Empirical Legal Studies

Assessing Normal Distributions

A nice illustrative discussion (here) on various approaches to assess whether "normal" distribution assumptions plausibly hold. Participants in the discussion provide a helpful illustration (below) on two perspectives (kernel density vs. qnorm) on a possible bi-modal distribution.

Graphing Counterfactual Regression Trend Lines

In a recent Statlist discussion (here), the question was posed about how to: "generate a graph to show how to the GDP per capita trend line would have continued if the conflict [or any discrete event] had not occurred." (emphasis added) Put slightly differently, the question involves how to over-lay two separate time-trend lines: one from actual data reflecting the influence of a discrete event and another trend line reflecting a counterfactual regression trend (that is, as if the discrete event did not happen).

To illustrate, the graph (above) plots and compares "the effect that the civil conflict in Mozambique and Rwanda have had on the GDP per capita growth in the long run" and over-lays a projected regression line reflecting GDP per capita assuming that the civil conflict did not emerge in these two countries.

While the Stata graphics coding can be tricky, the end result is a quickly interpretable graph.

How to Deal with an Ordinal Dep Var When You Need/Want to Include Fixed Effects?

A recent question posed on StataList has stimulated an interesting discussion (here) as well as a call for FE ordinal models. The specific question:

"So to sum up my question: Is it possible to 'argue' that my ordinal dependent variables can be treated as continuous and I can therefore use FE for them as well? If yes - could you point me towards the appropriate literature/methodology? Or is this not possible and I need to use logit/probit for the ordinal dependent variables?"

The core of the question--can an ordinal dependent variable be treated as "continuous"--comes up most frequently in the survey context where a response involves a Likert Scale (typically a 5- or 7-point scale -- or an even-numbered scale that pushes respondents off a mid-point response). While reasonable minds can--and do--differ on what modeling options may plausibly exist, at the very least, and as a first step, a researcher would need to closely examine how any ordinal dependent variable distributes as this may itself limit model selection options.

Souter's Pen

I guess it's not totally irrelevant that Chris posted about Souter, given the discussion of the ABA ratings and the new vacancy on the Supreme Court he just created...though the pen thing would not, I think, be predictive of either decision making or nomination...  Anyway, I wanted to take the opportunity the pen post created both to thank Amy and Rich for spending some time with us discussing their research, and to think about the ramifications of that research for some of the names being batted around for Souter's seat.  I think we all agree that the pick will be a female, which means, according to Rich and Amy's research, a lower expected ABA rating.  In addition, the pick may well be a non-judge (Jennifer Granholm, anyone?), which would also lead to a lower ABA rating.  However, the pick is being made by a Democrat...So, Rich and Amy, what does your research say about the rating a Granholm might receive?  Does ideology trump judicial experience?  [Perhaps tangentially, will the President letting the ABA back in on the process make their determination more relevant to the Senate?  Does the Senate distinguish between WQ and Q?  Or does it just not vote for someone who is not qualified?]

Discussing "Bias and the Bar" II

Sara - We definitely need to think more about how we can operationalize some of the features of "judicial temperament." I personally need more time to really think this through, so I instead thought it might be good to write about the question that keeps running through my head as I try to operationalize judicial temperament. The issue I'm struggling with, and which I'd love to hear the thoughts from others, is how we guard against imputing too much to the obvious proxies we'd have to use. For example, to play devil's advocate, I'm interpreting your suggestion of using the Congressional staff variable to reflect the quality of "open-mindedness" as implying that the political nature of the job might actually point towards close-mindedness. The question is whether that is reading too much into what it means - or what the ABA perceives it to mean - when someone has served on a Congressional staff. We thought about it in two terms: (1) an obviously political position, but also (2) a not-always-good substitution for traditional legal experience, especially given the political nature of the job. Put another way, did the person get the nomination because of their political service, or due to their qualifications? However, is the acknowledgement of the political flavor of the appointment and the nominee's background the same as measuring whether a nominee will be viewed by the ABA as "open-minded"? Alternatively, by this definition, our inclusion of the Years as Public Interest Lawyer could be seen as another measure of potential "open-mindedness" or "commitment to equal justice" given the equal justice-nature of much public interest work. But, again, are we presuming too much to suggest that the ABA views such work in this manner? Finally, what are service as a government attorney? The vast majority of people in this category - which we found the ABA viewed positively - serve as some type of prosecutor. Is this a signal of substantial courtroom and/or litigation experience, or could one possibly somehow link such experience - either positively or negatively - to some of the suggested ways of understanding "judicial temperament" in the ABA's guidelines? More broadly, how do we make sure that even our operationalization of these terms does not in and of itself make judgments? For example, does it (or should it) matter who the staffer worked for in Congress? Does it matter what issues the staffer focused on?

