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GSS and ANES: Alike Yet Different

The General Social Survey (GSS), run out of National Opinion Research Center at University of Chicago, and American National Election Studies (ANES), which until recently ran out of University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, are two preeminent surveys tracking over-time trends in social and political attitudes, beliefs and

Another Coding Issue in the ANES Cumulative File

Technology has made it easy to analyze data. However, we have paid inadequate attention to developing automation in data analysis software that pays more attention to potential problems with the data itself. For example, I was recently exploring how interviewer rated political knowledge varied by respondent’s level of education

Delay Shooting the Help

Procrastination Procrastination, delaying without reason doing something that one has to do, makes little sense. If the voluntary delay also causes anxiety, which in most cases it does, it may be particularly pointless. Yet, a lot of people procrastinate at least some of the time. Why? One can make a

Structural Inequality

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, recently spoke about social mobility. He said, My particular focus is on inter-generational social mobility – the extent to which a person’s income or social class is influenced by the income or social class of their parents. Social mobility is a measure of

On Love

Mothers spend a great deal of their time and energy on their kids, especially newborns. They spend far more time thinking and working to ensure the welfare of another human being (their kid) than most humans will spend on any other human being, say their romantic partner or sibling. Add

Idealog: 'Automatically' Summarize Articles and Judicial Opinions

While many of the articles and judicial opinions are never cited, a system can be established to build summaries of those that are. The idea is straightforward- harvest sentences just before the citation in academic articles citing the article of interest. One can learn from the summaries of the articles

The Perils of Balancing Scales

Randomization of scale order (balancing) across respondents is common practice. It is done to ‘cancel’ errors generated by ‘satisficers’ who presumably pick the first option on a scale without regard to content. The practice is assumed to have no impact on the propensity of satisficers to pick the first option,

Join Or Die

How to join datasets correctly is well understood. But we continue to do it badly. Here are notes on how to do fuzzy joins and long to wide transformations starting with some general preprocessing advice. Preprocessing keys and Tables 1. Remove stuff irrelevant to matching, e.g., font style, spaces,