Biography: Graeme Blair is an associate professor of political science at UCLA and serves as Co-Director of Training and Methods of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). Graeme uses experiments, field research, and statistics to study how to reduce violence and how to improve social science research. He works primarily in Nigeria, often in partnership with government, civil society, or international organizations. His work is published in journals including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Political Analysis. His book on community policing is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press Studies in Comparative Politics and his book on research design is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. He is the recipient of the Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science, the Society for Political Methodology best statistical software award, and the Pi Sigma Alpha best paper award.
Better research planning through simulation
Abstract: The talk introduces a new way of thinking about research designs in the social sciences, with the aim of making it easier to develop and to share strong research designs. At the heart of our approach is the MIDA framework, in which a research design is characterized by four elements: a model, an inquiry, a data strategy, and an answer strategy. We have to understand each of the four on their own and also how they interrelate. The design encodes your beliefs about the world, it describes your questions, and it lays out how you go about answering those questions, both in terms of what data you collect and how you analyze it. In strong designs, choices made in the model and inquiry are reflected in the data and answer strategies, and vice-versa. This way of thinking pays dividends at multiple points in the research design lifecycle: planning the design, implementing it, and integrating the results into the broader research literature. The declaration, diagnosis, and redesign process informs choices made from the beginning to the end of a research project. These ideas will appear in Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign, forthcoming in the fall with Princeton University Press.
To access the recording please click here.
