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30 November 2009

Glynn on "What Can We Learn with Statistical Truth Serum?"

We hope you can join us this Wednesday, December 2nd for the final Applied Statistics Workshop of the term, when we will have Adam Glynn (Department of Government) presenting his talk entitled "What Can We Learn with Statistical Truth Serum?" Adam has provided the following abstract:

Due to the inherent sensitivity of many survey questions, a number of researchers have adopted indirect questioning techniques in order to minimize bias due to dishonest or evasive responses. Recently, one such technique, known as the list experiment (and also known as the item count technique or the unmatched count technique), has become increasingly popular due to its feasibility in online surveys. In this talk, I will present results from two studies that utilize list experiments and discuss the implications of these results for the design and analysis of future studies. In particular, these studies demonstrate that, when the key assumptions hold, standard practice ignores relevant information available in the data, and when the key assumptions do not hold, standard practice will not detect some detectable violations of these assumptions.

The workshop will begin at 12 noon with a light lunch and wrap up by 1:30. We meet in room K354 of CGIS Knafel (1737 Cambridge St). We hope you can make it.

Posted by Matt Blackwell at November 30, 2009 4:28 PM