| 1. |
- Bader, Felix, et al.
(författare)
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On the Transportability of Laboratory Results
- 2021
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Ingår i: Sociological Methods & Research. - : Sage Publications. - 0049-1241 .- 1552-8294. ; 50:3, s. 1452-1481
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The “transportability” of laboratory findings to other instances than the original implementation entails the robustness of rates of observed behaviors and estimated treatment effects to changes in the specific research setting and in the sample under study. In four studies based on incentivized games of fairness, trust, and reciprocity, we evaluate (1) the sensitivity of laboratory results to locally recruited student-subject pools, (2) the comparability of behavioral data collected online and, under varying anonymity conditions, in the laboratory, (3) the generalizability of student-based results to the broader population, and (4), with a replication at Amazon Mechanical Turk, the stability of laboratory results across research contexts. For the class of laboratory designs using interactive games as measurement instruments of prosocial behavior we find that rates of behavior and the exact behavioral differences between decision situations do not transport beyond specific implementations. Most clearly, data obtained from standard participant pools differ significantly from those from the broader population. This undermines the use of empirically motivated laboratory studies to establish descriptive parameters of human behavior. Directions of the behavioral differences between games, in contrast, are remarkably robust to changes in samples and settings. Moreover, we find no evidence for either anonymity effects nor mode effects potentially biasing laboratory measurement. These results underscore the capacity of laboratory experiments to establish generalizable causal effects in theory-driven designs.
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| 2. |
- Barban, Nicola, et al.
(författare)
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Causal Effects of the Timing of Life-course Events : Age at Retirement and Subsequent Health
- 2020
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Ingår i: Sociological Methods & Research. - : Sage Publications. - 0049-1241 .- 1552-8294. ; 49:1, s. 216-249
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this article, we combine the extensive literature on the analysis of life-course trajectories as sequences with the literature on causal inference and propose a new matching approach to investigate the causal effect of the timing of life-course events on subsequent outcomes. Our matching approach takes into account pre-event confounders that are both time-independent and time-dependent as well as life-course trajectories. After matching, treated and control individuals can be compared using standard statistical tests or regression models. We apply our approach to the study of the consequences of the age at retirement on subsequent health outcomes, using a unique data set from Swedish administrative registers. Once selectivity in the timing of retirement is taken into account, effects on hospitalization are small, while early retirement has negative effects on survival. Our approach also allows for heterogeneous treatment effects. We show that the effects of early retirement differ according to preretirement income, with higher income individuals tending to benefit from early retirement, while the opposite is true for individuals with lower income.
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| 3. |
- Do, Salomé, et al.
(författare)
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The Augmented Social Scientist. : Using Sequential Transfer Learning to Annotate Millions of Texts with Human-Level Accuracy
- 2022
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Ingår i: Sociological Methods and Research. - New York : Sage Publications. - 0049-1241 .- 1552-8294.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The last decade witnessed a spectacular rise in the volume of available textual data. With this new abundance came the question of how to analyze it. In the social sciences, scholars mostly resorted to two well-established approaches, human annotation on sampled data on the one hand (either performed by the researcher, or outsourced to microworkers), and quantitative methods on the other. Each approach has its own merits – a potentially very fine-grained analysis for the former, a very scalable one for the latter – but the combination of these two properties has not yielded highly accurate results so far. Leveraging recent advances in sequential transfer learning, we demonstrate via an experiment that an expert can train a precise, efficient automatic classifier in a very limited amount of time. We also show that, under certain conditions, expert-trained models produce better annotations than humans themselves. We demonstrate these points using a classic research question in the sociology of journalism, the rise of a “horse race” coverage of politics. We conclude that recent advances in transfer learning help us augment ourselves when analyzing unstructured data.
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| 4. |
- Engzell, Per
(författare)
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What Do Books in the Home Proxy For? A Cautionary Tale
- 2021
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Ingår i: Sociological Methods & Research. - : SAGE Publications. - 0049-1241 .- 1552-8294. ; 50:4, s. 1487-1514
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In studies of educational achievement, students' self-reported number of books in the family home is a frequently used proxy for social, cultural, and economic background. Absent hard evidence about what this variable captures or how well, its use has been motivated by strong associations with student outcomes. I show that these associations rest on two types of endogeneity: Low achievers accrue fewer books and are also prone to underestimate their number. The conclusion is substantiated both by comparing reports by students and their parents and by the fact that girls report on average higher numbers despite being similar to boys on other measures of social background. The endogenous bias is large enough to overturn classical attenuation bias; it distorts cross-country patterns and invalidates many common study designs. These findings serve as a caution against overreliance on standard regression assumptions and contribute to ongoing debates about the empirical robustness of social science.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Manzo, Gianluca, et al.
