Category: Data and Methods

Polling accuracy: a Q&A with Kai Arzheimer and Jocelyn Evans | OUPblog

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Polling data is ubiquitous in today’s world, but it is is often difficult to easily understand the accuracy of polls. In a recent paper published in Political Analysis, Kai Arzheimer and Jocelyn Evans developed a new methodology for assessing the accuracy of polls in multiparty and multi-candidate elections.

Source: Polling accuracy: a Q&A with Kai Arzheimer and Jocelyn Evans | OUPblog

Oldies but goldies. For installing/updating the ado, checkout SSC. And here is even more background material on surveybias.

Surveybias 1.4 is out

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Surveybias 1.4 is out 1

Just how badly biased is your pre-election survey? Once the election results are in, our scalar measures B and B_w provide convenient, single number summaries. Our surveybias add-on for Stata will calculate these and other measures from either raw data or from published margins. Its latest iteration (version 1.4) has just appeared on SSC. Surveybias…

Lehrbuch “Strukturgleichungsmodelle” erscheint bald

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[caption id="attachment_15760" align="alignleft" width="300"] Lehrbuch Strukturgleichungsmodelle[/caption] Mein seit langem geplantes Lehrbuch “Strukturgleichungsmodelle” erscheint demnächst bei Springer VS. Viele politikwissenschaftliche Beispiele illustrieren die Anwendung gängiger Modelle auf Daten aus dem ESS und dem Allbus. Gezeigt wird jeweils, wie sich die Modellschätzung in Stata, MPlus und Lisrel realisieren läßt. Zu allen Beispielen ist die vollständige und kommentierte…

New (Free!) Software for Assessing Survey Bias

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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),…

Google Scholar Fail

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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…

Analysing Facebook with R

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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…

How to Get a 100 per cent Response Rate

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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.

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