Have a message. State it. Write nothing else.

Those are the first instructions to Demographic Research authors on their submission pages. I've heard variations on this theme before, but nothing as clearly stated as this. You might say that the Demographic Research editors had a message, stated it clearly, and wrote nothing else.

I started using this advice to reframe several papers that I have hanging around. What I have found in my first week using this advice is that the organization of papers has become easier. My writing becomes crisper. My papers are shorter. And I find them to be more compelling.

I noticed improvement in a couple of ...

Over the weekend, jeremy posted about beckieball, a "new sport sweeping the country." The purpose was to show how selection on characteristics affects the correlation between characteristics upon selection. This, as commenter Stuart Buck pointed out, is an example of Berkson's Paradox, though it relates to jeremy's post about height and nba.

Although he left several other exercises to the reader, I thought I would do a simpler one: recreate the code that he used to make his example. I did this a) because it was a semi-useful way to shake the cobwebs from egg nog and yuletides, and b) because I think that it will come ...

I am attempting to learn R. This is either a great thing or a terrible, terrible mistake while on the tenure clock. But, all the cool kids are doing -- so even though they might also jump off a bridge, I'm going to jump into R.

The hardest part so far is doing things that now come as second nature to me in Stata. Although R's tools are much better in the long-run, learning what types of objects different functions return and such ends up being a very high learning curve.

A while back (all posts are a while back now), I wrote a post describing how to import ...

I was born in Northern Colorado and now live just outside the District of Columbia. I can attest from personal experience that these two places do not share much. Except, that is, for their desire to become states.¹

I was curious what would happen if both became states as a modern-day [Missouri Compromise]. I wrote the following script to make the Amazing Apportionment Machine to reapportion seats and looked at two scenarios: the current distribution of congressional districts and the distribution if "Northern Colorado" and the "State of Columbia" were added as states.

The code has some useful tricks for general purpose in it. First, it defines a program ...

In the commotion of moving and starting my new job, I neglected to post about two articles that came out last month that I worked on for quite a while. The first, Reassessing Residential Preferences for Redevelopment, was published in City & Community last month in a special issue on gentrification. My paper argues that much of our public policy and debate regarding changing residential preferences for gentrification occurs without actually measuring preferences in the population. Using the 2004-5 Chicago Area Study, I do just that to show that preferences break down along groups defined by home ownership. Home owners in the city of Chicago, regardless of race, are ...

I am moving with my family this week so that I can start my new position at American University in the Department of Sociology and Center on Health, Risk and Society. I am very excited to be starting this new position being with great new colleagues, being in a wonderful academic and policy environment, and moving back to the area where my wife and I grew up. In addition to a much needed, if only possibly well deserved, vacation last week posts have necessarily been a little slow.

As a scholar of residential mobility, it is very strange to be going through a move myself. Throughout the process, I ...

While writing scripts is one of the most important skills for reproducible quantitative sociology, the typical convention is to pick up the skills through more experienced colleagues in graduate school or at the workplace. Below are a few tips that I have learned from others, picked up on my own, or otherwise accumulated in my arsenal of tricks that I thought that I would pass along. There are great resources out there, but I thought it would be helpful to pass along what I think are the most important and helpful tips.

1. Include a brief header in all scripts indicating the name of the file, the creator, and a brief ...

Rolf Pendall posted a short, interesting piece on the suburbanization of poverty at the Urban Institute's new Metro Trends Blog. In it, he questions the basis of determining cities from suburbs in the service of understanding the "suburbanization of poverty."

His criticism stems from the ambiguity of defining suburbs and cities based on their urban design and physical infrastructure. He demonstrates this ambiguity through examples of Houson, Texas (a city with extensive sprawl); Fremont, California (a suburb with its own employment base and denser development than Houston); and Silver Spring, Maryland (an inner-ring suburb with all of the accoutrements of urban living).

His question is valid and one we ...

Sometimes art expresses truth better than research ever could. I present the following as evidence of art capturing the essence of the Whole Foods habitus.

The video is of course meant to parody the cultural conventions of Whole Foods; but, I think that it really speaks to larger truths about culture, food, and inequality. While the video pokes fun at the Whole Foods consumer, I think that it accurately reflects how out of touch a vast swath of relatively privileged Americans are regarding the real struggles of poorer and many minority residents face when attempting to eat a healthy diet. Forget the fact that kombucha isn't on the shelves, many ...

After much hard work on the part of very talented people, the website for the Chicago Community Adult Health Study launched this week! For those who do not know about the project, it is an excellent dataset to examine influences of neighborhood environments on health outcomes among adults. The sample comes from all 343 Neighborhood Clusters in the city of Chicago, which allows a wide range of analyses across neighborhood environments. In addition to the survey of informants, there is also very rich data on the physical aspects of the neighborhood environment based on systematic social observations in all of the 343 Neighborhood Clusters.

I took advantage of this in ...