Home › 2022 › November

Month: November 2022

By Posted on Posted in Public opinion No Comments

Political Psychology recently published Chalmers et al 2022 "The rights of man: Libertarian concern for men's, but not women's, reproductive autonomy". The basis for this claim about libertarians' selective concern is indicated in the abstract as:

Libertarianism was associated with opposition to abortion rights and support for men's right both to prevent women from having abortions (male veto) and to withdraw financial support for a child when women refuse to terminate the pregnancy (financial abortion).

The above passage represents a flawed inferential method that I'll explain below.

---

The lead author of Chalmers et al 2022 quickly responded to my request about the availability of data, code, and codebooks, with replication materials now public at the OSF site. I'll use data from Study 2 and run a simple analysis to illustrate the inferential flaw.

The only predictor that I'll use is a 0-to-6 "Libert" variable that I renamed "Libertarianism" and recoded to range from 0 to 1 for responses to the item "To what extent would you describe your political persuasion as libertarian?", with 0 for "Not at all" to 1 "Very much".

---

In the OLS linear regression below, the abSINGLE outcome variable has eight levels, from 0 for "Not at all" to 1 for "Very much", for an item about whether the respondent thinks that a pregnant woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if she is single and does not want to marry the man.

The linear regression output below (N=575) indicates that, on average, respondent libertarianism is negatively correlated with support for permitting a woman to have an abortion if she is single and does not want to marry the man.

. reg abSINGLE Libertarianism
---------------------------------
      abSINGLE |  Coef.  p-value
---------------+-----------------
Libertarianism | -0.30   0.000 
     intercept |  0.89   0.000 
---------------------------------

In the OLS linear regression below, the maleVETO outcome variable has six levels, from 0 for "Strongly disagree" to 1 for "Strongly agree", for an item about whether the respondent thinks that a woman should not be allowed to have an abortion if the man involved really wants to keep his unborn child.

The linear regression output below (N=575) indicates that, on average, respondent libertarianism is positively correlated with support for prohibiting a woman from having an abortion if the man involved really wants to keep his unborn child.

. reg maleVETO Libertarianism
--------------------------------
      maleVETO |  Coef. p-value
---------------+----------------
Libertarianism |  0.26  0.000 
     intercept |  0.13  0.000 
--------------------------------

So what's the flaw in combining results from these two regressions to infer that libertarians have a concern for men's reproductive autonomy but not for women's reproductive autonomy?

---

The flaw is that the linear regressions above include data from non-libertarians, and patterns among non-libertarians might account for the change in the sign of the coefficient on Libertarianism.

Note, for example, that, based on the OLS regression output, the predicted support among respondents highest in libertarianism will be 0.89 + -0.30, or 0.69, for women's right to an abortion on the 0-to-1 abSINGLE item, but will be 0.13 + 0.26, or 0.39, for men's right to an abortion veto on the 0-to-1 maleVETO item.

But let's forget these linear regression results, because the appropriate method for assessing whether a group is inconsistent is to analyze data only from that group. So here are respective means, for respondents at 6 on the 0-to-6 "Libert" variable (N=18):

0.45 on abSINGLE

0.49 on maleVETO

And here are respective means, for respondents at 5 or 6 on the 0-to-6 "Libert" variable (N=46):

0.53 on abSINGLE

0.42 on maleVETO

I wouldn't suggest interpreting these results to mean that libertarians are on net consistent about women's reproductive autonomy and men's reproductive autonomy or, for that matter, that libertarians favor women's reproductive autonomy over men's. But I think that the analyses illustrate the flaw in making inferences about a group based on a linear regression involving people who aren't in that group.

The Stata log file has output of my analyses above and additional analyses, but Chalmers et al 2022 had two datasets and multiple measures for key items, so the analyses aren't exhaustive.

Tagged with: , ,

By Posted on Posted in Sex No Comments

Politics & Gender published Deckman and Cassese 2021 "Gendered nationalism and the 2016 US presidential election", which, in 2022, shared an award for the best article published in Politics & Gender the prior year.

---

1.

