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Month: March 2017

By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

I recently blogged about the Betus, Lemieux, and Kearns Monkey Cage post (based on this Kearns et al. working paper) that claimed that "U.S. media outlets disproportionately emphasize the smaller number of terrorist attacks by Muslims".

I asked Kearns and Lemieux to share their data (I could not find an email for Betus). My request was denied until the paper was published. I tweeted a few questions to the coauthors about their data, but these tweets have not yet received a reply. Later, I realized that it would be possible to recreate or at least approximate their dataset because Kearns et al. included their outcome variable coding in the appendix of their working paper. I built a dataset based on [A] their outcome variable, [B] the Global Terrorism Database that they used, and [C] my coding of whether a given perpetrator was Muslim.

My analysis indicated that these data do not appear to support the claim of disproportionate media coverage of terror attacks by Muslims. In models with no control variables, terror attacks by Muslim perpetrators were estimated to receive 5.0 times as much media coverage as other terror attacks (p=0.008), but, controlling for the number of fatalities, this effect size drops to 1.53 times as much media coverage (p=0.480), which further drops to 1.30 times as much media coverage (p=0.622) after adding a control for attacks by unknown perpetrators, so that terror attacks by Muslim perpetrators are compared to terror attacks by known perpetrators who are not Muslim. See the Stata output below, in which "noa" is the number of articles and coefficients represent incident rate ratios:

kearns et al 1My code contains descriptions of corrections and coding decisions that I made. Data from the Global Terrorism Database is not permitted to be posted online without permission, so the code is the only information about the dataset that I am posting for now. However, the code describes how you can build your own dataset with Stata.

Below is the message that I sent to Kearns and Lemieux on March 17. Question 2 refers to the possibility that the Kearns et al. outcome variable includes news articles published before the identities of the Boston Marathon bombers were known; that lack of knowledge of who the perpetrators were makes it difficult to assign that early media coverage to the Muslim identity of the perpetrators. Question 3 refers to the fact that the coefficient on the Muslim perpetrator predictor is larger as the number of fatalities in that attack is smaller; the Global Terrorism Database lists four rows of data for the Tsarnaev case, the first of which has only one fatality, so I wanted to check to make sure that there is no error about this in the Kearns et al. data.

Hi Erin,

I created a dataset from the Global Terrorism Database and the data in the appendix of your SSRN paper. I messaged the Monkey Cage about writing a response to your post, and I received the suggestion to communicate with you about the planned response post.

For now, I have three requests:

  1. Can you report the number of articles in your dataset for Bobby Joe Rogers [id 201201010020] and Ray Lazier Lengend? The appendix of your paper has perpetrator Ray Lazier Lengend associated with the id for Bobby Joe Rogers.
  1. Can you report the earliest published date and the latest published date among the 474 articles in your dataset for the Tsarnaev case?
  1. Can you report the number killed in your dataset for the Tsarnaev case?

I have attached a do file that can be used to construct my dataset and run my analyses in Stata. Let me know if you have any questions, see any errors, or have any suggestions.

Thanks,

L.J

I have not yet received a reply to this message.

I pitched a response post to the Monkey Cage regarding my analysis, but the pitch was not accepted, at least while the Kearns et al. paper is unpublished.

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NOTES:

[1] Data from the The Global Terrorism Database have this citation: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2016). Global Terrorism Database [Data file]. Retrieved from https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd.

[2] The method for eliminating news articles in the Kearns et al. working paper included this choice:

"We removed the following types of articles most frequently: lists of every attack of a given type, political or policy-focused articles where the attack or perpetrators were an anecdote to a larger debate, such as abortion or gun control, and discussion of vigils held in other locations."

It is worth assessing the degree to which this choice disproportionately reduces the count of articles for the Dylann Roof terror attack, which served as a background for many news articles about the display of the Confederate flag. It's not entirely clear why these types of articles should not be considered when assessing whether terror attacks by Muslims receive disproportionate media coverage.

[3] Controlling for attacks by unknown perpetrators, controlling for fatalities, and removing the Tsarnaev case drops the point estimate for the incident rate ratio to 0.89 (p=0.823).

