Manfred te Grotenhuis is currently visiting the Swedish Institute of Social Research (SOFI), where he presented our joint work on Weighted Effect Coding. The recoding of his presentation is available on Manfred’s YouTube channel, and embedded below:

The relevant papers are available here (open access):

• When size matters: advantages of weighted effect coding in observational studies
• A novel method for modelling interaction between categorical variables

More information, as well as software for SPSS and STATA are available from the project website.

ps. Stay updated for an exciting update to the ‘wec’ R package!

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.