If you teach in a policy school or in a political science department, chances are some of your students are not quite conversant in the quantitative methods used in the social sciences.
Many of the students who sign up for my fall seminar on the Microeconomics of International Development Policy, for example, are incredibly bright, but they are not familiar with regression analysis, and so they don’t know how to read a regression table. This makes it difficult to assign empirical papers in World Development for in-class discussion, let alone papers in the Journal of Development Economics.
While I do not have the time to teach basic econometrics to students in those seminars, I have prepared two handouts for them to read in preparation for reading papers containing empirical results, which I thought I should make available to anyone who would rather not spend precious class time teaching the basics of quantitative methods. I have used both these handouts in my development seminar last fall, and my students said that they had learned quite a bit from reading them.
Given that many of us are spending these days revising our syllabus for the fall semester, I have revised my empirical handouts for the new academic year, and I am happy to make them available to whoever wants to use them. If you use them, I simply request that you do not modify them and that you let me know about how I can improve them for next year.
Trivial Confirmations of the Obvious?
An op-ed by Jacqueline Stevens a few weekends ago in the New York Times made a lot of waves. In it, Stevens — a professor in the political science department at Northwestern University — essentially declares herself in favor of eliminating National Science Foundation funding for political science research.
Her reason? Political scientists are lousy forecasters.
This post not going to be a response to Jacqueline Stevens. GWU’s Henry Farrell has a great response here, Stanford’s James Fearon — whose work is singled out by Stevens as the type of work she dislikes — has his own response here, and forecaster extraordinaire Jay Ulfelder responds here.
What I am going to take issue with here instead is a two-sentence excerpt. Indeed, in her op-ed, Stevens writes of empirical research in political science that
Many of today’s peer-reviewed studies offer trivial confirmations of the obvious (…). I look forward to seeing what happens to my discipline and politics more generally once we stop mistaking probability studies and statistical significance for knowledge.
Trivial confirmations of the obvious, really?