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By Posted on Posted in Sex No Comments

According to its website, Visions in Methodology "is designed to address the broad goal of supporting women who study political methodology" and "serves to connect women in a field where they are under-represented." The Call for Proposals for the 2017 VIM conference indicates that submissions were restricted to women:

We invite submissions from female graduate students and faculty that address questions of measurement, causal inference, the application of advanced statistical methods to substantive research questions, as well as the use of experimental approaches (including incentivized experiments)...Please consider applying, or send this along to women you believe may benefit from participating in VIM!

Here is the program for the 2016 VIM conference, which lists activities restricted to women, lists conference participants (which appear to be only women), and has a photo that appears to be from the conference (which appears to have only women in the photo).

The 2017 VIM conference webpage indicates that the conference is sponsored by several sources such as the National Science Foundation and the Stony Brook University Graduate School. But page 118 of the NSF's Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) of January 2017 states:

Subject to certain exceptions regarding admission policies at certain religious and military organizations, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (20 USC §§ 1681-1686) prohibits the exclusion of persons on the basis of sex from any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.  All NSF grantees must comply with Title IX.

The VIM conference appears to be an education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance and, as such, submissions and conference participation should not be restricted by sex.

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NOTES:

1. This Title IX Legal Manual discusses what constitutes an education program or activity:

While Title IXs antidiscrimination protections, unlike Title VI’s, are limited in coverage to "education" programs or activities, the determination as to what constitutes an "education program" must be made as broadly as possible in order to effectuate the purposes of both Title IX and the CRRA. Both of these statutes were designed to eradicate sex-based discrimination in education programs operated by recipients of federal financial assistance, and all determinations as to the scope of coverage under these statutes must be made in a manner consistent with this important congressional mandate.

2. I think that the relevant NSF award is SES 1324159, which states that part of the project will "continue a series of small meetings for women methodologists that deliberately mix senior leaders in the subfield with young, emerging scholars who can benefit substantially from such close personal interaction." This page indicates that the 2014 VIM conference received support from NSF grant SES 1120976.

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UPDATE [June 20, 2019]

I learned from a National Science Foundation representative of a statute (42 U.S. Code § 1885a) that permits the National Science Foundation to fund women-only activities listed in the statute. However, the Visions in Methodology conference has been funded by host organizations such as Stony Brook University, and I have not yet uncovered any reason why host institutional covered by Title IX would not be in violation of Title IX in funding single-sex educational opportunities.

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

The Monkey Cage published a post that claimed that "U.S. media outlets disproportionately emphasize the smaller number of terrorist attacks by Muslims". Such an inference depends on the control variables making all else equal, but the working paper on which the inference was based had few controls and few alternate specifications. The models controlled for fatalities but the Global Terrorism Database used for the key reference also lists the number of persons injured, and a measure of total casualties might be a better control than only fatalaties. For example, the Boston Marathon bombing is listed as having 1 fatality and 132 injured, but the models in the working paper would estimate the media coverage to be the same as if the bombing had had 1 fatality and 0 injured.

Moreover, as noted in the comments to the post, the Boston Marathon bombing is an outlier in terms of the outcome variable (20 percent of articles were devoted to that single event). But the working paper reported no model that omitted this outlier from the analysis, so it is not clear to what extent the estimates and inferences reflect a "Muslim perpetrator" effect or a "Boston Marathon bombing" effect. And, as also noted in the comments, proper controls would reflect the difference in expected media coverage for terrorist attacks in which the perpetrator was killed at the scene versus terrorist attacks in which there was a manhunt for the perpetrator.

Finally, from what I can tell based on the post and the working paper, the number of articles for the Boston Marathon bombing might include articles published before it was known or credibly suspected that the perpetrators were Muslim. If so, then the article count for the Boston Marathon bombing might be inflated because media coverage of the bombing before the religion of the perpetrators was known or credibly suspected cannot be attributed to the religion of the perpetrators.

My request for the data and code used for the post was declined, but hopefully I'll remember to check for the data and code after the working paper is published. In the meantime, I asked the authors on Twitter about inclusion of articles before the suspects were known and about results when the Boston Marathon bombing is excluded from the analysis.

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