My colleagues Constantin Ruhe, Lisa Groß and I have a new article out in the Journal of Refugee Studies! I won't post a PDF because it's open access, so anyone can download if for free. We dig into the question about why GDP per capita has not generally been a good predictor of new refugees. … Continue reading The Asylum Hump: Why Country Income Level Predicts New Asylum Seekers, But Not New Refugees
Statistics
JOB POSTING: Come work on migration and forced displacement in Bonn!
We're hiring a new researcher in my project team at the German Development Institute! It's a very good gig for a post-doc, and there's a ton of opportunity to do cool work and interact with policy makers. More details and how to apply here.
The Challenge of Conflict Data
The last two posts I wrote focused on the social and political structures that drive data collection and availability. In these posts I was primarily talking about statistics in wealthy countries, as well as developing countries that aren't affected by conflict or violence. When it comes to countries that are beset by widespread conflict and violence, … Continue reading The Challenge of Conflict Data
How is Public Data Produced (Part 2)
I published a post yesterday about how administrative data is produced. In the end I claimed that data gathering is an inherently political process. Far from being comparable, scientifically standardized representations of general behavior, public data and statistics are imbued with all the vagaries and unique socio-administrative preferences of the country or locality that collects … Continue reading How is Public Data Produced (Part 2)
How Is Public Data Produced?
The 2016 Global Peace Index (GPI) launched recently. Along with its usual ranking of most to least peaceful countries it included a section analyzing the capacity for the global community to effectively measure progress in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically Goal 16, the peace goal. The GPI's analysis of statistical capacity (pp. 73-94) motivates a critical question: … Continue reading How Is Public Data Produced?
Rigor Versus Reality: Balancing the field with the lab
I am finally able to respond (add) to a post by Chris Moore about the problem of mathematicization and formalization of political science, and social science more generally, as it relates to how the social sciences inform real policy issues. As I'm finishing a Fulbright fellowship in Samoa, where I worked specifically on research supporting policy … Continue reading Rigor Versus Reality: Balancing the field with the lab
Logical Fallacies: A graph
This is great - it's a post on iO9, and makes light of the ridiculous "vaccines cause autism" meme with a lovely graphical representation of what really "causes" autism. Correlation is not causation friends. Source: iO9, Redditor Jasonp55
Finding Big Data’s Place in Conflict Analysis
Daniel Solomon recently posted a piece on how we conceptualize (and often misconceptualize) the role of big data in conflict event prediction. His post got me thinking about what role big data plays in conflict analysis. This comes on the heels of Chris Neu's post on the TechChange blog about the limits of using crowdsourcing to … Continue reading Finding Big Data’s Place in Conflict Analysis
Causes of Effects…and Effects of Causes
Andrew Gelman and Guido Imbens recently posted a paper entitled "Why Ask Why? Forward Causal Inference and Reverse Causal Questions." It completely made my day, primarily because it succinctly deals with the way people naturally arrive at research questions with the help of some statistical logic. While I liked the models and the logic, what I … Continue reading Causes of Effects…and Effects of Causes
Social Network Analysis: A cool analysis of how SNA worked during the American Revolution
Lots of people saw Kieran Healy's humorous and thought proviking post about how some very basic matrix algebra and centrality analysis can be used to identify people within social networks using basic metadata. This article by Shin Kap Han goes into more depth about centrality and the power of weak bonds; I found the analysis of the … Continue reading Social Network Analysis: A cool analysis of how SNA worked during the American Revolution
Charles P. Martin-Shields 