Of course, much of this relates back to Sara's initial post about the impact of the ABA's investigations - it's not merely that someone was a judge, but that the ABA attempts to determine whether they really were a fair and impartial judge. The problem, however, is that we have little to work with on the outside. We could obviously attempt to look into the information brought forth by others (i.e., the media, interest groups, senators, etc.), but (a) most nominees receive little attention if any, and (b) the information we hear publicly about is likely to be somewhat biased. In fact, as a side note, a big problem is the lack of information on nominees -- when I was constructing a list of nominees who were opposed by interest groups, there were a surprising number who has zero articles written about their nominations, including passing mentions that they were nominated and/or confirmed. Which brings us back to the issue of how do we attempt to explain something - or some idea - for which we only have limited information and potential proxies?

Thoughts?

Finally, we will certainly work on creating a more nuanced ideology measure. The one question, Sara, is were you referring to the distance between the ABA committee and the nominee or the distance between the Judiciary Committee and the nominee? The issue is that, and forgive me if I’ve totally misunderstood your post, is that I'm just not sure what it would mean to hypothesize that the ABA Standing Committee's ratings are influenced by how ideologically distant the nominee is from the Senate Judiciary Committee. This would in turn have to mean that we believe that the ABA is more likely to rate nominees highly in times of unified government (when the ideological distance would be closer), and rate them less well in times of divided government (when the ideological distance would be farther). And, this would suggest the ABA's ratings are in part driven by the makeup of the Judiciary Committee, rather than based on the nominee's background.  Obviously, if we could create some measure of the ABA Committee's ideology that we could then compare to the nominee's ideology, that would be great.... Last thought: yes, determining whether the bias has switched over time is definitely a worthy question; the issue, as always, is getting the data.

Sara - thanks again for really pushing me/us to think about these issues!

Re: Chris's post yesterday, the only possible response is to say thank you for such a great suggestion, and the reminder to pay close attention to how one describes what their model actually does - and for providing us with all of the information on how to put that suggestion into action! We appreciate the guidance!! And, we'll let you know what we found as soon as we're done.

Thoughts on "Bias and the Bar"

Rich, Amy, and Susan have done a great service by writing their study.  My comments here focus on a specific aspect of the paper: the issue of causality.  The paper itself makes a number of explicitly causal claims, referring (for example) to the "most influential causal factors" that might determine ratings, and to the construction of "a series of causal models" (p. 11).

My narrow point is that models of which they speak aren't really causal models at all; they are straightforward regression-type models, of the sort social scientists do a lot of.  That isn't a criticism of what they've done, but rather just an observation, albeit one that suggests a simple change in approach.

Manipulability theories of causation (perhaps most famously set out in Holland's (1986) paper) -- upon which most of the current approaches to causal inference are based -- certainly have their critics.  But they have a natural application to the central question of the paper: What ABA rating would nominee X have received had s/he been appointed by a Democratic president, rather than a Republican (or vice-versa)?

This (to me) suggests that the paper is an obvious candidate for a matching-based analysis of the influence of (e.g.) party on ABA ratings.  Such an approach is (a) very easy to do, as a practical matter, (b) allows one to control for other potentially confounding factors, and best of all (c) provides a direct answer to the question posed above that can be interpreted in causal terms.  These approaches are increasingly widely used in empirical legal studies, and seem (to me) to hold particular promise in addressing the authors' central question.

Discussing "Bias and the Bar"

Thanks for your post, Sara! You are obviously correct in that we cannot truly capture in our model the full parameters of the investigation the ABA conducts. Most importantly, we do not know what is learned in the background interviews, and the ABA does not share that information with anyone outside of the ABA committee, including the president and the Senate Judiciary Committee members. However, we would argue that our model does more than simply capture nominee qualifications per se since the crucial question is not how would others rate these nominees, but how did the ABA evaluate them? The issue is that what is considered "qualified" really does vary based on who you ask, and, as evidenced by external discussions of nominee ABA ratings, the ABA's ratings do not merely reflect the conventional wisdom as to whether a certain person is, objectively, qualified for the federal bench. We do examine information others can also find, but we chose these measures because these are the types of qualifications the ABA itself says it considers in its guidelines. Furthermore, even if others possess this same information, the reason the ABA is granted this role is its unique ability to evaluate how much these different background experiences matter. Senators thus rely upon the ABA to give them guidance about whether a particular nominee is, in fact, fit for the federal bench.