So what is gendered nationalism? From Deckman and Cassese 2021 (p. 281):

Rather than focus on voters' sense of their own masculinity and femininity, we consider whether voters characterized American society as masculine or feminine and whether this macro-level gendering, or gendered nationalism as we call it, had political implications in the 2016 presidential election.

So how is this characterization of American society as masculine or feminine measured? The Deckman and Cassese 2021 online appendix indicates that gendered nationalism is...

Measured with a single survey item asking whether "Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine." Responses were provided on a four-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

So the measure of "whether voters characterized American society as masculine or feminine" (p. 281) ranged from the characterization that American society is (too) feminine to the characterization that American society is...not (too) feminine. The "(too)" is because I suspect that respondents might interpret the "too" in "too soft and feminine" as also applying to "feminine", but I'm not sure it matters much.

Regardless, there are at least three potential relevant characterizations: American society is feminine, masculine, or neither feminine nor masculine. It seems like a poor research design to combine two of these characterizations.

---

2.

Deckman and Cassese 2021 also described gendered nationalism as (p. 278):

Our project diverges from this work by focusing on beliefs about the gendered nature of American society as a whole—a sense of whether society is 'appropriately' masculine or has grown too soft and feminine.

But disagreement with the characterization that "Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine" doesn't necessarily indicate a characterization that society is "appropriately" masculine, because a respondent could believe that society is too masculine or that society is neither feminine nor masculine.

Omission of a response option indicating a belief that American society is (too) masculine might have made it easier for Deckman and Cassese 2021 to claim that "we suppose that those who rejected gendered nationalism were likely more inclined to vote for Hillary Clinton" (p. 282), as if only the measured "too soft and feminine" characterization is acceptance of "gendered nationalism" and not the unmeasured characterization that American society is (too) masculine.

---

3.

Regression results in Table 2 of Deckman and Cassese 2021 indicate that gendered nationalism predicts a vote for Trump over Clinton in 2016, net of controls for political party, a single measure of political ideology, and demographics such as class, race, and education.

Gendered nationalism is the only specific belief in the regression, and Deckman and Cassese 2021 reports no evidence about whether "beliefs about the gendered nature of American society as a whole" has any explanatory power above other beliefs about gender, such as gender roles and animus toward particular genders.

---

4.

Deckman and Cassese 2021 reported on four categories of class: lower class, working class, middle class, and upper class. Deckman and Cassese 2021 hypothesis H2 is that:

Gendered nationalism is more common among working-class men and women than among men and women with other socioeconomic class identifications.

For such situations, in which the hypothesis is that one of four categories is distinctive, the most straightforward approach is to omit from the regressions the hypothesized distinctive category, because then the p-values and coefficients for each of the three included categories will provide information about the evidence that that included category differs from the omitted category.

But the regressions in Deckman and Cassese 2021 omitted middle class, and, based on the middle model in Table 1, Deckman and Cassese 2021 concluded that:

Working-class Democrats were significantly more likely to agree that the United States has grown too soft and feminine, consistent with H2.

But the coefficients and standard errors were 0.57 and 0.26 for working class and 0.31 and 0.40 for lower class, so I'm not sure that the analysis in Table 1 contained enough evidence that the 0.57 estimate for working class differs from the 0.31 estimate for lower class.

---

5.

I think that Deckman and Cassese 2021 might have also misdescribed the class results in the Conclusions section, in the passage below, which doesn't seem limited to Democrat participants. From p. 295:

In particular, the finding that working-class voters held distinctive views on gendered nationalism is compelling given that many accounts of voting behavior in 2016 emphasized support for Donald Trump among the (white) working class.

For that "distinctive" claim, Deckman and Cassese 2021 seemed to reference differences in statistical significance (p. 289, footnote omitted):

The upper- and lower-class respondents did not differ from middle-class respondents in their endorsement of gendered nationalism beliefs. However, people who identified as working class were significantly more likely to agree that the United States has grown too soft and feminine, though the effect was marginally significant (p = .09) in a two-tailed test. This finding supports the idea that working-class voters hold a distinctive set of beliefs about gender and responded to the gender dynamics in the campaign with heightened support for Donald Trump’s candidacy, consistent with H2.

