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Year: 2014

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I discussed here some weird things that SPSS does with regard to weighting. Here's another weird thing, this time in Stata:

StataQ1trunc

The variable Q1 has a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 99,999. For this particular survey question, 99,999 is not a believable response; so, instead of letting 99,999 and other unbelievable responses influence the results, I truncated Q1 at 100, so that all responses above 100 equaled 100. There are other ways of handling unbelievable responses, but this can work as a first pass to assess whether the unbelievable responses influenced results.

The command replace Q1trunc = 100 if Q1 > 100 tells Stata to replace all responses over 100 with a response of 100; but notice that this replacement increased the number of observations from 2008 to 2065; that's because Stata  treated the 57 missing values as positive infinity and replaced these 57 missing values with 100.

Here's a line from Stata's help missing documentation:

all nonmissing numbers < . < .a < .b < ... < .z

Stata has a reason for treating missing values as positive infinity, as explained here. But -- unless users are told of this -- it is not obvious that Stata treats missing values as positive infinity, so this appears to be a source of potential error for code with a > sign and missing values.

Here's how to recode the command so that missing values remains missing: replace Q1trunc = 100 if Q1 > 100 & if Q1 < .

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This post presents selected excerpts from Jesper W. Schneider’s 2014 Scientometrics article, "Null hypothesis significance tests. A mix-up of two different theories: the basis for widespread confusion and numerous misinterpretations" [ungated version here]. For the following excerpts, most citations have been removed, and page numbers references to the article have not been included because my copy of the article lacked page numbers.

The first excerpt notes that the common procedure followed in most social science research is a mishmash of two separate procedures:

What is generally misunderstood is that what today is known, taught and practiced as NHST [null hypothesis significance testing] is actually an anonymous hybrid or mix-up of two divergent classical statistical theories, R. A. Fisher’s 'significance test' and Neyman's and Pearson's 'hypothesis test'. Even though NHST is presented somewhat differently in statistical textbooks, most of them do present p values, null hypotheses (H0), alternative hypotheses (HA), Type I (α) and II (β) error rates as well as statistical power, as if these concepts belong to one coherent theory of statistical inference, but this is not the case. Only null hypotheses and p values are present in Fisher's model. In Neyman–Pearson's model, p values are absent, but contrary to Fisher, two hypotheses are present, as well as Type I and II error rates and statistical power.

The next two excerpts contrast the two procedures:

In Fisher's view, the p value is an epistemic measure of evidence from a single experiment and not a long-run error probability, and he also stressed that 'significance' depends strongly on the context of the experiment and whether prior knowledge about the phenomenon under study is available. To Fisher, a 'significant' result provides evidence against H0, whereas a non-significant result simply suspends judgment—nothing can be said about H0.

They [Neyman and Pearson] specifically rejected Fisher’s quasi-Bayesian interpretation of the 'evidential' p value, stressing that if we want to use only objective probability, we cannot infer from a single experiment anything about the truth of a hypothesis.

The next excerpt reports evidence that p-values are overstated. I have retained the reference citations here:

Using both likelihood and Bayesian methods, more recent research have demonstrated that p values overstate the evidence against H0, especially in the interval between significance levels 0.01 and 0.05, and therefore can be highly misleading measures of evidence (e.g., Berger and Sellke 1987; Berger and Berry 1988; Goodman 1999a; Sellke et al. 2001; Hubbard and Lindsay 2008; Wetzels et al. 2011). What these studies show is that p values and true evidential measures only converge at very low p values. Goodman (1999a, p. 1008) suggests that only p values less than 0.001 represent strong to very strong evidence against H0.

This next excerpt emphasizes the difference between p and alpha:

Hubbard (2004) has referred to p < α as an 'alphabet soup', that blurs the distinctions between evidence (p) and error (α), but the distinction is crucial as it reveals the basic differences underlying Fisher’s ideas on 'significance testing' and 'inductive inference', and Neyman–Pearson views on 'hypothesis testing' and 'inductive behavior'.

The next excerpt contains a caution against use of p-values in observational research:

In reality therefore, inferences from observational studies are very often based on single non-replicable results which at the same time no doubt also contain other biases besides potential sampling bias. In this respect, frequentist analyses of observational data seems to depend on unlikely assumptions that too often turn out to be so wrong as to deliver unreliable inferences, and hairsplitting interpretations of p values becomes even more problematic.

