Ethan Fosse, University of Toronto and Christopher Winship, Harvard University
“Models of Social Change: Principles and Methods of Age-Period-Cohort Analysis”
Age-period-cohort (APC) analysis has a long, controversial history in sociology and demography. Despite nearly a century of research, there is little agreement on how to adequately analyze APC data. In this talk we discuss techniques for improving APC analysis. We begin with a brief overview of APC models, showing how one can interpret APC effects in a causal way. We then outline techniques that entail point identification using measured causes, such as mechanism-based models. Next, we discuss a general framework for APC analysis grounded in partial identification using bounds and sensitivity analyses of mechanism-based models. We conclude with future directions for research.
Biography: Ethan Fosse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto where he currently teaches courses on quantitative methods, social change, and computational social science. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. He worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University in the Department of Sociology and Department of Politics, where he designed and implemented a series of open-source statistical programming workshops.
Biography: Christopher Winship is the Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology, Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a faculty associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Program in Criminal Justice, the Ph.D. Program in Organizational Behavior, the Center for Public Leadership, the Safra Center for Ethics, and the Program in Social Inequality. He is past chair of both the Departments of Sociology at Harvard and Northwestern University. Prior to coming to Harvard in 1992, he was a Professor of Sociology, Statistics, and Economics at Northwestern. He has also been the Director of the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences at Northwestern and interim Director of the Economic Research Center at the University of Chicago. He has a BA in Sociology and Mathematics from Dartmouth College (1972) and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University (1977).
A recording of the seminar can be accessed here.
Drs. Winship and Fosse’s challenge may be accessed here.
