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19 February 2007

Applied Statistics - Dan Hopkins

This week, the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by Dan Hopkins, a Ph.D. candidate at in the Government Department at Harvard. Dan has a long-standing association with Harvard, having graduated from the College in 2000. His research focuses on political behavior, state and local politics, and political methodology. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review. He will present a talk entitled "Flooded Communities: Estimating the Post-Katrina Migration's Impact on Attitudes towards the Poor and African Americans." The paper is available from the workshop website. The presentation will be at noon on Wednesday, February 21 in Room N354, CGIS North, 1737 Cambridge St. As always, lunch will be provided. An abstract of the paper follows on the jump:

Flooded Communities: Estimating the Post-Katrina Migration's Impact on Attitudes towards the Poor and African Americans

This paper uses the post-Katrina migration as a quasi-experiment to confront concerns of selection bias and measurement error that have long plagued research on environmental effects. Drawing primarily on a phone survey of 3,879 respondents, it demonstrates that despite the attention to issues of race and poverty following Hurricane Katrina, people in communities
that took in evacuees actually became less supportive of the poor, of African Americans, and of policies to help those groups. The patterns uncovered suggest that the key mechanism is not direct contact, physical proximity, or persuasion by local elites. Instead, the empirical observations accord with a new theory of environmental effects emphasizing the interaction of changing demographics and the media environment. Under the theory of politicized change, sudden changes in local demographics make demographics salient to local residents. Media coverage can convey information about these shifts and can also frame people's thinking on issues related to them.

Posted by Mike Kellermann at 12:07 PM

Unwed teenagers and other statistics in the news

Gary Langer, the director of polling for ABC News, has posted an interesting piece on some recent coverage (or mis-coverage) of social science and medical research. One of his targets is an article that appeared on the front page of the New York Times announcing that "51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse." I had heard a lot about this particular story, not least because one of my colleagues has it posted on the bulletin board in our office. As it turns out, the magic 51% number was obtained by including women aged 15-17 in the data, something that was not particularly transparent in the article. So, while there is nothing necessarily wrong with the data itself, it is not clear that these are the numbers that you should be looking at (unless you are concerned about the national epidemic of unwed teenagers living with their parents).

In addition to leading the polling unit, Langer serves as kind of a "statistical watchdog" for ABC News. He was on a panel here at IQSS about a year ago and told some great stories about the amount of garbage that crosses their desks on a regular basis. It would be nice if all of the major news organizations had similar arrangements in place to vet their coverage of statistical reportage. (Hat tip: Mystery Pollster)

Posted by Mike Kellermann at 11:40 AM