(författare)
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Heuristics, Interactions, and Status Hierarchies : An Agent-based Model of Deference Exchange
- 2015
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Ingår i: Sociological Methods & Research. - : Sage Publications. - 0049-1241 .- 1552-8294. ; 44:2, s. 329-387
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Since Merton’s classical analysis of cumulative advantage in science, it has been observed that status hierarchies display a sizable disconnect between actors’ quality and rank and that they become increasingly asymmetric over time, without, however, turning into winner-take-all structures. In recent years, formal models of status hierarchies tried to account for these facts by combining two micro-level, counterbalancing mechanisms: “social influence” (supposedly driving inequality) and the desire for “reciprocation in deferential gestures” (supposedly limiting inequality). In the article, we adopt as empirical benchmark basic features that are common to most distributions of status indicators (e.g., income, academic prestige, wealth, social ties) and argue that previous formal models were only partially able to reproduce such macro-level patterns. We then introduce a novel agent-based computational model of deferential gestures that improves on the realism of previous models by introducing heuristic-based decision making, actors’ heterogeneity, and status homophily in social interactions. We systematically and extensively study the model’s parameter space and consider a few variants to determine under which conditions the macroscopic patterns of interest are more likely to appear. We find that specific forms of status-based heterogeneity in actors’ propensity to interact with status-dissimilar others are needed to generate status hierarchies that best approximate these macroscopic features.
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| 7. |
- Markovsky, Barry, et al.
(författare)
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Comparing Direct and Indirect Measures of Just Rewards
- 2012
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Ingår i: Sociological Methods & Research. - : SAGE Publications. - 0049-1241 .- 1552-8294. ; 41:1, s. 199-216
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We offer the first comparison between "direct" and "indirect" methods for measuring perceptions of distributive justice in reward allocations. The direct method simply asks respondents what they would consider to be a fair salary for a particular person in a given set of circumstances. In contrast, the indirect method infers fair salaries from respondents' judgments about the relative unfairness of hypothetical salaries. The particular indirect method that we will assess is a vignette survey technique pioneered by Jasso and Rossi (1977) and used in a number of more recent publications. The vignettes describe characteristics of a hypothetical employee, with the objective of deriving what respondents believe to be the just reward for that employee. Our experimental test suggests that the two methods yield incompatible results and that neither is immune to bias. The indirect method also suffers from a type of specification error that leads to untenable results. We conclude by suggesting directions for new research to gain a better understanding of these problems and, ultimately, to circumvent them.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Munck, Ingrid, et al.
(författare)
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Measurement Invariance in Comparing Attitudes Toward Immigrants Among Youth Across Europe in 1999 and 2009: The Alignment Method Applied to IEA CIVED and ICCS
- 2018
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Ingår i: Sociological Methods & Research. - : SAGE Publications. - 0049-1241 .- 1552-8294. ; 47:4, s. 687-728
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study applies the alignment method, a technique for assessing measurement equivalence across many groups, to the analysis of adolescents' support for immigrants' rights in a pooled data set from the 1999 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Civic Education Study and the 2009 IEA International Civics and Citizenship Education Study. We examined measurement invariance across 92 groups (country by cohort by gender), finding that a five-item scale was statistically well-grounded for unbiased group comparisons despite the presence of significant noninvariance in some groups. Using the resulting group mean scores, we compared European youth's attitudes finding that female students had more positive attitudes than did male students across countries and cohorts. An analysis of countries participating in both studies revealed that students in most countries demonstrated more positive attitudes in 2009 than in 1999. The alignment methodology makes it feasible to comprehensively assess measurement invariance in large data sets and to compute aligned factor scores for the full sample that can update existing databases for more efficient further secondary analysis and with metainformation concerning measurement invariance.
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| 10. |
- Spaiser, Viktoria, et al.
(författare)
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Identifying Complex Dynamics in Social Systems : A New Methodological Approach Applied to Study School Segregation
- 2018
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Ingår i: Sociological Methods & Research. - : SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC. - 0049-1241 .- 1552-8294. ; 47:2, s. 103-135
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is widely recognized that segregation processes are often the result of complex nonlinear dynamics. Empirical analyses of complex dynamics are however rare, because there is a lack of appropriate empirical modeling techniques that are capable of capturing complex patterns and nonlinearities. At the same time, we know that many social phenomena display nonlinearities. In this article, we introduce a new modeling tool in order to partly fill this void in the literature. Using data of all secondary schools in Stockholm county during the years 1990 to 2002, we demonstrate how the methodology can be applied to identify complex dynamic patterns like tipping points and multiple phase transitions with respect to segregation. We establish critical thresholds in schools' ethnic compositions, in general, and in relation to various factors such as school quality and parents' income, at which the schools are likely to tip and become increasingly segregated.
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