Social Science Statistics Blog

Last week I discovered (for myself anyway) the Social Science Statistics Blog, which is run by a group of hot-shot graduate students from various departments at Harvard, including Health Policy, Government, Political Science, Sociology, and Statistics.  Most of them appear to have an affiliation with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.  Their posts have a humor, edginess, and candor that is hard not to like--will they be this interesting when they all get academic jobs?  I hope so.

Here is the introduction to an interesting post by Jens  Hainmueller  (government), entitled The Role of Sample Size and Unobserved Heterogeneity in Causal Inference:

Here is a question for you: Imagine you are asked to conduct an observational study to estimate the effect of wearing a helmet on the risk of death in motorcycle crashes. You have to choose one of two different data-sets for this study: Either a large, rather heterogeneous sample of crashes (these happened on different roads, at different speeds, etc.) or a smaller, more homogeneous sample of crashes (let's say they all occurred on the same road). Your goal is to unearth a trustworthy estimate of the treatment effect that is as close as possible to the `truth', i.e. the effect estimate obtained from an (unethical) experimental study on the same subject. Which sample do you prefer?

See here for the rest of Jens' post.

Comments

[christoper]

Time Spent Teaching Social Studies

In order to cover that many benchmarks, teachers would need 15,464 hours of solid instructional time. In a typical 180-day school year, teachers have approximately 9,042 hours of actual time spent teaching (Maranon, 2003). Of those hours, primary grades emphasize reading instruction over all other content areas because administrators and teachers feel pressured to devote their time and energy to those areas that are tested. In a study conducted by the Council for Basic Education (2004), elementary principals reported a decrease in instructional time for social studies in grades K-5 since the year 2000 (Hind, 2005). It seems that the current trend is for students to have little exposure to social studies in the primary grades.
social studies

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Is statistics considered a social science or liberal arts?
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