Worried about survey bias? We have updated our add-on (or ado) surveybias, which calculates our multinomial generalisation of the old Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy (2005) measure for survey bias. If you have any dichotomous or multinomial variable in your survey whose true distribution is known (e.g. from the census, electoral counts, or other official data),…
Meet one reviewer from hell. Or perhaps not
Google decided some time ago that their algorithms are so good that the old Humanities/Social Sciences/Hard Sciences button on Google Scholar did no longer earn its keep. As a Social Scientist trying to remember the exact title of that dear old Dalton 1984 piece, I could not agree less. [caption id="attachment_13371" align="alignright" width="754"] Not my…
I’ve recently discovered Rfacebook, which lets you access public information on Facebook from R. In terms of convenience, no package for R or Python that I have seen so far comes near. Get yourself a long-lived token, store it as a variable, and put all posts on a fanpage you are interested in into one…
When I drove home from work a couple of days ago, I noticed a policeman flagging down precisely every tenth car in the other lane and directing the drivers towards a lay-by. He was in uniform, wearing hi-vis gear and his government-issued Walther, so non-compliance was clearly not an issue. The scene was completed by a large billboard, stating that this was no ordinary vehicle spot check but rather a road use survey. I badly want these guys on our team.
As previously reported on this blog, my PhD student and I are doing a CATI survey on European Identities. Here is how it worked out for us.
The shiny and new version 1.1 of our Stata addon surveybias is out. Surveybias estimates accuracy measures for pre-election polls and similar surveys where the true distribution of some categorical variable is known. Here is the lowdown.
Party system change, illustrated. Germany’s FDP was represented in the federal parliament from 1949 until 2013. During this time, they were part of various government coalitions for more than four decades. In 2009, they managed to attract more than 14 per cent of the vote, their best national result ever. Many voters did not like…
Thanks to the generosity of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, we are fielding a telephone survey on European and national identities. Our CATI studio runs on open source software, in the cloud. No, we are not exactly risk-adverse.
Somewhat foolishly, my university has granted me access to Mogon: not the god, not the death metal band but rather their supercomputer, which currently holds the 182th spot in the top 500 list of the fastest computers on the planet. It has some 34,000+ cores and more than 80 TB of RAM, but basically it’s just a very large bunch of Linux boxes. That means that I have a rough idea how to handle it, and that it happily runs my native Linux Stata and MPlus (and hopefully Jags) binaries for me. It also has R installed, and this is where my misery began.