User:Piotrus/Sandbox/Notes/Qualitative

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Contents

[edit] Week 3

[edit] Voluntary political participation

  • selfish goal of selfless (volunteer) job
  • many blurry boundaries (work/volunteer, political/nonpolical)
  • requirements for participation (time, money, skills)
  • type of information carried
  • effort for 'multiply voting'
  • various activities compared in the above 3 dimensions - stats translated into nominal variables (presumably through ranges)
  • importance of the dependent variable

[edit] Social movements and the state

  • variable - protest policing - measure of political opportunities for social movements affecting action repertoires (Tilly...)
  • framing is important
  • history
  • 'protest policing style' summarizes information (stats and other info) in nominal form for different time periods
  • inductive reasoning (cases described, hypothesis then drawn)
  • "The available information is not sufficient for accurate statements" - how qualitative is this? (p.77)

[edit] Constructing variables

  • refreshing research designs concepts: variable, levels of measurement, scales, reliability, validity, dummy variables. New article created: coding (social sciences) to summarize information about concept I was relativly unfamiliar with before. New terms: factor analysis (is it used in sociology? Example in book is psychology and it seems to be a dominant use).

[edit] Data cleaning

  • [1]
  • Screening phase: look for outliers and similar problems. Double entry is a great idae - but is it feasible in small projects?
  • Diagnostic phase: The diagnostic phase is labor intensive and the budgetary, logistical, and personnel requirements are typically underestimated or even neglected at the study design stage. - same question as above
  • We suggest including a data-cleaning plan in study protocols - what are study protocols? Example of data-cleaning plan would be useful.

[edit] Studying group activism

  • macro approach analyzing participation
  • two distinct analytic approaches (p.57, 58) - interesting. Can they really avoid all logical fallacies just by refusing to make claims about individual?
  • see aggregate data (note to self: read on and expand)
  • why normal distribution for individual's activism? P.66, 67. I am not convinced, need to follow refs.
  • Roper Social and Political Trends data set - sounds interesting Read up on it
  • doing an example would be useful

[edit] Res prop

One of the major changes that have in recent years affected virtually every area of our lives has been the development of the new communication network, the Internet. Not only has the Internet changed the way we carry out many routine tasks, but it has changed our culture as well. Many communities and social movements have adopted the Internet as one of their tools, and an increasing number of them exist predominantly online.

One of those communities is Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org). Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia, or as it defines itself, “a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia” Wikipedia growth has been impressive; Wikipedia's own statistics for April 2006 Wikipedia show that it had more than 3,800,000 articles in many languages, including more than 1,000,000 in the English-language version. It is now one of the most-used reference resources available on the Internet and several independent studies have concluded that its quality is suprisingly high, similar to that of established traditional sources like Encyclopedia Britannica.

One of the most unique qualities of Wikipedia is how, or perhaps more to the point, by whom, it is created. With few exceptions (imports of data from public domain sources) all content of Wikipedia is created by volunteers. It is extremely easy to became a volunteer contributor (or 'editor'): one does not even need to register to edit Wikipedia content – all that is need is to click 'edit' tab located at the top of every article and presto – the person becomes an editor. There is over a million of registered accounts on Wikipedia, and millions of recorded anonymous I.P. addresses that have edited Wikipedia.

Despite – or perhaps because – this huge number of people who have contributed to the creation of the ever-growing content of Wikipedia, we know almost nothing about them. Wikipedia software was not designed to collect statistical information about itself and the users, and while in the past years certain statistical tools have been designed for the purpose of analyzing Wikipedia, most of them are still in development and in any case they seem to be mostly amateurish and 'trivia'-centered. Further, Tto this date only about a dozen of studies have been carried about Wikipedia, and few of those study the editors; those that do have mostly concentrated on the aspect of motivation. While they offer some interesting insights, they all suffer from the lack of crucial data on the background of editors: we don't even know what's the average age, sex and education of the editors, not to mention editing patterns or political views.

Since I am already collecting extensive data (through the analysis of various public documents) on about 250 users who over the period of 3 years contributed to one of the key policies of Wikipedia (Verifiability) I would like to take this opportunity to collect additional data and create a profile of an 'average editor' (or several groups of editors), possibly also comparing them to the 'average editor' of a content page.

[edit] Week 4

[edit] Summarizing distributions

[edit] Trends in...

  • theory of countervailing forces: distress leads to less civic participation
  • annual number of black elected officials: raising, should increase civic participation
  • presidency and + correlation with democrats - give opportunities to blacks (but replublican threats can be a stimuli too)
  • education: strong predictor of civic participation. U-shaped rising fluctuations. Expectation: +
  • income inequality: raising. Expectation: lower civic participation due to weakening social networking links
  • unemployment: macro model - lower leves because of lack of resources, same for inflation, immigration
  • criminal victimization: as above (the more, the less)

[edit] Who participates?

  • analysis by race/ethnicity and gender
  • Latino participation lower - but not all may be citizens, plus the immigration effect. Evem so, L are very low. Also for religious and non-political volunteering - but not when we control for religion.
  • interesting: AA are more likely to work for campaign, and less to give money - contrast to theoretical arguments above that poverty lowers participation
  • men are slightly more active, which is especially suprising in non-formal pol. activities. Same level of activity for non-p. and women dominate in religious.