In the Table 1 baseline model predicting gendered nationalism without interactions, ologit coefficients are 0.25 for working class and 0.26 for lower class, so I'm not sure that there is sufficient evidence that working class views on gendered nationalism were distinctive from lower class views on gendered nationalism, even though the evidence is stronger that the 0.25 working class coefficient differs from zero than the 0.26 lower class coefficient differs from zero.

Looks like the survey's pre-election wave had at least twice as many working class respondents as lower class respondents. If that ratio was similar for the post-election wave, that would explain the difference in statistical significance and explain why the standard error was smaller for the working class (0.15) than for the lower class (0.23). Search for "class" at the PRRI site and use the PRRI/The Atlantic 2016 White Working Class Survey.

---

6.

At least Deckman and Cassese 2021 interpreted the positive coefficient on the interaction of college and Republican as an estimate of how the association of college and the outcome among Republicans differed from the association of college and the outcome among the omitted category.

But I'm not sure of the justification for "largely" in Deckman and Cassese 2021 (p. 293):

Thus, in accordance with our mediation hypothesis (H5), gender differences in beliefs that the United States has grown too soft and feminine largely account for the gender gap in support for Donald Trump in 2016.

Inclusion of the predictor for gendered nationalism pretty much only halves the logit coefficient for "female", from 0.80 to 0.42, and, in Figure 3, the gender gap in predicted probability of a Trump vote is pretty much only cut in half, too. I wouldn't call about half "largely", especially without addressing the obvious confound of attitudes about men and women that have nothing to do with "gendered nationalism".

---

7.

Deckman and Cassese 2021 was selected for a best article award by the editorial board of Politics & Gender. From my prior posts on publications in Politics & Gender: p < .000, misinterpreted interaction terms, and an example of the difference in statistical signifiance being used to infer an difference in effect.

---

NOTES

1. Prior post mentioning Deckman and Cassese 2021.

2. Prior post on deviations from a preregistration plan, for Cassese and Barnes 2017.

3. "Gendered nationalism" is an example of use of a general term when a better approach would be specificity, such as a measure that separates "masculine nationalism" from "feminine nationalism". Another example is racial resentment, in which a general term is used to describe only the type of racial resentment directed at Blacks. Feel free to read through participant comments in the Kam and Burge survey, in which plenty of comments from respondents who score low on the racial resentment scale indicate resentment directed at Whites.

Tagged with: , , ,

By Posted on Posted in Misperceptions No Comments

The Journal of Social and Political Psychology recently published Young et al 2022 "'I feel it in my gut:' Epistemic motivations, political beliefs, and misperceptions of COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election", which reported in its abstract that:

Results from a US national survey from Nov-Dec 2020 illustrate that Republicans, conservatives, and those favorable towards President Trump held greater misperceptions about COVID and the 2020 election.

Young et al 2022 contains two shortcomings of too much social science: bias and error.

---

1.

In Young et al 2022, the selection of items measuring misperceptions is biased toward things that the political right is more likely than the political left to indicate a misperception about, so that the most that we can conclude from Young et al 2022 is that the political right more often reported misperceptions about things that the political right is more likely to report misperceptions about.

Young et al 2022 seems to acknowledge this research design flaw in the paragraph starting with:

Given the political valence of both COVID and election misinformation, these relationships might not apply to belief in liberal-serving misinformation.

But it's not clear to me why some misinformation about covid can't be liberal-serving. At least, there are misperceptions about covid that are presumably more common among the political left than among the political right.

For example, the eight-item Young et al 2022 covid misperceptions battery contains two items that permit respondents to underestimate the seriousness of covid-19: "Coronavirus (COVID-19 is a hoax" [sic for the unmatched parenthesis], and "The flu is more lethal than coronavirus (COVID-19)". But the battery doesn't contain corresponding items that permit respondents to overestimate the seriousness of covid-19.