The next excerpt cautions against incorrect interpretation of p-values:

Many regard p values as a statement about the probability of a null hypothesis being true or conversely, 1 − p as the probability of the alternative hypothesis being true. But a p value cannot be a statement about the probability of the truth or falsity of any hypothesis because the calculation of p is based on the assumption that the null hypothesis is true in the population.

The final excerpt is a hopeful note that the importance attached to p-values will wane:

Once researchers recognize that most of their research questions are really ones of parameter estimation, the appeal of NHST will wane. It is argued that researchers will find it much more important to report estimates of effect sizes with CIs [confidence intervals] and to discuss in greater detail the sampling process and perhaps even other possible biases such as measurement errors.

The Schneider article is worthwhile for background and information on p-values. I'd also recommend this article on p-value misconceptions.

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Jeremy Freese recently linked to a Jason Mitchell essay that discussed perceived problems with replications. Mitchell discussed many facets of replication, but I will restrict this post to Mitchell's claim that "[r]ecent hand-wringing over failed replications in social psychology is largely pointless, because unsuccessful experiments have no meaningful scientific value."

Mitchell's claim appears to be based on a perceived asymmetry between positive and negative findings: "When an experiment succeeds, we can celebrate that the phenomenon survived these all-too-frequent shortcomings. But when an experiment fails, we can only wallow in uncertainty about whether a phenomenon simply does not exist or, rather, whether we were just a bit too human that time around."

Mitchell is correct that a null finding can be caused by experimental error, but Mitchell appears to overlook the fact that positive findings can also be caused by experimental error.

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Mitchell also appears to confront only the possible "ex post" value of replications, but there is a possible "ex ante" value to replications.

Ward Farnsworth discussed ex post and ex ante thinking using the example of a person who accidentally builds a house that extends onto a neighbor's property: ex post thinking concerns how to best resolve the situation at hand, but ex ante thinking concerns how to make this problem less likely to occur in the future; tearing down the house is a wasteful decision through the perspective of ex post thinking, but it is a good decision from the ex ante perspective because it incentivizes more careful construction in the future.

In a similar way, the threat of replication incentivizes more careful social science. Rational replicators should gravitate toward research for which the evidence appears to be relatively fragile: all else equal, the value of a replication is higher for replicating a study based on 83 undergraduates at one particular college than for replicating a study based on a nationally-representative sample of 1,000 persons; all else equal, a replicator should pass on replicating a stereotype threat study in which the dependent variable is percent correct in favor of replicating a study in which the stereotype effect was detected only using the more unusual measure of percent accuracy, measured as the percent correct of the problems that the respondent attempted.

Mitchell is correct that there is a real possibility that a researcher's positive finding will not be replicated because of error on the part of the replicator, but, as a silver lining, this negative possibility incentivizes researchers concerned about failed replications to produce higher-quality research that reduces the chance that a replicator targets their research in the first place.

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Comments to this scatterplot post contained a discussion about when one-tailed statistical significance tests are appropriate. I'd say that one-tailed tests are appropriate only for a certain type of applied research. Let me explain...

Statistical significance tests attempt to assess the probability that we mistake noise for signal. The conventional 0.05 level of statistical significance in social science represents a willingness to mistake noise for signal 5% of the time.

Two-tailed tests presume that these errors can occur because we mistake noise for signal in the positive direction or because we mistake noise for signal in the negative direction: therefore, for two-tailed tests we typically allocate half of the acceptable error to the left tail and half of the acceptable error to the right tail.

One-tailed tests presume either that: (1) we will never mistake noise for signal in one of the directions because it is impossible to have a signal in that direction, so that permits us to place all of the acceptable error in the other direction's tail; or (2) we are interested only in whether there is an effect in a particular direction, so that permits us to place all of the acceptable error in that direction's tail.

Notice that it is easier to mistake noise for signal in a one-tailed test than in a two-tailed test because one-tailed tests have more acceptable error in the tail that we are interested in.

So let's say that we want to test the hypothesis that X has a particular directional effect on Y. Use of a one-tailed test would mean either that: (1) it is impossible that the true direction is the opposite of the direction predicted by the hypothesis or (2) we don't care whether the true direction is the opposite of the direction predicted by the hypothesis.

I'm not sure that we can ever declare things impossible in social science research, so (1) is not justified. The problem with (2) is that -- for social science conducted to understand the world -- we should always want to differentiate between "no evidence of an effect at a statistically significant level" and "evidence of an effect at a statistically significant level, but in the direction opposite to what we expected."

