October 11, 2004

History of ideas

Posted by Henry

Cosma Shalizi informs us that the 1973-74 edition of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas is online. Cosma provides pointers to some of the more interesting articles, and notes in passing E.P. Thompson’s dictum that ” to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks.” While you’re there, be sure to check out his unique take on Friday cat-blogging.

September 28, 2004

Polls, polls and more polls

Posted by Eszter

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Mystery Pollster is a new blog for “Demystifying the Science and Art of Political Polling”. I didn’t find it through Kausfiles or Instapundit, I got the recommendation during a phone conversation with a friend who barely reads blogs… but who does work with surveys herself. The blog should be of interest to data & methods geeks and political junkies alike.

UPDATE: Since a reader completely misunderstood why I happened to mention how I got information about this blog, I thought I should clarify. I mentioned that I did not get it from reading another blog, because I found it interesting that people who do not read blogs are still in the position to recommend blogs these days. For those of us interested in who knows about blogs and who reads them, this is an interesting tidbit.

September 26, 2004

Nice results

Posted by Eszter

I was hesitant to blog about technical details of my work here, but then I realized that if my fellow economist and philosopher bloggers can post about the details of their work then why couldn’t the sociology geeks?:) I’ll tuck it below the fold though as it likely only has limited appeal.

One of the goals of my dissertation project was to figure out survey measures of people’s actual online skills. In most of the existing literature, when people include measures of computer skills (the existing lit is mostly about computer-use skill not online skills), they rely on people’s self-perceived abilities. That is, researchers simply ask users to rate their skill. As you can imagine, this measure may not be very good. However, collecting data on actual skill is quite time-consuming, labor intensive and expensive, so we often don’t have a choice but to rely on survey measures. The question then is whether we can come up with survey measures better than the ones currently in use.

In my project, I measured people’s (one hundred randomly selected adult Internet users’) ability to find various types of information online and their efficiency (speed) in doing so.1 I also asked participants to rank their skills (as per the traditional skill measures) and to rate their understanding of a few dozen computer and Internet-related items. (There’s more on what I did to see whether perceived understanding is a good proxy for actual knowledge, but for that you’ll have to read the paper.;-)2

I then checked the correlation of the various survey measures with actual skill. I constructed an index measure of skill based on the most highly correlated survey questions.3 I then looked to see to what extent the self-perceived skill measure explains the variance in actual skill versus the extent to which my index measure based on knowledge items explains the variance in actual skill. I am happy to report that my index measure is a better predictor of skill than people’s self-perceived abilities.

An additional exciting bonus is that some of my survey measures were replicated on a national data set (the General Social Survey 2000 & 2002 Internet modules) so others can use these better measures as well.

I’m excited. The study I did was pretty risky in some ways. There was no guarantee that I would even find any variance on the most crucial variables (such as skill). But I did. And now these findings with the new versus traditional survey measures of skill suggest that there is something generalizable there, which is exciting.

Yes, I’m a data geek.

1 Yes, I realize there are all sorts of other ways one may measure skill, I had to pick something and I picked this measure because I believe it is very relevant to many other types of online actions.

2 If you’re interested in the methodological details of the study, you’ll find related publications here.

3 Yes, I know, it’s complicated because computer and Internet-related knowledge changes over time so it’s hard to know whether/how my measures will stand the test of time. But they should be useful at least for the GSS data as those surveys were conducted close to when I did my project.