Dear Applied Statistics Workshop,
Please join us this Wednesday when Dan Hopkins, Post-Doctoral Fellow at
Harvard University (and soon to be Assistant Professor at Georgetown), will
present "Making Credible Inferences about the Effects of Local Contexts".
Dan provided the following abstract for his presentation:
In the last decade, there has been an explosion of social science research
exploring the influence of local contexts on attitudes and behavior. Yet
such studies face methodological hurdles, including the endogeneity of
individuals' moving decisions, significant measurement error, and ambiguity
about their causal interpretation. This presentation reconceptualizes the
effects of local contexts as an interaction between the local context and
salient national issues. It then uses panel or time-series cross-sectional
data to explore the impact of exogenous changes in the salience of national
issues on local contextual effects. Across three empirical examples on
attitudes toward immigration drawn from two countries, we observe that local
contexts only correlate with attitudes when immigration is a nationally
salient issue. The effects of local contexts vary in predictable ways with
the topics of national politics. All politics might not be local after all.
Dan provided the following paper as background for his talk:
http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~dhopkins/immpap75tot.pdf
The Applied Statistics Workshop meets each Wednesday in room K354, 1737
Cambridge St (CGIS-Knafel). A light lunch is served at 12 noon, with
presentations usually beginning at 1215 pm and the workshop usually
concludes by 130 pm. All are welcome!
Cheers
Justin Grimmer