To illustrate a problem with (2), let's say that we commit before the study to a one-tailed test for whether X has a positive effect on Y, but the results of the study indicate that the effect of X on Y is negative at a statistically significant level, at least if we had used a two-tailed test. Now we are in a bind: if we report only that there is no evidence that X has a positive effect on Y at a statistically significant level, then we have omitted important information about the results; but if we report that the effect of X on Y is negative at a statistically significant level with a two-tailed test, then we have abandoned our original commitment to a one-tailed test in the hypothesized direction.

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Now, when is a one-tailed test justified? The best justification that I have encountered for a one-tailed test is the scenario in which the same decision will be made if X has no effect on Y and if X has a particular directional effect on Y, such as "we will switch to a new program if the new program is equal to or better than our current program"; but that's for applied science, and not for social science conducted to understand the world: social scientists interested in understanding the world should care whether the new program is equal to or better than the current program.

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In cases of strong theory or a clear prediction from the literature supporting a directional hypothesis, it might be acceptable -- before the study -- to allocate 1% of the acceptable error to the opposite direction and 4% of the acceptable error to the predicted direction, or some other unequal allocation of acceptable error. That unequal allocation of acceptable error would provide a degree of protection against unexpected effects that is lacking in a one-tailed test.

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Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013, p. 3) wrote:

List experiments are a commonly used social scientific tool for measuring the prevalence of illegal or undesirable attributes in a population. In the context of electoral fraud, list experiments have been successfully used in locations as diverse as Lebanon, Russia and Nicaragua. They present our best tool for detecting fraudulent voting in the United States.*

I'm not sure that list experiments are the best tool for detecting fraudulent voting in the United States. But, first, let's introduce the list experiment.

The list experiment goes back at least to Judith Droitcour Miller's 1984 dissertation, but she called the procedure the item count method (see page 188 of this 1991 book). Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013) reported results from list experiments that split a sample into two groups: members of the first group received a list of 4 items and were instructed to indicate how many of the 4 items applied to themselves; members of the second group received a list of 5 items -- the same 4 items that the first group received, plus an additional item -- and were instructed to indicate how many of the 5 items applied to themselves. The difference in the mean number of items selected by the groups was then used to estimate the percent of the sample and -- for weighted data -- the percent of the population to which the fifth item applied.

Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013) reported four list experiments from September 2013, with these statements as the fifth item:

  • "I cast a ballot under a name that was not my own."
  • "Political candidates or activists offered you money or a gift for your vote."
  • "I read or wrote a text (SMS) message while driving."
  • "I was abducted by extraterrestrials (aliens from another planet)."

Figure 4 of Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013) displayed results from three of these list experiments:

amj2013f4

My presumption is that vote buying and voter impersonation are low frequency events in the United States: I'd probably guess somewhere between 0 and 1 percent, and closer to 0 percent than to 1 percent. If that's the case, then a list experiment with 3,000 respondents is not going to detect such low frequency events. 95 percent confidence intervals for weighted estimates in Figure 4 appear to span 20 percentage points or more: the weighted 95 percent confidence interval for vote buying appears to range from -7 percent to 17 percent. Moreover, notice how much estimates varied between the December 2012 and September 2013 waves of the list experiment: the point estimate for voter impersonation in December 2012 was 0 percent, and the point estimate for voter impersonation in September 2013 was -10 percent, a ten-point swing in point estimates.

So, back to the original point, list experiments are not the best tool for detecting vote fraud in the United States because vote fraud in the United States is a low frequency event that list experiments cannot detect without an improbably large sample size: the article indicates that at least 260,000 observations would be necessary to detect a 1% difference.

If that's the case, then what's the purpose of a list experiment to detect vote fraud with only 3,000 observations? Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013, p. 31) wrote that:

From a policy perspective, our findings are broadly consistent with the claims made by opponents of stricter voter ID laws: voter impersonation was not a serious problem in the 2012 election.

The implication appears to be that vote fraud is a serious problem only if the fraud is common. But there's a lot of problems that are serious without being common.

So, if list experiments are not the best tool for detecting vote fraud in the United States, then what is a better way? I think that -- if the goal is detecting the presence of vote fraud and not estimating its prevalence -- then this is one of those instances in which journalism is better than social science.

