When it comes to quantitative data in conflict studies, standards for collection, reliability, ethics, and usage remain behind the curve. We discuss five things that scholars can do to address these gaps.
When it comes to quantitative data in conflict studies, standards for collection, reliability, ethics, and usage remain behind the curve. We discuss five things that scholars can do to address these gaps.
*Post written with my coauthor Ryan Maness. We are currently rounding the corner and almost ready to submit the final version of our Cyber Conflict book. This post represents ongoing research as...
There's a Slate article titled "The End of the College Essay" circulating in various Facebook and Twitter circles critical of assigning long essays to undergraduates. The gist of the complaint...
My first semester teaching as a PhD'd professor was tough - I was constantly struggling to stay on top of my research responsibilities and my family responsibilities. Add in teaching 2 new preps -...
Have you heard about a new study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, authored by academics Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa and released by University of Chicago Press? Their research question should be of interest to most of the people reading this blog: "are undergraduates really learning anything once they get" to college?**The results are disturbing: Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and...
Aaron Shaw had an interesting post at the Dolores Labs blog last week that examined how using different question scales in surveys can elicit very different responses:You can ask “the crowd” all kinds of questions, but if you don’t stop to think about the best way to ask your question, you’re likely to get unexpected and unreliable results. You might call it the GIGO theory of research design.To demonstrate the point, I decided to recreate some classic survey design experiments and distribute them to the workers in Crowdflower’s labor pools. For the experiments, every worker saw only one...
It is an appropriately gloomy day here in Manhattan, as the city and the country remembers the horror of September 11th, 2001 and attempts to continue to collectively heal. For me, part of that healing process has been trying to understand what happened, and more importantly, how to prevent it from ever happening again. Over the past eight years many others have been moved to investigate and analyze these events, which has lead to a plethora of research on 9/11—some good, some not so good.As someone who attempts to read everything that comes across my desk related to these attacks, I thought...
Ah, August 15 NSF target dates! This time of year makes the image above ring truer than ever. Hat Tip to Stu Shulman.