The other important issue is that Senators depend on the ABA because they lack the time, resources and staff to do their own investigations. Even if the senators have nothing more than the ABA rating, the belief that the rating reflects an in-depth evaluation heightens the importance of this rating. And, even if our model is merely capturing what factors are likely to lead to a determination that a nominee is qualified per se, since it is the ABA that sets the gold standard for this discussion, then even capturing that part of the process provides important insights.

As to whether the findings are time-bound, our reason for looking at nominees from 1985 onward was to deal with any potential time-based issues. Since 1985, and especially since the Bork nomination in 1987, criticisms directed at the ABA have been from conservatives. We therefore believe our findings explain the process as it exists today, and most likely, the process in the future, but agree that we cannot necessarily use them to explain the ABA's behavior in earlier periods. And, given important changes such as the increased politicization of lower court appointments, the increased politicization of the ABA House of Delegates, and changes in the evaluation standards themselves, we think it best to focus our attention on this more recent period.

Omitted variable bias is always of concern, and certainly our model cannot capture how the additional context provided by the ABA's committee's interviews influences the decision-making process. That said, our model does, we believe, reflect the influence of the major factors the ABA considers, and provides us with insights on how the ABA determines whether a nominee is considered "qualified' for the federal bench. If the factors we examine only point toward whether a nominee is qualified per se, that in fact suggests that we need to understand even more why we then find differences based on ideology and partisanship.

Forum Post #8: A Few Concluding Thoughts

Jason and I haven't had a chance to coordinate on this, so rather than trying to speak for both of us, I'll offer my thoughts and he can chime in with his own if he is so inclined.

First, I'd like to thank everyone for their thoughtful comments and critiques of our paper.  You've given us a lot to think about and the next draft of the paper will be substantially better because of your input.

Second, there's been a lot of talk over the last two days about ways in which our data might be refined and improved.  There is clearly a great deal of useful work that could be done in this area and I hope that our study will just be the beginning of a more well-informed discussion of the student-edited law review and how it fits into the overall schema of legal scholarship.    I, for one, would be particularly interested to seem some empirical data, expanding on Christine's "armchair empiricism," that examines what law reviews actually publish.  Somewhere between what editors say they consider and what they actually publish lies the truth about how these decisions get made.

Finally, I want to thank Bill Henderson for seeking us out and organizing this forum.  It is, of course, always nice to have someone come from out of the blue and express interest in your work.  But the forum has also been useful for us and, I hope, for everyone else as well.

Forum Post #6: Moving From Anecdote to Data

First, thanks to Bill and everyone for letting an empirical neophyte trespass on this blog for awhile.  As a typical junior professor, I am a regular submitter to law reviews and have spent untold hours talking to colleagues about the submission process.  However, lately these discussions have grown tiresome as I realize that as arbitrary and random as the process seems to be, unrelated anecdotes only make the process seem more random instead of creating some pattern of order.  No one person's "N" is ever going to be big enough for that person to say with any authority "The best way to get your article accepted at top journals is to do X."  However, these conversations seem always to dwindle to the point where Professor A says that doing one thing is important, but then Professor B will counter with the argument that the Professor A must be wrong because Professor B never does that one thing and always places well.  And so on.  So, I am pleased as punch to be moving from war stories to data.  If nothing else, the student-run law review system produced the two authors of this study and perhaps honed their writing skills to the point that they were able to advance knowledge in this way.  (I would like to hear about their own placement story, though, now that they are on the other side!)

However, as everyone else seems eager to point out, survey responses aren't the sort of data we need to conclusively dispel or confirm these anecdotes.  (As an alumnus of the Lee Epstein/Andrew Martin Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship workshops, I remember one of them saying that the best way to introduce bias into your project is to do a survey!)  I won't belabor the point, but I think we all know that law review editors are smart enough to know what answers they should pick.  (However, a survey of former Articles Editors might produce less self-conscious responses.)  I think it's interesting that the "Tier 1" editors assigned lower importance scores to certain categories regarding author prestige and article topic, but those factors were still the most important in rank order.  And, as the authors note, when asked virtually the same question in different form regarding author's place in the world, editors answered differently depending on wording.  They don't care about how "notable" an author is, but they care whether the author is "highly influential in her respective field."

