Presentation: Explaining Polarization

Today, I am attending the ‘Day of Sociology’ conference at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. I look forward to all the presentations, together covering the broad field of Sociology in Flanders and the Netherlands.

Also, I will present a working paper on polarization of attitudes on abortion in North America. It’s called Explaining Polarization of North Americans’ Abortion Attitudes, 1977-2006 and it authored by myself, Ariana Need, and Manfred te Grotenhuis. The abstract of the paper:

This study finds that North Americans’ attitudes towards induced abortion have become increasingly polarized between 1977 and 2006. This is in line with previous studies that treat polarization as a distributional characteristic. We improve upon existing studies by formulating an explanatory model for attitude polarization that distinguishes between macro-level and micro-level polarization.

A partial explanation for macro-level polarization of North Americans’ abortion was found in declining rates of church attendance. On the micro-level, we find that frequent church attendees are relatively restrictive towards abortion compared to people hardly ever attending church, and that this difference is more polarized in states with Medicaid provision of abortion, parental involvement legislation, high levels of apostasy, and high abortion ratios. Finally, in these same contexts, frequent church attendees were found more polarized amongst themselves as well.

Sex discrimination in graduate admissions? A real-life aggregation paradox

A 1975 study on graduate admissions at Berkeley found that male applicants had a substantially higher likelihood of being admitted, compared to women. However, upon closer examination the presence of aggregation paradoxes do not legitimize the conclusion that women were discriminated against.

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The Human Fertility Database

Data comparability is a valuable thing, and achieving high levels of compatibility is exactly the goal of the Human Fertility Database. From the website:

The main goal of the Human Fertility Database (HFD) is to provide access to detailed high-quality data on cohort and period fertility to a broad audience of users. We are trying to develop the HFD into an important resource for monitoring, analyzing, comparing, and forecasting fertility as well as for studying causes and consequences of fertility change in the industrialized world. The uniform format of HFD data will facilitate comparative analysis across countries and regions and encourage analysts to move beyond the simple indicators such as the period Total Fertility Rates.

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Simpson’s Paradoxical Card Trick

Imagine this card trick. A statistician divides a regular deck of cards into two sets: one of 20 and one of 32 cards. Next, he urges two groups of students to investigate the cards, and hands out one set of cards to each of the groups. Both groups start counting the cards, and cross-tabulating the numbers based on several ways they can come up with. Quite rapidly, a member of the group with 20 cards observes an interesting pattern. Amongst the cards his group is studying, an interesting pattern emerges: a disproportionally large number of black court cards. A hypothesis is formulated: could it be that their ‘blackness’ causes them being a ‘court’ card more frequently?

The results are drawn up in a table and shown to the entire group:

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WorldBank on iPhone: Great initiative, but not quite there …

Last Tuesday, I wrote about the Open Data initiative of the World Bank, and mentioned the iPhone App that provides access to a great amount data. Isn’t it lovely to be able to access information on a large number of indicators, covering many countries and years? Always wondered how the fertility rates in Samoa developed over time, or are you finding yourself discussing country-differences in the government dept as a percentage of GDP? Now you can have the information in your pocket, and access it everywhere, every time. For free.
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World Bank Open Data Initiative

Following upon my declaration of the Decade of Data, I think it is very impressive that the World Bank decided to share its data. As part of their ‘open data initiative’, data from their large number of databases is made available through the internet. Together, these databases encompass over 2,000 indicators of countries all over the world, many of them covering a time-series of 50 years. Topics include:

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Attending QMSS2: Analysing the lifecourse

I am very proud to have been accepted for participating in the Summer School on Analysing the life course. This summer school is part of the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences 2 (QMSS2) program, funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF).

This June, I will thus head to Bristol, and learn about advanced methods for the analysis of complex event history data. From the program website:
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Index of the R-Sessions

The R-Sessions are a series of blog entries on using R. A large part consists of an R-manual I once wrote. Other posts include some tricks I found out, as well as entries detailing functions and packages I wrote for R. The series already entails over forty posts, so I decided to create an index. It is found below. On a fixed page on this website (www.rensenieuwenhuis.nl/r-project/r-sessions-index/) I will continue to update this index with new editions of the R-Sessions.

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Have a great Decade of Data!

Now that I am trying to get to a regular blogging schedule, I realized that I have not wished my readers a happy new year. Although I am traditionally late with these kind of things, I suppose now is too late to wish you all a very happy 2010. But, perhaps it is not too late to wish you all to have a great new decade?

I think that 2010 could be the beginning of a beautiful decade. The Decade of Data perhaps? There have been so many data-related developments the last couple of years, that I tend to believe that a lovely stage has been set.
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The Agenda

As I wrote last week: I’m back. Curving Normality has been way too quiet for way to long. I started my job as a PhD, some other projects, and had some other things on my mind as well (some of them nice, some not). All in all, it was a bit too much to pay attention to all of it at once, so Curving Normality came second for a while.

I have been seriously contemplating whether or not to continue blogging. However, the number of daily readers remained high, even months after my last post. Of course, this is motivating, but more so: I like to share my thoughts in the light and easy way that is customary to a blog. Therefore, I decided to continue blogging and attempt to rebuild my network of (social) science related blogs.

Also, I decided to realign the content of Curving Normality more closely with the activities I’m involved in. This way, the blog can enforce academic endeavors, rather than draining time form them. So, I decided upon four major topics:
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