Bøger i Elements in Quantitative and Computational Methods for the Social Sciences serien

The goal of this Element is to provide a detailed introduction to adaptive inventories, an approach to making surveys adjust to respondents' answers dynamically. This method can help survey researchers measure important latent traits or attitudes accurately while minimizing the number of questions respondents must answer. The Element provides both a theoretical overview of the method and a suite of tools and tricks for integrating it into the normal survey process. It also provides practical advice and direction on how to calibrate, evaluate, and field adaptive batteries using example batteries that measure variety of latent traits of interest to survey researchers across the social sciences.

In this Element we develop: stochastic models, which add a crucial element of uncertainty to human interaction; models of human interactions structured by social networks; and 'evolutionary' models in which agents using more effective decision rules are more likely to survive and prosper than others.

This Element discusses how shiny, an R package, can help instructors teach quantitative methods more effectively by way of interactive web apps. The interactivity increases instructors' effectiveness by making students more active participants in the learning process, allowing them to engage with otherwise complex material in an accessible way.

Offers researchers and teachers an introduction to clustering, which is a prominent class of unsupervised machine learning for exploring and understanding latent, non-random structure in data. A suite of widely used clustering techniques is covered, in addition to R code and real data to facilitate interaction with the concepts.

Simple, elegant, and powerful, tools are available in user-friendly, free software to help design, build, and run models of social interactions, even on the most basic laptop. Focusing on a well-known model of housing segregation, this Element sets out the fundamentals of what is now known as 'agent based modeling'.

In discrete choice models the relationships between the independent variables and the choice probabilities are nonlinear, depending on both the value of the particular independent variable being interpreted and the values of the other independent variables. Thus, interpreting the magnitude of the effects (the "e;substantive effects"e;) of the independent variables on choice behavior requires the use of additional interpretative techniques. Three common techniques for interpretation are described here: first differences, marginal effects and elasticities, and odds ratios. Concepts related to these techniques are also discussed, as well as methods to account for estimation uncertainty. Interpretation of binary logits, ordered logits, multinomial and conditional logits, and mixed discrete choice models such as mixed multinomial logits and random effects logits for panel data are covered in detail. The techniques discussed here are general, and can be applied to other models with discrete dependent variables which are not specifically described here.

This Element provides the working social scientist with an overview of the most common methods for text classification, an intuition of their applicability, and Python code to execute them. It covers both the ethical foundations of such work as well as the emerging potential of neural network methods.

Dimension reduction offers researchers and scholars the ability to make complex, high dimensional data spaces simpler and more manageable. This Element offers readers a suite of modern unsupervised dimension reduction techniques to efficiently represent the original high dimensional data space in a simplified, lower dimensional subspace.

Text is a fantastic resource for social scientists, but because it is so abundant, and so variable, it can be difficult to extract the information we want. Many basic text analysis methods are available as Python implementations: this Element will teach you when to use which method, how it works, and the Python code to implement it.

Nonresponse and other sources of bias are endemic features of public opinion surveys. We elaborate a general workflow of weighting-based survey inference, and describe in detail how this can be applied to the analysis of historical and contemporary opinion polls.

Shows how innovation in computer vision methods can markedly lower the costs of using images as data. Introduces readers to deep learning algorithms commonly used for object recognition, facial recognition, and visual sentiment analysis. Provides guidance and instruction for scholars interested in using these methods in their own research.

An accessible and practical guide for the analysis and interpretation of regression discontinuity (RD) designs. The focus is on the canonical sharp RD setup that has the following features: (i) the score is continuously distributed and has only one dimension, (ii) there is only one cutoff, and (iii) compliance with the treatment assignment is perfect.

Twitter presents an ideal combination of size, international reach, and data accessibility that make it a useful data source. Acquiring, cleaning, and analyzing these data, however, require new tools and processes. This Element introduces these methods and provides scripts and examples for downloading, processing, and analyzing Twitter data.