So, we know now that articles editors, even though they understand that they shouldn't say it's super important, admit that characteristics of the author are pretty much as important as characteristics of the work.  So, that seems to jive with everyone's worst fears and conventional wisdom.  And I think the objective data would support that.  A few weeks ago, I updated some armchair empiricism on which authors get published in the Harvard Law Review (not a respondent to the survey).  While my interest was in the gender breakdown of the authors published, I hasten to add that any casual legal scholar would recognize most of the names of those whose work was published in any given volume.  I would suspect the same would be true of at least the top 5 journals.

So, what can I possibly add to this forum?  Here are two small bits.  First, I think the "hot topic" factor here is not treated in a precise way.  Although the authors suggest that at least most journals do not look for hot topics, the factor was phrased as "The topic is one about which many articles are currently being written."  Well, that sentence does not cry out for agreement, and one can think of many other ways in which the same could be worded.  In fact, two factors that were ranked highly ("The article fills a gap in the literature" and "The topic would interest the general public") also describe hot topics.  One can imagine that a legal topic that is currently in the news would spawn articles that both fill a (new) gap and that would interest the general public.  Because of the timeliness, this topic may be the subject of many law review articles, but it's hard for an articles editor to know that at the beginning of the trend.

Second, one interesting aspect about the law review selection process is the agency problem.  Editors are choosing articles that they will work on, perhaps personally.  While the authors assume that these individual editors choose articles that will gain their law reviews citations and attention, in reality these editors will move on before this attention happens.  So, editors may be more interested in choosing topics that they themselves are interested in and possibly choosing authors that they would like to get to know.  I would be interested to know if any articles editors thought about the relationship between themselves and their authors.  I definitely remember the authors that I worked with.  And, I could definitely tell when I was getting an offer from an articles editor who really liked my topic.

Forum Post #4: What is Right About Student-Edited Law Journals?

One of unwritten questions raised by the Nance-Steinberg study is whether the institution of the student-edited law review remains the appropriate outlet for the "best" legal scholarship, including interdisciplinary and empirical work.   

Nance and Steinberg, for example, cite to Judge Posner's remark that the shift away from doctrinal scholarship has left Articles Editors floundering in a "scholarly enterprise vast reaches of which they could barely comprehend."  According to this view, student-edited journals should focus on doctrinal work while the more sophisticated stuff should be reserved for faculty-run journals.

This argument is quite popular in some law professor circles.  But I think it begs a more fundamental question:  What is the purpose of legal scholarship?  Perhaps this is a better way to phrase the question:  What is the purpose of scholarship produced by law faculty?   

A lot of articles published in prestigious faculty-edited law journals are impenetrable, using formal mathematical modeling that only a specialist could understand.  There is no pretense that the journal is engaged in dialogue with a larger legal community.  Under this paradigm, scholarly "success" is a remarkably insular conversation among elite academics.  Why should a law professor be paid to write articles that graduates of his or her law school cannot understand?  What is the justification for the disconnect between the classroom and the faculty-edited law journal?

Although the current student-edited system has drawbacks, it also has some huge advantages:

• There are no faculty gatekeepers who have built their careers around established theories and methodologies;
• It demands that the insights of empiricism and social science be written in a way that is intelligible and educates the reader (yes, footnotes can educate!), which is appropriate since many lawyers eventually become regulators and policymakers;
• Seriously flawed studies will be ignored by the marketplace of ideas, which also happens in the peer-reviewed world (see, e.g, here);
• Unlike many social science journals, law reviews permit (rather, expect) an author to explore the normative implications of their empirical work--this is a source of envy for many economists, sociologists, and political scientists.

That said, there is ample room for outlets like the JELS, which has become an important vehicle for setting standards for (intelligible) empirical legal work, including the advancement of  methods. 

But regardless of publication outlet, we still need to answer the question, "what is the purpose of our scholarship (beyond our own professional advancement)"? If law students cannot evaluate the merits of our articles that bear on the law, perhaps the problem is primarily one of curriculum (and the institutional incentives that perpetuate an antiquated model) rather than publication outlet.   

