"Pollock and Edwards explain the nuts-and-bolts of research design and data analysis in a clear and concise style. The Essential of Political Analysis is an intuitive introduction to complex material, replete with examples from the political science literature that add relevance to statistical concepts. This text offers students an excellent balance between the technical and the practical." —Francis Neely, San Francisco State University Gain the skills you need to conduct political analysis and critically assess statistical research. In this Sixth Edition of The Essentials of Political Science, bestselling authors Philip H. Pollock III and Barry C. Edwards build students’ analytic abilities and develop their statistical reasoning with new data, fresh exercises, and accessible examples. This brief, accessible guide walks students through the essentials—measuring concepts, formulating and testing hypotheses, describing variables—while using key terms, chapter-opening objectives, over 80 tables and figures, and practical exercises to get them using and applying their new skills. Using SPSS, STATA or R? Discounted package deals available with Philip H. Pollock’s companion workbooks. . Give your students the SAGE edge! SAGE edge offers a robust online environment featuring an impressive array of free tools and resources for review, study, and further exploration, keeping both instructors and students on the cutting edge of teaching and learning.
This is a shrink-wrapped, discounted package containing Philip Pollock's popular, student-friendly political science methods text and new student workbook using Stata. Workbook contains a data CD.
Teach your students to conduct political research using R, the open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. An R Companion to Political Analysis offers the same easy-to-use and effective style as the best-selling SPSS and Stata Companions. The all-new Second Edition includes new and revised exercises and datasets showing students how to analyze research-quality data to learn descriptive statistics, data transformations, bivariate analysis (cross-tabulations and mean comparisons), controlled comparisons, statistical inference, linear correlation and regression, dummy variables and interaction effects, and logistic regression. The clear explanation and instruction is accompanied by annotated and labeled screen shots and end-of-chapter exercises to help students apply what they have learned. "Students will love this book, as will their teachers." – Courtney Brown, Emory University
This textbook introduces the scientific study of politics, supplying students with the basic tools to be critical consumers and producers of scholarly research.
The Fifth Edition of A Stata® Companion to Political Analysis by Philip H. Pollock III and Barry C. Edwards teaches your students to conduct political research with Stata, one of the most popular statistical software packages. This workbook offers the same easy-to-use and effective style as the other companions to the Essentials of Political Analysis, to work with Stata versions 12 through 17. With this comprehensive workbook, students analyze research-quality data to learn descriptive statistics, data transformations, bivariate analysis (such as cross-tabulations and mean comparisons), controlled comparisons, correlation and bivariate regression, interaction effects, and logistic regression. The many annotated screen shots, as well as QR codes linking to demonstration videos, supplement the clear explanations and instructions. End-of-chapter exercises allow students to ample space to practice their skills. The Fifth Edition includes new and revised exercises, along with new and updated datasets from the 2020 American National Election Study, an experiment dataset, and two aggregate datasets, one on 50 U.S. states and one based on countries of the world. A new 15-chapter structure helps break up individual elements of political analysis for deeper explanation while updated screenshots reflect the latest platform.
