Survey Monkey and Mechanical Turk Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has become an important data collection tool for social scientists – especially experimental political science research. For a very low cost, one can collect thousands of responses, and there is a growing literature regarding the representativeness of the samples collected from MTurk (see this 2011 article by […]
Do individuals who earn higher income behave more like John Stewart Mill’s Economic Man? In other words, does wealth increase the likelihood of greedy predispositions and thus increased “unethical behavior”? New research published in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences seems to suggest this very result. Researchers from the the University of California, Berkeley and Rotman School of Management, […]
Hello Again Everyone, I have just received my copy of A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations by Clarke and Primo. I have not yet begun to read the book; however, the idea that the emphasis political scientists put on testing (formal) models and the way that practice may distort how we view […]
Hello All, I am still reading Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality by Morton and Williams and in Chapter 5 the authors discuss how randomization in experimental design actually works like an “idea” instrumental variable (IV) in terms of controlling for confounding variables. Essentially there are three conditions for an ideal IV: (1) Statistical […]
Hello Everyone, Causal Inference and Experimental Design One of the primary advantages of experiments in the social sciences is their ability to help us isolate causes. According to the Rubin Causal Model (RCM) also known as the Neyman-Rubin Causal Model (named after the researchers who developed and formalized the logic) we are essentially looking for […]