Welcome to the Social Science Statistics Blog, hosted by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. We are starting this blog today in order to make public some of the hallway conversations about social science statistical methods and analysis that are regular features at the Institute and related research groups. Perhaps you may have also found that while formally published research is emphasizing one topic or approach, conversations with scholars at conferences reveal a strong trend about to proceed in a new direction. We similarly find correlated trends in the work-in-progress of many of Harvard's methodologists and visitors' informal speculations and plans revealed while making their rounds at our seminars. We find familiarity with these trends to be valuable for our own research, and so we hope to record some of this information here for ourselves, our students, and anyone else who may wish to listen in.
This blog may be especially useful at Harvard given the high level of decentralization here -- referred to by Harvard insiders as "every tub [or School] on its own bottom" although, since this decentralization often goes right down to the individual faculty member, I sometimes think a better phrase might be "everyone with a bottom has their own tub." To prevent this formal structure from having negative intellectual consequences, faculty here often invent structures to span our formal structures. This blog is one of those structures. Another is a weekly Research Workshop on Applied Statistics we started a few years ago, billed as "a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different disciplines". Every week during the academic year, a differing subset of the almost 300 faculty and students from across the university who have signed themselves up for our mailing list appear at the Institute for a talk on some aspect of social science methods or their application. Most of us find this regular exchange with such a diverse group of scholars to be highly productive, although we sometimes have to figure out how to translate the jargon describing the same statistical models from one discipline to another (most are familiar with either "Malmquist Bias" in Astronomy or "Selection Bias" in Economics but rarely both, despite the fact that they are almost identical mathematically.)
Although most of our blog posts will involve other subjects, one post each week during the academic year will include summaries of (and when available links to) papers presented at our weekly seminar, along with a sense of the discussion that takes place afterwards. Some of the other topics we plan will include posts on trends in methodological thought, questions and comments, paper and conference announcements, applied problems needing methodological solutions, methodological techniques seeking applied problems, and whatever else may be of interest and occurs to someone around here. Comments on posts are welcome from others too.
The main responsibility for the daily posts on this blog has been taken by an extremely talented group of gradaute students representing six different academic disciplines. Our authoring team is chaired by Jim Greiner, who has a law degree, practical experience with the Justice Department and a law firm in Washington D.C., and is now a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard's Statistics Department. Members of our committee include Sebastian Bauhoff, in the Economics track of the Health Policy Ph.D. Program; Felix Elwert, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and an A.M. candidate in the Department of Statistics; John Friedman, a Ph.D student in the Economics department; Jens Hainmueller and Mike Kellermann, graduate students in the Department of Government; Amy Perfors, a graduate student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at MIT; Andrew (Drew) C. Thomas, who after getting a B.A. in physics from MIT has joined the Department of Statistics Ph.D. program; and Jong-Sung You, a Ph. D. Candidate in Public Policy at the Kennedy School and Doctoral Fellow of Inequality and Social Policy Program. Please read more about our team here.
Posted by Gary King at September 6, 2005 12:38 PM