Tables and Figures ix Preface xiii Getting Started 1 Copying the Data Files to Floppy Disk or Other Portable Media 2 How to Handle the Datasets 2 Contents of the Datasets 4 Notes 4 Introduction to Stata 5 Commands Covered describe, codebook, set more off, search, help Changing General Preferences 5 Obtaining Information about a Dataset 6 Obtaining Information about Variables 9 Creating and Viewing a Log File 10 A Closer Look Obtaining Specific Variable Information with Define Notes 11 Printing Results 13 Getting Help 13 Exercises 17 Notes 17 Descriptive Statistics 19 Commands Covered tab1, summarize, sktest, histogram, Submit button Interpreting Measures of Central Tendency and Variation 19 Describing Nominal Variables 20 Describing Ordinal Variables 21 Describing Interval-level Variables 23 Obtaining Bar Charts and Histograms 27 Creating Bar Charts 27 Creating Histograms 32 A Closer Look The Submit Button and the OK Button: What's the Difference? 33 Exercises 35 Notes 40 Transforming Variables 43 Commands Covered recode, generate; generate, recode; xtile, nquantiles; generate; tabulate, generate; label variable; label define; label values; drop; aorder Transforming Categorical Variables 44 Transforming Interval-level Variables 46 A Closer Look The xtile Command 48 The label define and label values Commands 51 Creating an Additive Index 51 Creating Indicator Variables 53 Exercises 55 Notes 58 Making Comparisons 59 Commands Covered tabulate, column; tabulate, summarize; graph bar; format; replace Cross-tabulation Analysis 59 Mean Comparison Analysis 60 A Closer Look The format Command 62 Visualizing Relationships with Bar Charts 62 Graphing an Interval-level Dependent Variable 63 Graphing a Categorical Dependent Variable 67 A Closer Look The replace Command 70 Exercises 73 Notes 83 Making Controlled Comparisons 85 Commands Covered (prefix) bysort:, tabulate, col; tabulate, summarize; graph bar; if Cross-tabulation Analysis with a Control Variable 86 A Closer Look The if Qualifier 88 Bar Charts for Controlled Comparisons with a Categorical Dependent Variable 89 Mean Comparison Analysis with a Control Variable 91 Bar Charts for Controlled Comparisons with an Interval-level Dependent Variable 96 Exercises 98 Notes 105 Making Inferences about Sample Means 107 Commands Covered ttest; ttest, by; robvar, by Describing a Sample Mean 108 Testing the Difference between Two Sample Means 111 Exercises 116 Notes 118 Chi-square and Measures of Association 121 Commands Covered (tabulate option) chi2; (tabulate option) taub; (tabulate option) V; somersd; lambda; which; ssc install Installing lambda and somersd 122 Analyzing Ordinal-level Relationships 122 Analyzing Nominal-level Relationships 127 A Problem with Lambda 129 Exercises 130 Notes 136 Correlation and Linear Regression 137 Commands Covered correlate; regress; graph twoway (scatter); graph twoway (scatter)(lfit) The correlate Command and the regress Command 137 Creating a Scatterplot 139 A Closer Look R-squared and Adjusted R-squared: What's the Difference? 140 Exploring Multivariate Relationships with Regression 147 Exercises 150 Notes 156 Dummy Variables and Interaction Effects 159 Commands Covered xi: regress; char [omit]; test Regression with Dummy Variables A Closer Look The test Command 162 Interaction Effects in Multiple Regression 164 Graphing Linear Prediction Lines for Interaction Relationships 167 Exercises 173 Notes 178 Logistic Regression 181 Commands Covered logit; logistic; estimates store; Irtest, force; predict; adjust, by pr gen; quietly:; tabstat, by The logit Command and the logistic Command 182 Logistic Regression with Multiple Independent Variables 185 A Closer Look The estimates Command and the Irtest Command 187 Working with Predicted Probabilities: Models with One Independent Variable 188 Working with Predicted Probabilities: Models with Multiple Independent Variables 191 Exercises 196 Notes 201 Doing Your Own Political Analysis 203 Commands Covered insheet Five Doable Ideas 203 Political Knowledge 204 Economic Performance and Election Outcomes 204 State Courts and Criminal Procedure 204 Electoral Turnout in Comparative Perspective 205 Congress 205 Doing Research on the U.S. Senate 205 Finding Raw Data 206 How to Code Raw Data 206 A Closer Look The Stata Data Editor 208 Two Possible Coding Shortcuts 210 Importing Text Data 212 Writing It Up 215 The Research Question 215 Previous Research 216 Data, Hypotheses, and Analysis 216 Conclusions and Implications 216 Notes 217.
