This book provides a solution to the ecological inference problem,
which has plagued users of statistical methods for over seventy-five
years: How can researchers reliably infer individual-level behavior
from aggregate (ecological) data? In political science, this question
arises when individual-level surveys are unavailable (for instance,
local or comparative electoral politics), unreliable (racial
politics), insufficient (political geography), or infeasible
(political history). This ecological inference problem also confronts
researchers in numerous areas of major significance in public policy,
and other academic disciplines, ranging from epidemiology and
marketing to sociology and quantitative history. Although many have
attempted to make such cross-level inferences, scholars agree that all
existing methods yield very inaccurate conclusions about the world. In
this volume, Gary King lays out a unique--and reliable--solution to
this venerable problem. King begins with a qualitative overview,
readable even by those without a statistical background. He then
unifies the apparently diverse findings in the methodological
literature, so that only one aggregation problem remains to be solved.
He then presents his solution, as well as empirical evaluations of the
solution that include over 16,000 comparisons of his estimates from
real aggregate data to the known individual-level answer. The method
works in practice. King's solution to the ecological inference problem
will enable empirical researchers to investigate substantive questions
that have heretofore proved unanswerable, and move forward fields of
inquiry in which progress has been stifled by this problem.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400849208
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter