Dad Joke
When I was a kid we were so poor that we had to share a calculator,
and the “X” button didn’t even work.
Times were hard.
Housekeeping
- Start on data collection now
- The rest of the class
- Git
- Stats
- Screen scraping
- Additional topics
Cleaning data
- Why is data ‘dirty’?
- Errors in transcription
- Bugs in software that produced it
- Missing data (e.g., when a date is unknown it’s
recoded as Jan 1)
- Can’t be read by software
- Wrong date format
- Multiple age formats - e.g., ‘4’, ‘4 yo’, ‘4
years’
- Observations that shouldn’t be in the analysis
- Inappropriate for statistical tests
- log-transformations
- Coding groups (e.g., high-risk and low-risk)
Operationalization
- Making a construct measurable
- Constructs are not empirical and can’t be tested
directly
- We must argue that our measures represent or at
least are correlated with the concepts we really care about
- Hypotheses relate concepts together, e.g.,
“socially cohesive groups are more willing to contribute to shared
goals”
- In order to test this, need to argue that you have
something that represents social cohesion, and something that represents
shared goals.
Online data
- Online data is “raw”
- This is generally wonderful - we have actual
conversations, full text, etc.
- However, it isn’t made for researchers
- It isn’t designed to measure a construct
- We have to do the work to create measures that
measure them (and recognize when we can’t)
Papers
Sara Klingenstein, Tim Hitchcock, and Simon DeDeo. 2014. The
civilizing process in London’s Old Baily. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences
How can we detect changes in culture?
- Digitization of historical records allows for
comparison across time
- Google N-gram viewer
- Censuses
- This paper uses court transcripts from London’s Old
Bailey courthouse from 1760s-1910s
Violent and non-violent offenses are talked about differently
Some questions
- What are some of the dangers of doing this kind of
work?
- What are some computational methods that are
becoming “normalized” in your discipline?
Merton Paper
Merton, Robert K. 1948. The Bearing of Empirical Research upon the
Development of Social Theory. American Sociological Review.
Empirical research for developing theory
- Empirical work doesn’t just verify/test
theories
- Serendipity: Something odd in data that needs an
explanation
- Recasting: New aspects become more salient
- Refocusing: Advances in procedures lead to
attention where things can be measured/tested
- Clarification: Operationalizing concepts requires
drawing boundaries around them