Reactions to "A Model Discipline" -- Part II

In the previous reaction post, I introduced the important new book A Model Discipline by Clarke and Di Primo.  There I concluded with a note about how a multi-method approach provides a compelling reason for the combination of inductive and deductive analytic strategies.  In this post I will discuss in more detail their argument for the varying purposes of models.

Reactions to "A Model Discipline"

I figured a good use of this space is to provide my thoughts on important recent books or articles relevant to research in public management.  This may sometimes be a discuss an article directly related to the study of public management.  But, I am going to start with some reactions to a provocative new book in political methodology -- A Model Discipline:  Political Science and the Logic of Representations by Clarke and Primo.

More resources for learning R

A couple of MOOCs are starting up related to data mining and statistics in R.  I won't sign up for the MOOCs but I will likely watch through many of the associated videos that are nicely collected on youtube.  The videos are broken up into nice little chunks (10-20 minutes) on specific topics.

Check them out here (data mining) and here (statistics).

Reminder for where to get my working papers

I will likely have posts when I add papers, but I want to remind everyone that my working papers are generally available at SSRN.  Soon, this will include my APSA paper on trust in the EPA and fracking,  I give co-authors a veto on posting working papers, but that is the only thing that stops me from posting all of my papers.

Quick review of my APSA panel on trust and accountability in government

This last weekend was the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago.  The good news is that there was some excellent research in the public administration section (as well as others).  The bad news is that the allocation of panels to the public administration section was tiny.  We have a lot of work to do to increase the footprint of the section in the APSA.

I was happy to participate in a great panel (first thing Thursday morning) to a full room -- totaling about 10 chairs.  The overall topic was trust and accountability in administrative agencies and my comments are after the break.

A great example of the utility of R

I am in the process of moving over to R as my baseline statistics applications.  Recently I have been working largely in STATA and then moving some results over to R for its fantastic graphic options.  While this has worked, it has significant limitations.  One of the strengths of R is its creation of objects that can be fed automatically into graphics commands (which STATA can also do -- but in a less comprehensive way).

The following blog post is a great example of how R works and the advantages it provides.  After the break, I will have a short commentary on why I think this example illustrates the utility of R so well.

http://rforpublichealth.blogspot.com/2013/08/exporting-results-of-linear-regression_24.html

Re-launch for Research in Public Management

It has been quite awhile since I posted -- but it is just because I have been reorganizing and resting up.  I plan to re-launch the site this week with a much broader web presence.  This blog will house my blog posts related to the research side of public management -- working papers, comments on papers/book I read, methods tutorials, etc.

I will launch a second blog for my teaching related activities at www.EBPubMan.blogspot.com.  There you will see links to news articles and other blog posts relevant to emergency management, evidence-based public management, and public management issues generally.

I have also launched a twitter feed.  Follow me @Robinson_OU for my professional twitter posts along the range of research and teaching activities reviewed above

Some Scary Simulations on the Robustness of Logit

Based on my training, I was always believed that logit models were relatively robust.  Specifically, the rule-of-thumb had been that having more than 50 observations was probably ok for simple MLE models like logit.  Some sticklers prefer a floor of 100 observations.  However, some recent research suggests that the floor may be need to be higher -- much higher.

Big Changes Coming

There are big changes coming to the blog.  I will try to ramp up posting in anticipation of the changes -- but I am not sure how well that will work.  I am moving to the University of Oklahoma's Department of Political Science to become the Bellmon Chair of Public Service and becoming the editor of Risk, Hazards, Crisis, and Public Policy starting in the fall of 2013.  I am considering a blog for each of these new responsibilities.

Randomized Response Surveys -- Curious but Unconvinced

I have run across an interesting strategy for survey design -- that may interest others as well.  A common criticism of surveys (especially those on potentially sensitive subject -- or anything with a social affirmation bias) is that people may not answer honestly and there is no way to ensure that they do.  One strategy to overcome this is randomized response.