domestic violence & employment bleg

I got an email from a former student who is now working in an employment program and asked me about research on the problem that victims of domestic violence sometimes lose their jobs due to victimhood. She’s asking me for relevant research. We know about Matt Desmond’s work on victims of domestic violence getting evicted, but I’m not the right person to know the research on the employment link. So, Scatterplotters, can you help?

nominal bleg

I need some available data that allows a simple model with a nominal outcome.  Ideally, there would be 4 categories (less ideally 5, less still 3), and it would be not quasi-ordinal.  The model will probably need to include a binary explanatory variable, a categorical explanatory variable, and a continuous or quasi-continuous variable.  But the outcome is the first thing.  Any ideas?

the future of academic freedom!

Inside High Ed has a story on a Florida state university that will not have tenure.  What struck me about the article was not that the university won’t have tenure, but the argument for why this is a good thing:

“We don’t want the [professors we hire] to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”*

The faculty contracts will last for one, three or five years, and will be renewed based on merit “rather than on a set rule within the boundaries of tenure,” Darkazalli said. He said that abandoning the tenure model means that faculty members will be less inclined to pursue the kind of “trivial publication and research” professors on the tenure track sometimes feel is required of them to succeed**, and instead focus on teaching and research beneficial to their students.

* Not added: “We want them to feel their livelihoods are in jeopardy each and every year.”

** Also unsaid: “We want them to tackle the really big questions.  The ones that might take one, three, or even five years to answer.”

ncaa women’s lacrosse championship predictions

My predictions for the NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championship.  

is open access equal access?

As Jenn and Brayden both write, a high-powered group of sociologists incoporated a new online journal, Sociological Science. Most commenters at orgtheory debate the prospect of Sociological Science succeeding in the near future and Brayden wonders whether this model can displace established journals. I, however, question how much the journal will promote or exacerbate inequality across academic institutions.

The editors tout the “evaluative not developmental” editorial reviews as a main feature of the nascent journal. One month review times and no R&Rs. It sounds great, after all I frequently get frustrated with the fact that reviewers do not recognize the my brilliant ideas, eloquent prose, and innovative statistical techniques. Who likes being forced to explain regression models to reviewers or to be asked by an editor to add three literatures and simultaneously cut 3,000 words?

At the same time, editorial focus on “evaluative” rather than “developmental” reviews implicitly assumes that authors can equally access venues to support the development of their work. I do not think that this is true.

anarchism in the academy

I’ve always liked Marx but hated Marxism. Growing up, I identified mostly with anarchism, and was moved particularly by its critique of power and hierarchy, and the violence that undergirds them. And where Marxism was severe and joyless, anarchism to me seemed playful and creative. In critical sociology, of course, Marxist and Marxian perspectives — I know, I know there’s a difference in the two — have been dominant, and the influence of anarchism has been marginal at best. I don’t write about anarchism either, and sadly don’t think of it very often, but I’m heartened to see that it’s finally making some waves in the academy. First, James C. Scott wrote the marvelous The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. And now anthropologist David Graeber has been getting a lot of press for his work with Occupy, and for not getting tenure at Yale. See this piece in the New Yorker. (I don’t really know Graeber or his work, so I can’t say much about it). In any event, it’s nice to see scholars take this political philosophy seriously, both as a topic of study and as an analytic perspective (especially given that it’s been proven exactly right in its critique of Marxism over the years).

tess

Incidentally, the TESS project that I’ve co-run for nearly five years is currently in another round of funding from NSF, with Jamie Druckman, a political scientist here at Northwestern, as the new co-PI.  (You might note that, as a subtle shout-out to our home institution, the main color on the TESS website is now purple.)

The premise of TESS is that investigators submit ideas for Internet-based survey experiments, these are reviewed, and successful proposals are fielded at no cost to the investigator using a platform based on a population sample (the GfK KnowledgePanel, formerly known as Knowledge Networks, which, yes, is also the company the collected the data for a certain other study that has been talked about a lot on sociology blogs).

