posts tagged “research”

New methods are key to developing new hypotheses and testing old ones. It would be difficult to imagine social sciences today without regression models, or social network analysis, or online ethnographies. Each has been developed and used to expand what we think that we know about the social world.

Black and white picture of a Victor snap trap
Image by pepperberryfarm via Flickr, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0

But social scientists, especially junior researchers, too often fail to justify their new methods. They demonstrate their creativity and document the often considerable work they put into developing their new approach. But scholars should take care that they're not just building a better mousetrap.

Because I am a masochistperfectionist, I spent the better part my day making my R code more elegant. I figured out what to do with a simple loop, but wanted to write the code the right way. I always tell myself that the time I spend torturing myselfwriting the right code will help me down the line so I know how to do it next time. I will inevitably forget and spend the same four hours doing the same thing again. As a gift to my future self, I decided that I would write down what I learned because it will likely come up again (you're welcome, future Mike!).

My basic problem comes from the desire to match two lists item-by-item. Python contains a function, zip(), that does this. I want to figure out how to zip in R.

I hope that you will forgive the shameless self-promotion, but I recently published a paper in Sociological Science (yay open access!) that examined neighborhood racial change in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston metropolitan neighborhoods with an amazingly talented colleague, Siri Warkentien.

We find mixed results related to future racial integration. On the negative side we find that recent estimates overestimate the stability of long-term racial integration. Previous studies don't really examine the pace of neighborhood change, which reveals many integrated neighborhoods are in fact resegregating.

On a more positive note, we find that some neighborhoods really do maintain multiethnic segregation over many decades. We call those neighborhoods "quadrivial ...