Social Science Statistics Blog

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9 March 2009

Hopkins on "Making Credible Inferences about the Effects of Local Contexts"

Please join us this Wednesday when Dan Hopkins, Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University (and soon to be Assistant Professor at Georgetown), will present "Making Credible Inferences about the Effects of Local Contexts". Dan provided the following abstract for his presentation:

In the last decade, there has been an explosion of social science research exploring the influence of local contexts on attitudes and behavior. Yet such studies face methodological hurdles, including the endogeneity of individuals' moving decisions, significant measurement error, and ambiguity about their causal interpretation. This presentation reconceptualizes the effects of local contexts as an interaction between the local context and salient national issues. It then uses panel or time-series cross-sectional data to explore the impact of exogenous changes in the salience of national issues on local contextual effects. Across three empirical examples on attitudes toward immigration drawn from two countries, we observe that local contexts only correlate with attitudes when immigration is a nationally salient issue. The effects of local contexts vary in predictable ways with the topics of national politics. All politics might not be local after all.

Dan provided the this paper as background for his talk.

The Applied Statistics Workshop meets each Wednesday in room K354, 1737 Cambridge St (CGIS-Knafel). A light lunch is served at 12 noon, with presentations usually beginning at 1215 pm and the workshop usually concludes by 130 pm. All are welcome!

Posted by Justin Grimmer at 8:23 PM