This book provides a narrative of how R can be useful in the analysis of public administration, public policy, and political science data specifically, in addition to the social sciences more broadly. It can serve as a textbook and reference manual for students and independent researchers who wish to use R for the first time or broaden their skill set with the program. While the book uses data drawn from political science, public administration, and policy analyses, it is written so that students and researchers in other fields should find it accessible and useful as well. By the end of the first seven chapters, an entry-level user should be well acquainted with how to use R as a traditional econometric software program. The remaining four chapters will begin to introduce the user to advanced techniques that R offers but many other programs do not make available such as how to use contributed libraries or write programs in R. The book details how to perform nearly every task routinely associated with statistical modeling: descriptive statistics, basic inferences, estimating common models, and conducting regression diagnostics. For the intermediate or advanced reader, the book aims to open up the wide array of sophisticated methods options that R makes freely available. It illustrates how user-created libraries can be installed and used in real data analysis, focusing on a handful of libraries that have been particularly prominent in political science. The last two chapters illustrate how the user can conduct linear algebra in R and create simple programs. A key point in these chapters will be that such actions are substantially easier in R than in many other programs, so advanced techniques are more accessible in R, which will appeal to scholars and policy researchers who already conduct extensive data analysis. Additionally, the book should draw the attention of students and teachers of quantitative methods in the political disciplines.
In this Element and its accompanying second Element, A Practical Introduction to Regression Discontinuity Designs: Extensions, Matias Cattaneo, Nicolás Idrobo, and Rocıìo Titiunik provide an accessible and practical guide for the analysis and interpretation of regression discontinuity (RD) designs that encourages the use of a common set of practices and facilitates the accumulation of RD-based empirical evidence. In this Element, the authors discuss the foundations of the canonical Sharp RD design, which has the following features: (i) the score is continuously distributed and has only one dimension, (ii) there is only one cutoff, and (iii) compliance with the treatment assignment is perfect. In the second Element, the authors discuss practical and conceptual extensions to this basic RD setup.
The Book of R is a comprehensive, beginner-friendly guide to R, the world’s most popular programming language for statistical analysis. Even if you have no programming experience and little more than a grounding in the basics of mathematics, you’ll find everything you need to begin using R effectively for statistical analysis. You’ll start with the basics, like how to handle data and write simple programs, before moving on to more advanced topics, like producing statistical summaries of your data and performing statistical tests and modeling. You’ll even learn how to create impressive data visualizations with R’s basic graphics tools and contributed packages, like ggplot2 and ggvis, as well as interactive 3D visualizations using the rgl package. Dozens of hands-on exercises (with downloadable solutions) take you from theory to practice, as you learn: –The fundamentals of programming in R, including how to write data frames, create functions, and use variables, statements, and loops –Statistical concepts like exploratory data analysis, probabilities, hypothesis tests, and regression modeling, and how to execute them in R –How to access R’s thousands of functions, libraries, and data sets –How to draw valid and useful conclusions from your data –How to create publication-quality graphics of your results Combining detailed explanations with real-world examples and exercises, this book will provide you with a solid understanding of both statistics and the depth of R’s functionality. Make The Book of R your doorway into the growing world of data analysis.
There are a plethora of books that aim to teach the research methods needed for political science. Thinking Like a Political Scientist stands out from them in its conviction that students are better served by learning a handful of core lessons well rather than trying to memorize hundreds of often statistical definitions. Short and concise, the book has two main parts, Asking Good Questions and Generating Good Answers. In the first section, one chapter each is devoted to the three fundamental questions in political science: who cares?, what happened?, and why?. These take up, among many other topics, crafting a literature review, creating hypotheses, measuring concepts, and the difference between correlation and causation. The second section of the book has chapters about choosing a research design, choosing cases, working with written documents, and working with numbers. All of these are essential skills for undergraduates to have when reading published work and conducting their own research. Every chapter ends with several exercises where students can read examples from published work and develop their own skills as researchers. Finally, unlike most research methods books, Christopher Howard s sprinkles humor and surprising analogies throughout."