We have a couple new mechanisms this time around.  One is a Short Studies Program, which allows people to submit shorter proposals for shorter experiments for which we are committed to turning around very quick decisions via internal review if possible.  Another is a Special Competition for Younger Investigators, which will give graduate students and recent Ph.D.s a competitive opportunity to field a larger experiment than the usual TESS parameters allow if they can make a good case for it.

Anyway, ironically, other blogs have actually posted our publicity announcement before I’ve said anything about it, so I might as well just link to Andrew Gelman’s post here.

flawed science moves good science

I was fortunate to attend a talk by an economist visiting our campus last week and, during lunch, she mentioned the embarrassment that the Reinhart and Rogoff scandal caused the economics profession, including being flogged by Stephen Colbert. I then explained the embarrassment in our fair discipline, the Regnerus affair, of which she had not heard (which, itself, made me very happy). I realize that many might be losing an appetite for this topic, but I think that juxtaposing these two episodes shows some fairly sharp contrasts and lessons for academic work more generally.

Both, I believe, point to fundamental problems in our publication systems. Equally important, however, I submit that sociology’s handling of the Regnerus affair actually conveys a relatively healthy response that, through the subsequent devastating critiques, produced important knowledge. I also submit that the publication of Regnerus’s paper led to this outcome far quickly than what happened in response to the Reinhart and Rogoff scandal.

counterfactuals and historical logic

One of my favorite articles to teach in graduate theory is Richard Ned Lebow’s “If Mozart Had Died at Your Age,” (paywall, sorry) which very cleverly lays out a counterfactual theory in which Mozart not dying at 36 changes the aesthetic, thereby the philosophical, thereby the political, history of Germany and therefore the world.

Now we have another example, somewhat (though not a lot!) more pedestrian, in the question of what the world might have been like had the Supreme Court not taken Bush v. Gore. Sandra Day O’Connor has commented that perhaps the court shouldn’t have taken the case, and Mediaite dares to ask: how might history have differed? Check it out – parsimony or contingency? You decide.

congress and science funding

In the latest battle in the war on science, the Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology has asked the NSF to explain the peer review process that lead to five grant applications being funded.

This time the attack hits a little closer to home for sociologists. Although the focus seems to be cultural anthropology, as four of the five grants received at least part of their funding from that program, two of the five PIs are sociologists. The Directory of the NSF is being asked to defend awards given to Michael Macy (Cornell) and Linda Kalof (Michigan State).

The lead Democrat on the committee, Representative Johnson, has penned a pretty militant letter in favor of NSF autonomy, and is asking Representative Smith to withdraw his request. (h/t to @howardaldrich for the two letters.)

actually, now is the perfect time to ‘commit sociology’

This opinion piece by Bob Brym and Howard Ramos was published by iPolitics on April 26, 2013. Since that piece is behind a paywall, it is reproduced here with permission.

When questioned during a news conference Thursday about an alleged plot to blow up a Via Rail train, Prime Minister Stephen Harper — making a dig at his Liberal rival, Justin Trudeau — said that “this is not a time to commit sociology.”

Why not? Why does the prime minister consider it an offence — or perhaps a sin — to use sociology to help shed light on the roots of terrorism or, for that matter, other pressing problems in contemporary society?

Part of Mr. Harper’s thinking may be based on a belief that, in the face of disaster and terror, many people just want to hear a strong voice of reassurance and authority. There’s another, more sinister interpretation of his comments: If you probe too deeply into the roots of terrorism or other problems, you might come to the conclusion that Conservative party’s ‘solutions’ themselves are suspect. It follows that thinking sociologically must to be avoided at all costs.

when to retract?