Forum Post #3: Methodological Matters

My Ph.D. thesis director once advised me that "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."  His point was not to make the perfect the enemy of the good, particularly when conducting truly original research.  So it's important to preface any critique of their work by acknowledging that, whatever flaws their study may have, Nance and Steinberg have done a great service to the legal academy by shedding some empirical light on the question of law review publication.

As is the case with any empirical paper, methodological criticisms of their work are among the easiest to offer.  One could question their decision to use conventional factor analysis with ordinally-measured response variables (particularly when better techniques exist), or their extensive use of tables when figures (such as the one above; click on chart to enlarge) typically do a much better job of conveying complex statistical results.

My biggest concern, however (and one prefaced by Michael's comment to Bill's first Forum post) is the effect of social desirability bias (hereinafter SDB) on the study's findings.  SDB refers to survey respondents' tendency to answer surveys in manners they think are socially (or, here, professionally) desirable or expected of them; it is a well-known and commonly-observed phenomenon in survey research (a recent paper with a list of current references is Streb et al.).  I'd contend that the presence and effect of such bias can explain both their intuitive findings as well as some of the more unexpected ones.

Articles editors (AEs) undoubtedly are interested in growing the prestige of their journal, and in minimizing their editorial workload.  They are also, however, socialized into the law review culture; they understand that law reviews, as forums for scholarly work, should publish the "best" (most original, creative, important, well-reasoned, persuasive) scholarship they can.  As AEs, their professional role is to select such work for publication, and to do so in a way that doesn't systematically disfavor authors or work on the basis of other (putatively irrelevant) criteria.  SDB suggests that AE's survey responses will likely reflect their desire to be seen as conforming to that role.

Consider Nance and Steinberg's rather odd finding that, while "Author Prestige" is among the most influential of their constructs, "Notability of the Author" ranks dead last in the rankings of publication criteria. The phrasing of the authors' 56 "influence" questions is such that none is dispositive; each can influence the publication process without making or breaking a given paper.  In contrast, asking AEs to rank order the seven publication criteria forces a zero-sum choice: for one criterion to be ranked higher, another must be ranked lower.  That, combined with the relatively small number of items to be ranked and the presence of SDB effects, makes it difficult for an AE to place "Notability" high in the rankings.

A similar dynamic might explain the relative weakness of "negative" author traits: while AEs can be forgiven for privileging work by high-prestige authors, it is considered much less acceptable to disadvantage low-prestige ones.  Finally, in our post-Grutter world, it is likely that most AEs almost reflexively responded "no influence" to questions regarding the effects of author race and gender.

But while SDB is a potentially serious problem, it is by no means insurmountable.  A standard way of assessing the presence of SDB is to compare survey responses with actual behavior; as Michael suggested in his earlier comment, the obvious means of doing this would be to analyze data on actual submissions and acceptances.  Barring that, SDB can be reduced in surveys through anonymity; survey respondents who are assured that their answers will be anonymous are typically less affected by SDB than those who can be identified.

Forum Post #2: Some Context from the Authors

This study grows out of our own experiences as Articles Editors of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.  The Articles Office spent many of our early meetings talking about what criteria the law review ought to be using to select articles.  In the wake of those discussions, we were curious about the degree to which our peer journals would make use of the same criteria and weigh them the same way.  This study started as a way to answer that question.

Our first startling discovery was our fellow editors’ eagerness to talk about these issues.  We sent out an e-mail to every student-edited legal journal for which we could find an e-mail address and asked one or more of the editors responsible for selecting articles at that publication to fill out our survey instrument.  Though it’s impossible to know exactly how many of those e-mail addresses were valid, we believe that our e-mail reached between 375 and 400 journals.  The 191 responses from 163 journals were far more than we expected and gave us a data set that was well-suited to productive analysis.  We chose to focus on factor analysis because we believed that the specific criteria that were amenable to survey questions were properly understood as components of broader selection criteria.  Our results bore that out. 

