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26 September 2005

Applied Statistics - Xihong Lin

Mike Kellermann

This week's Applied Statistics Workshop presentation will be given by Professor Xihong Lin of the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Professor Lin received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of Washington. She is one of the newest members of the Harvard statistical community, having just moved to Harvard from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She has published widely in journals including the American Journal of Epidemiology, Biometrika, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association. She currently serves as the co-ordinating editor of Biometrics. Among her other awards, she has been recognized as an outstanding young scholar by both the American Statistical Association and the American Public Health Association.

Professor Lin's presentation, "Causal Inference in Hybrid Intervention Trials Involving Treatment Choice," considers the problem of causal inference from experiments in which some subjects are allowed to choose the treatment that they receive. Allowing treatment choice may increase compliance levels, but creates inferential challenges not present in a fully randomized experiment. Professor Lin will discuss her approach to this problem on Wednesday, September 28 at noon in Room N354, CGIS North, 1737 Cambridge St. Lunch will be provided.

Posted by SSS Coauthors at 11:53 AM

A multilevel analysis of the WVS/EVS data

Jong-Sung You

In my draft paper on the "correlates of social trust" (presented at the ASA conference, August 2005), I argued that fairness of a society such as freedom from corruption (fair administration of rules) and distributive fairness (relatively equal and unskewed distributions) affects the society's level of social trust more than its homogeneity does. Based on a multilevel analysis of data from the World Values Surveys (WVS, 1995-97, 2000-01) and the European Values Study (EVS, 1999), I found that corruption and inequality are significantly negatively associated with social trust controlling for individual-level factors and other country-level factors, while ethnic diversity loses significance once corruption or inequality is accounted for. Also, I found that the inequality effect is primarily due to the skewness of income rather than its simple heterogeneity, and that the negative effect of minority status is greater in more unequal and undemocratic societies.

The WVS and the EVS have been conducted in close cooperation with (almost) identical questions. The WVS (1995-97) covers 50 countries, and the WVS/EVS (1999-2001) covers 66 countries in all continents of the world. By pooling the 1995-97 data and the 1999-2001 data, I was able to increase the number of countries to 80. My literature review has unearthed few articles employing multilevel modeling in the comparative politics or sociology literatures. I suspect the scarcity of adequate multilevel data is one reason for this. Schofer and Fourcade-Gourinchas (2001) used the 1991 WVS in a multilevel analysis of the "structural contexts of civic engagement," but the country coverage was just 32. Although they had a lot of observations at the individual level, the relatively small N at the country level prevented them from including many explanatory variables at the country level. Now, with a relatively large number of countries, the WVS/EVS data seems to be an ideal dataset for which many interesting multilevel analyses can be conducted.

Since my draft is rough, I will welcome any comments, either methodological or substantive. You can find a draft here.

Posted by James Greiner at 7:00 AM