Presumably, a higher percentage of the political left than the political right overestimated the seriousness of covid-19 at the time of the survey in late 2020, given that, in a different publication, a somewhat different Young et al team indicated that:

Results from a national survey of U.S. adults from Nov-Dec 2020 suggest that Trump favorability was...negatively associated with self-reported mask-wearing.

Another misperception measured in the survey is that "Asian American people are more likely to carry the virus than other people", which was not a true statement at the time. But, from what I can tell, at the time of the survey, covid rates in the United States were higher among Hispanics than among Whites, which presumably means that Hispanic Americans were more likely to carry the virus than White Americans. It's not clear to me why misinformation about the covid rate among Asians should be prioritized over misinformation about the covid rate among Hispanics, although, if someone wanted to bias the research design against the political right, that priority would make sense.

---

Similar flaw with the Young et al 2022 election 2020 misperceptions battery, which had an item that permits overestimation of the detected voter fraud ("There was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election"), but had no item that would permit underestimation of voter fraud in 2020 (e.g., "There was no voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election"), which is the type of error that the political left would presumably be more likely to make.

For another example, Young et al 2022 had a reverse-coded misperceptions item for "We can never be sure that Biden's win was legitimate", but had no item about whether we can be sure that Trump's 2016 win was legitimate, which would be an obvious item to pair with the Biden item to assess whether the political right and the political left are equally misinformed or at least equally likely to give insincere responses to surveys that have items such as "The coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine will be used to implant people with microchips".

---

So I think it's less, as Young et al 2022 suggested, that "COVID misinformation and election misinformation both served Republican political goals", and more that the selection of misinformation items in Young et al 2022 was biased toward a liberal-serving conclusion.

Of course, it's entirely possible that the political right is more misinformed than the political left in general or on selected topics. But it's not clear to me how Young et al 2022 can provide a valid inference about that.

---

2.

For error, Young et al 2022 Table 3 has an unstandardized coefficient for Black race, indicating that, in the age 50 and older group, being Black corresponded to higher levels of Republicanism. I'm guessing that this coefficient is missing a negative sign, given that there is a negative sign on the standardized coefficient...The Table 2 income predictor for the age 18-49 group has an unstandardized coefficient of .04 and a standard error of .01, but no statistical significance asterisk, and has a standardized coefficient of .00, which I think might be too low...And the appendix indicates that "The analysis yielded two factors with Eigenvalues < 1.", but I think that should be a greater than symbol.

None of those potential errors are particularly important, except perhaps for inferences about phenomena such as the rigor of the peer and editorial review that Young et al 2022 went through.

---

NOTES

1. Footnotes 3 and 4 of Young et al 2022 indicate that:

Consistent with Vraga and Bode (2020), misperceptions were operationalized as COVID-related beliefs that contradicted the "best available evidence" and/or "expert consensus" at the time data were gathered.

If the purpose is to assess whether "I feel it in my gut" people are incorrect, then the perceptions should be shown to be incorrect and not merely in contradiction to expert consensus or, for that matter, in contradiction to the best available evidence.

2. The funding statement for Young et al 2022 indicates that the study was funded by the National Institute of Aging.

3. Prior posts on politically biased selection of misinformation items, in Abrajano and Lajevardi 2021 and in the American National Election Studies 2020 Time Series Study.

4. After I started drafting the above post, Social Science Quarterly published Benegal and Motta 2022 "Overconfident, resentful, and misinformed: How racial animus motivates confidence in false beliefs", which used the politically biased ANES misinformation items, in which, for example, respondents who agree that "World temperatures have not risen on average over the last 100 years" get coded as misinformed (an error presumably more common on the political right) but respondents who wildly overestimate the amount of climate change over the past 100 years don't get coded as misinformed (an error presumably more common on the political left).

5. I might be crazy, but I think that research about the correlates of misperceptions should identify respondents who have correct perceptions instead of merely identifying respondents who have particular misperceptions.

And I don't think that researchers should place particular misperceptions into the same category as the correct perception, such as by asking respondents merely whether world temperatures have risen on average over the last 100 years, any more than researchers should ask respondents merely whether world temperatures have risen on average by at least 3 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years, for which agreement would be the misperception.

Tagged with: , , ,