While there is obvious interest within the academic community in our simply reporting these results, we think our data also highlight some interesting aspects of the law review process that have been little discussed.  The most notable is the degree to which journals act as independent agents rather than as neutral arbiters of quality scholarship.  (We have consciously avoided taking on the question of whether students are capable of filling a role as neutral arbiters, but commentators have frequently argued that they are not.)  The primary measure of journal prestige (and the one we used in our analysis) is frequency of citation.  If the primary goal of editors is to increase the notability and prestige of their own journal – and our results can be read as indicating that it is – the best way to do that is to publish articles that will be read and cited frequently.  While that goal may correlate to some degree with an abstract notion of academic excellence or importance, it also draws on a number of other factors such as author notoriety or prestige and the frequency with which related topics are addressed in legal academic writing.  Thus, it is possible to explain editors’ tendency to gravitate towards articles by well-known authors at prestigious institutions (and our survey confirms that a strong tendency to do this is present across the board) or to articles in certain subject areas (most notably constitutional law) not as a product of their inability to recognize academic excellence but as the result of rational desire to increase the prestige of their own publications.  As Bill mentioned in his introduction, this is a job that student editors can likely do pretty well.

When undertaking this study, we were struck by the relative dearth of empirical work in this area.  Our hope is that, by providing some robust data about what law review editors actually do, we can move the debate about what they should do away from the anecdotal context of particular authors’ horror stories to a broader context based on a deeper understanding of how the process actually works today.

Forum Post #1: Opening the Black Box of Law Review Selection

Periodically law professors convene forums to trash law reviews. The most virulent words are usually heaped upon the student editors who run these journals. For example, in a symposium published by the University of Chicago Law   Review in 1994, student editors were referred to “incompetents”; in a similar forum in the Stanford Law Review in 1995, they were called “dumb and stupid.”

Within the article selection process, more specific criticism includes the student editors’ (perceived) fixation with copious footnotes, excessive literature reviews, trendy topics, or an author’s institutional affiliation or prior publications (as opposed to the one in front of them). These last items are of particular concern for law professors because it stacks the deck against an objective evaluation of their work. And placement has significant collateral effects on pay, promotion, and the lateral market.

Fortunately, the Nance-Steinberg study opens the black box of article selection. In my estimation, it reveals a reasonably fair and objective process in which original, persuasive, and polished articles have at least a fighting chance of getting a good placement. Sure, the author’s letterhead matters. But these results suggest that this bias is actually less true at more elite journals—and that finding itself may be a bit of a mythbuster. Moreover, the study actually has some suggestions that could, at the margins, help with an article’s placement.

To get all of our readers onto the same page, after the jump I will briefly summarize the sample, methodology, and key findings of the Nance-Steinberg study.

Forum on the Law Review Selection Process

Over the next couple of weeks, the law journal submission season will enter full swing. Because there are only a limited number of publication slots at elite law journals—and there is a perception, if not a reality, that a strong placement affects pay, promotion, and lateral offers—this positional competition creates severe angst among law professors that often ends in disappointment.

To help elucidate the inner-workings of this process, the ELS Blog will be hosting a forum today and tomorrow (August 14-15) on a recent empirical study by Jason Nance and Dylan Steinberg, “The Law Review Article Selection Process: Results from a National Study.”  The authors are 2006 graduates of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where they served as Articles Editors on the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.  Both authors are currently serving as clerks in the federal judiciary.

This forum will also include commentary on the Nance-Steinberg study by Benjamin Barton (Tennessee Law), Christine Hurt (Illinois Law and The Conglomerate), Ahmed Taha (Wake Forest Law), and our own Chris Zorn. I will begin the forum with a short summary of the Nance-Steinberg study.

Blog Forum – Significance Testing

For scholars interested in empirical research, no number is more important than .05. To paraphrase a 1967 article, the difference between .05 and .06 is the difference between right and wrong, creditable and embarrassing, success and failure. See James K. Skipper, Jr., Anthony L. Guenther, and Gilbert Nass, The Sacredness of .05: A Note Concerning the Uses of Statistical Levels of Significance in Social Science, 2 American Sociologist 16-18 (1967). When something is significant at the .05 level, we know it must be important.

Well, maybe this is not quite right. So this week two guests will share their thoughts on significance testing and how best to think about it. First, we have Ramon Henkel of the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Along with Denton E. Morrison, Professor Henkel co-edited The Significance Test Controversy (Aldine 1970), which was just reissued last year. (It includes the previously mentioned Skipper et al. article.) Second, we have Lawrence Mohr of the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Professor Mohr is the author of Understanding Significance Testing (Sage 1990).

A big ELS Blog welcome to them both.