[edit] Black Southern Student Sit-In Movement

  • abstract: Argues that the Southern sit-in movement of 1960, though appearing to have developed in the spontaneous manner described by classic collective behavior theory, actually grew out of preexisting institutions and organizational forms. Discusses the role of Black churches, colleges, protest organizations, and leaders in the movement.
  • The spread of the sit-ins followed the networks of these pre-existing institutional relationships. Factors internal to the black community - churches, Colls, protest organizations, & leaders - were responsible for nurturing & developing the movement. The analysis is based on primary data collected from archives & from interviews with over 50 civil rights leaders.
  • pre-existing social networks/structures are important
  • current social networks/structure affect many factors
  • Weberian angle - charismatic leadership
  • collective behaviour theory - spontaniety
  • resource mobilization theory - source of resources
  • first, gather information, then, interviews
  • p.6 'it appears that of this potential trouble spots produced defects in data' - how do we know this?

[edit] Racialized Social System

[edit] Questions

  • lenght - is logging necessary?
  • if I have lots of zeros, logging creates problems... recoding into categories is a possible idea?
  • no. of organizations - recoded 0,1,2,3,4,5 -> 1,2,3,4,5,6
  • when recoding, what's a good level of detail? For example, I recoded 0-100 range into 1-5. Comments?
  • logged variables are less intuitive then unlogged, should I discuss descriptives of logged or unlogged?
  • what use are measures of shape of the distribution?

[edit] Comments

  • How to split off lit review? (" A lot of what you write about in the intro, background, section on iron law and the evolution of Wikipedia seems like part of the lit review. I think you can condense all of this and make it part of your lit review. A possible order for your lit review would be to first talk about governance and oligarchy, and explain what the Iron Law of Oligarchy is. Then you can talk about the Internet and the governance of Internet use. After this, you can discuss any literature on Wikipedia. Perhaps you could begin by saying something like, "Wikipedia is one such on-line community...".) first part of p.8 - Michels points out... (finally)
  • is 'my judgement' that problematic? how to deal with it? (more examples, step by step, my experience)
  • how should I explain that being an admin is 'no big deal'? and how early? (mops'n'bucket, explain more admins, technical, 'no big deal')
  • wiki as a social movement - not relevant
  • what wikipedia is a case of? throw out Merton
  • controversty stories to spice it up - good examples? What about specific cases of WP:V-related debates later on? For example, discussing how I realized that several editors of WP:V are now banned, few others are using separate accounts, most popular debates (long standing conflict on "verifiability, not truth" quote, examples of "edit summaries" (something like peer review notes you left on Google Docs)...quotes of some users? People paid to write papers - not.
  • split offs Wikis
  • do I need to 'create my own theory'? 'under certain aspects, Iron law doesn't hold'
  • many remarked I need to talk more about 'quality' of Wikipedia: there are actually studies of that, I didn't want to go into detail - but should I? At least for a few more paras?
  • gender - control variale - reasons? women are less likely than men to participate in protest, for example S&S) - other control variable?
  • GoogleDocs - very useful - minor issues easily weeded out, major issues highlighted by many reviewers and easy to see what exactly do they mean...
  • process of making itself better
  • business and Iron Law - literature - Iron Law online and modern organizations
  • p.14 - missing data/bias? bias section? mention adminship

[edit] Process and protest

  • Putnam and Bowling Alone - important questoons
  • decrease in voting - increase in other activities
  • Index of Political Partiticaption - sounds interesting
  • focus: narrower activity but national, not local
  • biographical availibity - interesting concept (absence of personal contrains that my increase the costs and risks of movement participation, such as full-time employment, marriage, family responsibilities)
  • structural availibity - presense of interpersonal networks which facilitate recruitment to activism (Schussman, Soulte, Social Forces)
  • individuals rarely participate in protest or other political activities unless asked to
  • people who hold similar ideologies and are similar in some dimensions will join common organizations
  • splitting being asked to participate and participating - interesting

[edit] Regression analysis

[edit] HIV, STD...

  • This paper addresses risk to the primary female partners of men being released from prison (N = 106) by examining the prevalence of men's concurrent unprotected sex with other partners or needle sharing prior to and following release from prison (concurrent risk).
  • Rates of concurrent risk were 46% prior to incarceration, 18% one month post release, and 24% three months post release.
  • Multivariate analysis showed concurrent risk was significantly associated with having a female partner who had one or more HIV/STD risk factors and having a history of injection drug use.
  • Findings demonstrate need for prevention programs for incarcerated men and their female partners.
  • calendar-based recall?
  • why Mann-Whitney U? assessing whether two samples of observations come from the same distribution
  • table.2, table.3 - lots of insignificant results... Table.4 - not clear (OR?)? Risky is significant in both but drugs not in 2/3 (and race not in 4); median number of female partners in 3
  • 'The original sample was not randomly selected and may not be representative of all inmates at the study institution';

[edit] Voice and equality

  • interesting twist with asking 'why doesn't it happen?'
  • interesting discussion of causal interference - but how does Instrumental variable help with simultaneous causation?
  • good (clear) description of tables
  • very interesting finding (money vs. time -> inequality in power)

[edit] Regression

  • Stevens recommends that there should be at least 20 times as many cases as variables in the analysis, if one wants to interpret the most significant canonical root only. To arrive at reliable estimates for two canonical roots, Barcikowski and Stevens (1975) recommend, based on a Monte Carlo study, to include 40 to 60 times as many cases as variables.
  • Barcikowski, R., & Stevens, J. P. (1975). A Monte Carlo study of the stability of canonical correlations, canonical weights, and canonical variate-variable correlations. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 10, 353-364.
  • Stevens, J. (1986). Applied multivariate statistics for the social sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.