysis for Discrete Variables: The Role of Education in Social Mobility'
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Simon Glendinning, LSE; 'Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenological Method and the Limits of Science'
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Conor Gearty, LSE; 'British Perceptions of National Security, Civil Liberties and Human Rights'
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Will Jennings, LSE; 'Measuring Performance in a Noisy World: The Potential Uses of Time Series Intervention Models for Evaluation of Policy and Public Sector Performance'
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Ed Fieldhouse, University of Manchester; 'The Effectiveness of Local Party Campaigns in 2005: Combining Evidence from Campaign Spending and Agent Survey Data'
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Sean Wallis, University College London; 'Can Computers Make Sense of Sentences? Text mining, problems and challenges'
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Andreas Dafinger, London School of Economics; 'What Goes Without Saying - Interdisciplinary Approaches to Descriptive and Normative Spatial Order: Studies in sub-Saharan Africa'
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Roger Jowell, City University; 'Measuring Attitudes across Nations and over Time'
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Hasok Chang, University College London; 'Who Will Judge the Judges? Challenges in the Validation of Measurement Standards'
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Saadi Lahlou, EdF & EHESS Paris; 'Fine Grained Behavioural Observation in the Long Term: Studying Experimental Reality'
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Edmund Chattoe, University of Oxford; 'What is Simulation and What is it Used For?'
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Guy Cook, Open University; 'Genetically Modified Language: Investigating the Discourse of a "Public" Debate'
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Heather Hamill, University of Oxford; 'Streetwise: An Ethnographic Study of Taxi Drivers in Belfast, N. Ireland and New York, USA'
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Roberto Franzosi, University of Reading; 'From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data and Social Science'
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Peter Abell, London School of Economics; 'Narrative Explanation: An Alternative to Variable-Centered Explanation?'
For more details, please contact Dr Sally Stares, J.S.Tarr@lse.ac.uk|.