The Regnerus controversy has us debating, among other things, the criteria for retracting a published sociology paper from a journal. There are clearly some cases in which there is widespread agreement that a retraction is warranted:

1. fraudulent data
2. plagiarism
3. a mistake that invalidates the analysis

The case of Regnerus, however, has us disagreeing. So far, I can see that there is little agreement over whether these criteria require a retraction:

1. a paper whose review included an undisclosed conflict of interest
2. a paper with findings that have been demonstrated to be incorrect
3. a paper of poor quality (such that it should not have been published in the first place)
4. a paper with errant findings that is interacting in negative ways with the public/policy spheres

So far, Andy, Neal, Phil, Fabio, and Jeremy have made their thoughts known. I wonder if we can have a productive discussion about where the line–or at least the grey area–should be. Leaving it up to the editors without clear disciplinary norms seems less than optimal.

conflicts

Over at OrgTheory, Philip Cohen asked about norms of retraction when a reviewer has an undisclosed conflict. Here is a test case.

Walter Schumm (Kansas State) is the author of an article in Social Science Research defending the New Family Structures Survey (NFSS) and the Regnerus article that uses the data. Dr. Schumm was also paid by the Witherspoon Foundation to consult on the, “early stages of the development of the NFSS”. His non-peer-reviewed article* makes no mention of this relationship. In an email to me, Dr. Schumm wrote, “I don’t recall if it did come up.” Jim Wright, the editor of Social Science Research, told me, “This was never revealed, at least not to me. This is the first I have heard of Schumm’s involvement.”

Ball is in your court, Social Science Research Editorial Board.

* The article is included in a “Commentary and Debate” section of SSR on the Regnerus and Marks articles. In his introduction, the editor writes, “This ‘Commentary and Debate’ section contains several items pertinent to the controversy. They are published here so that the journal’s readers, authors, editorial board members, and reviewers will have the full story as well as some of the larger context in which the story unfolded.” If you looked at Schumm article without reading the Wright preface, you would likely think it was a normal SSR article.  It does not say “Commentary” anywhere and provides “Article Info” including the “Article History.”

Update: I missed this before, but Mark Regnerus cites both his SSR followup and the Schumm article in the Supreme Court brief he co-authored. They write:

…what is clear is that there remains much to be studied in this  domain, and hence confident assertions of “no difference” ought to be viewed with suspicion. As the study author [Regnerus] indicated, [long quote from the Regnerus sequel]  See also Walter R.  Schumm, Methodological Decisions and the Evaluation of Possible Effects of Different Family Structures on Children: The New Family Structures  Survey, 41 Soc. Sci. Research 1357-66 (2012) (validating methodological decisions made in New Family Structures Study, and noting similar decisions in other large-scale surveys).

A reasonable person who followed the citation to the Schumm article would have no idea that (1) Schumm was a consultant on the NFSS, or that (2) neither article was not peer-reviewed. Setting aside the issue of whether or not the Schumm article should have ever been published, I think  SSR has an ethical obligation to clarify both of these issues ASAP.

Update 2: Both the Schumm and Regnerus articles in the, “Commentary and Debate” section are labeled, “Original Research Article.”

 

 

None of the others have this designation. For example, here’s the listing for the Gary Gate’s piece:

 

these salary data got you blue?

From the ASA Faculty Salary Brief:

Perhaps you need to relocate to Canada, where we don’t necessarily collect data on sociologists’ salaries, but the Ontario Sunshine List gives us a hint that there are plenty of sociologists up here who break the six-figure barrier. Plus, a real pension, all the snowballs you can throw, and summer breaks that run April-August. It’s a northern paradise! Tempting? I hope so, because my department is hiring a Chair.

interfolio bleg

So, Interfolio: does it work?  Specifically, I mean the part of the service where job candidates sign up for the service, faculty members (or those in their employ) upload the letters, and then the service handles delivering letters of recommendation to the jobs for which the candidates are applying, regardless of whether the job wants the letters on paper or electronically.  Is this true?  Does it work as advertised?  Is it really as cheap as it looks on the website?

I have to admit, I haven’t followed this corner of academic technology/outsourcing for awhile, and so while I’ve had sporadic dealings with Interfolio in one way or another, I didn’t fully apprehend that this was their business model.  (I knew that departments could run their searches through Interfolio, but not the part where applicants could pay them to handle letters for them, or if I was aware of this I didn’t know that it was supposed to be something that could be used for non-electronic applications and that the ostensible price was so low.  Seems too good to be true, but then again, so did GMail and Dropbox once upon a time.)