Talk:Ecological fallacy
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[edit] Origin of the name
Can someone point to the origin of this phrase? An attribution would be helpful, even if its "I made this up".
- It's in zillions of books, so I don't think "I made this up" will be the answer. Michael Hardy 23:44, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- This article needs some references to back it up. 20 May 2005
- C Achen & W P Shively (1995 book "Cross-level inference") and G King (1997 book "A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem") provide histories that might be helpful. The term and its discussion start around the 1920s but renew as a discussion of analytic error in the 1950s. JeremyToday 01:38, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
- If the term and its discussion start around 1920, why does the article say that it comes from a paper in 1950 (which was perhaps the "analytical error" version mentioned above)? If William Robinson really came up with the term (or even made it popular), he probably merits a page of his own, especially since it is in "zillions of books" (instead of a link to a disambig page which lists several people by that name who are NOT him), but if he is only one of the users of something earlier, I say we kill the link from his name. --Cromwellt | Talk 22:14, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Simpson's paradox
How is the ecological fallacy different from Simpson's paradox? It seems like a link would at least be justified. Gray 21:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
Quite a fun description in example two. It's an example of 'ecological bias'. One thing I have noticed that is worrying on wikipedia is people tend to look at one phenomena and assume it is the same as another. It's like telling an academic that the term he is using means something else.
When you find two terms that appear to be alike the solution is not to merge the terms or relace one with another, the solution is to discover why two terms exist by conducting research! Whhat is being demonstrated is what I would called 'wikipedia subject bias' where the definition of terms on wikipedia is biased toward the subject discipline of wikipedia users with a complete disregard for the academic community as a whole from whom these 'rejected terms' originate. These terms exist for a reason! If one investigates why, one might discover a plethora of encyplopedic information....
Supposed 01:25, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
- I believe that Simpson's paradox and the Ecological fallacy are identical. The "ecological fallacy" first appeared in the sociological literature in 1950, but Simpson's paradox was first described by Karl Pearson in 1899. Perhaps we need to merge the two articles. — Aetheling (talk) 20:20, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] TV Shows...
Guys the TV show examples (not that any happen in both shows) are distracting please change names and prune irrelevant information...
[edit] Constracted?
I don't think "constracted" is a word... but I'm not enough of a statistician to figure out what the right one is. (Contrasted with? Constricted to?) --24.216.66.133 21:20, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Typical divide
The article said: "Within each community there is a typical divide between the rich and poor, the rich living in gated communities on the hills and the poor living adjacent to the industrial districts that pump carcinogens into their backyards." Is this a 'typical' divide? I don't think so. As a matter of fact, I think it is fairly unusual that rich people live in gated communities on hills. It might be typical in the country and time that the author live in, but I find it hard to believe that it is typical internationally and historically. I took the liberty of removing the word 'typical'. -Sensemaker
[edit] Origin
The section explaining the origin of the term is wrong: the problem described is not an ecological fallacy, but a reversal of cause and effect: literacy and immigration do correlate, it's just that a higher level of literacy attracts more immigration because of a more advanced economy, more jobs etc (instead of the reverse, that is, immigration bringing literacy, which is the conclusion the paper is attacking). This statistic can be propagated to individual level as well, showing that an individual immigrant is more likely to live in a high-literacy state. An ecological fallacy would be to find that immigrants actually live in low literacy states. Alfio 22:28, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Article quality
I rate this article "Start" class at best, due to serious errors and ambiguities in the examples and definitions given for the ecological fallacy, and the lack of a figure or two to help readers understand how the fallacy operates. As time permits I will try to remedy the deficiencies, and I would welcome some help in this. — Aetheling (talk) 19:54, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