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* This post was based on the October 30, 2013, version of the Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman manuscript, which was located here. A more recent version is located here and has replaced the "best tool" claim about list experiments:

List experiments are a commonly used social scientific tool for measuring the prevalence of illegal or undesirable attributes in a population. In the context of electoral fraud, list experiments have been successfully used in locations as diverse as Lebanon, Russia, and Nicaragua. They present a powerful but unused tool for detecting fraudulent voting in the United States.

It seems that "unused" is applicable, but I'm not sure that a "powerful" tool for detecting vote fraud in the United States would produce 95 percent confidence intervals that span 20 percentage points.

P.S. The figure posted above has also been modified in the revised manuscript. I have a pdf of the October 30, 2013, version, in case you are interested in verifying the quotes and figure.

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I came across an interesting site, Dynamic Ecology, and saw a post on self-archiving of journal articles.The post mentioned SHERPA/RoMEO, which lists archiving policies for many journals. The only journal covered by SHERPA/RoMEO that I have published in that permits self-archiving is PS: Political Science & Politics, so I am linking below to pdfs of PS articles that I have published.

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This first article attempts to help graduate students who need seminar paper ideas. The article grew out of a graduate seminar in US voting behavior with David C. Barker. I noticed that several articles on the seminar reading list placed in top-tier journals but made an incremental theoretical contribution and used publicly-available data, which was something that I as a graduate student felt that I could realistically aspire to.

For instance, John R. Petrocik in 1996 provided evidence that candidates and parties "owned" certain issues, such as Democrats owning care for the poor and Republicans owning national defense. Danny Hayes extended that idea by using publicly-available ANES data to provide evidence that candidates and parties owned certain traits, such as Democrats being more compassionate and Republicans being more moral.

The original manuscript identified the Hayes article as a travel-type article in which the traveling is done by analogy. The final version of the manuscript lost the Hayes citation but had 19 other ideas for seminar papers. Ideas on the cutting room floor included replication and picking a fight with another researcher.

Of Publishable Quality: Ideas for Political Science Seminar Papers. 2011. PS: Political Science & Politics 44(3): 629-633.

  1. pdf version, copyright held by American Political Science Association

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This next article grew out of reviews that I conducted for friends, colleagues, and journals. I noticed that I kept making the same or similar comments, so I produced a central repository for generalized forms of these comments in the hope that -- for example -- I do not review any more manuscripts that formally list hypotheses about the control variables.

Rookie Mistakes: Preemptive Comments on Graduate Student Empirical Research Manuscripts. 2013. PS: Political Science & Politics 46(1): 142-146.

  1. pdf version, copyright held by American Political Science Association

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The next article grew out of friend and colleague Jonathan Reilly's dissertation. Jonathan noticed that studies of support for democracy had treated don't know responses as if the respondents had never been asked the question. So even though 73 percent of respondents in China expressed support for democracy, that figure was reported as 96 percent because don't know responses were removed from the analysis.

The manuscript initially did not include imputation of preferences for non-substantive responders, but a referee encouraged us to estimate missing preferences. My prior was that multiple imputation was "making stuff up," but research into missing data methods taught me that the alternative -- deletion of cases -- assumed that cases were missing at random, which did not appear to be true in our study: the percent of missing cases in a country correlated at -0.30 and -0.43 with the country's Polity IV democratic rating, which meant that respondents were more likely to issue a non-substantive response in countries where political and social liberties are more restricted.

Don’t Know Much about Democracy: Reporting Survey Data with Non-Substantive Responses. 2012. PS: Political Science & Politics 45(3): 462-467. Second author, with Jonathan Reilly.

  1. pdf version, copyright held by American Political Science Association
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The American National Elections Studies (ANES) has measured abortion attitudes since 1980 with an item that dramatically inflates the percentage of pro-choice absolutists:

There has been some discussion about abortion during
recent years. Which one of the opinions on this page best agrees with your view? You can just tell me the number of the opinion you choose.
1. By law, abortion should never be permitted.
2. The law should permit abortion only in case of rape, incest, or when the woman's life is in danger.
3. The law should permit abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or danger to the woman's life, but only after the need for the abortion has been clearly established.
4. By law, a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice.
5. Other {SPECIFY}

In a book chapter of Improving Public Opinion Surveys: Interdisciplinary Innovation and the American National Election Studies, Heather Marie Rice and I discussed this measure and results from a new abortion attitudes measure piloted in 2006 and included on the 2008 ANES Time Series Study. The 2006 and 2008 studies did not ask any respondents both abortion attitudes measures, but the 2012 study did. This post presents data from the 2012 study describing how persons selecting an absolute abortion policy option responded when asked about policies for specific abortion conditions.

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Based on the five-part item above, and removing from the analysis the five persons who provided an Other response, 44 percent of the population agreed that "[b]y law, a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice." The figure below indicates how these pro-choice absolutists later responded to items about specific abortion conditions.

Red bars indicate the percentage of persons who agreed on the 2012 pre-election survey that "[b]y law, a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice" but reported opposition to abortion for the corresponding condition in the 2012 post-election survey.

2012abortionANESprochoice4

Sixty-six percent of these pro-choice absolutists on the 2012 pre-election survey later reported opposition to abortion if the reason for the abortion is that the child will not be the sex that the pregnant woman wanted. Eighteen percent of these pro-choice absolutists later reported neither favoring nor opposing abortion for that reason, and 16 percent later reported favoring abortion for that reason. Remember that this 16 percent favoring abortion for reasons of fetal sex selection is 16 percent of the pro-choice absolutist subsample.

In the overall US population, only 8 percent favor abortion for fetal sex selection; this 8 percent is a more accurate estimate of the percent of pro-choice absolutists in the population than the 44 percent estimate from the five-part item.

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Based on the five-part item above, and removing from the analysis the five persons who provided an Other response, 12 percent of the population thinks that "[b]y law, abortion should never be permitted." The figure below indicates how these pro-life absolutists later  responded to items about specific abortion conditions.

Green bars indicate the percentage of persons who agreed on the 2012 pre-election survey that "[b]y law, abortion should never be permitted" but reported support for abortion for the corresponding condition in the 2012 post-election survey.

2012abortionANESprolife4

Twenty-nine percent of these pro-life absolutists on the 2012 pre-election survey later reported support for abortion if the reason for the abortion is that the woman might die from the pregnancy. Twenty-nine percent of these pro-choice absolutists later reported neither favoring nor opposing abortion for that reason, and 42 percent later reported opposing abortion for that reason. Remember that this 42 percent opposing abortion for reasons of protecting the pregnant woman's life is 42 percent of the pro-life absolutist subsample.

In the overall US population, only 11 percent oppose abortion if the woman might die from the pregnancy; this 11 percent is a more accurate estimate of the percent of pro-life absolutists in the US population than the 12 percent estimate from the five-part item.

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There is a negligible difference in measured pro-life absolutism between the two methods, but the five-part item inflated pro-choice absolutism by a factor of 5. Our book chapter suggested that this inflated pro-choice absolutism might result because the typical person considers abortion in terms of the hard cases, especially since the five-part item mentions only the hard cases of rape, incest, and danger to the pregnant woman's life.

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Notes

1. The percent of absolutists is slightly smaller if absolutism is measured as supporting or opposing abortion in each listed condition.

2. The percent of pro-life absolutists is likely overestimated in the "fatal" abortion condition item because the item asks about abortion if "staying pregnant could cause the woman to die"; presumably, there would be less opposition to abortion if the item stated with certainty that staying pregnant would cause the woman to die.

3. Data presented above are for persons who answered the five-part abortion item on the 2012 ANES pre-election survey and answered at least one abortion condition item on the 2012 ANES post-election survey. Don't know and refusal responses were listwise deleted for each cross-tabulation. Data were weighted with the Stata command svyset [pweight=weight_full], strata(strata_full); weighted cross-tabulations were calculated with the command svy: tabulate X Y if Y==Z, where X is the abortion condition item, Y is the five-part abortion item, and Z is one of the absolute policy options on the five-part item.

4. Here is the text for each abortion condition item that appeared on the 2012 ANES Time Series post-election survey:

>[First,/Next,] do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose abortion being legal if:
* staying pregnant could cause the woman to die
* the pregnancy was caused by the woman being raped
* the fetus will be born with a serious birth defect
* the pregnancy was caused by the woman having sex with a blood relative
* staying pregnant would hurt the woman's health but is very unlikely to cause her to die
* having the child would be extremely difficult for the woman financially
* the child will not be the sex the woman wants it to be

There was also a general item on the post-election survey:

Next, do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose abortion being legal if the woman chooses to have one?

5. Follow-up items to the post-election survey abortion items asked respondents to indicate intensity of preference, such as favor a great deal, favor moderately, or favor a little. These follow-up items were not included in the above analysis.

6. There were more than 5000 respondents for the pre-election and post-election surveys.

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