1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910824890503321

Autore

King Gary <1958->

Titolo

A solution to the ecological inference problem : reconstructing individual behavior from aggregate data / / Gary King

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, N.J. : , : Princeton University Press, , [1997]

©1997

ISBN

0-691-01241-5

1-4008-4920-9

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xxii, 342 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

320/.072

Soggetti

Political statistics

Inference

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

part I. Introduction -- part II. Catalog of problems to fix -- part III. The proposed solution -- part IV. Verification -- part V. Generalizations and concluding suggestions -- part VI. Appendices.

Sommario/riassunto

This book provides a solution to the ecological inference problem, which has plagued users of statistical methods for over seventy-five years: How can researchers reliably infer individual-level behavior from aggregate (ecological) data? In political science, this question arises when individual-level surveys are unavailable (for instance, local or comparative electoral politics), unreliable (racial politics), insufficient (political geography), or infeasible (political history). This ecological inference problem also confronts researchers in numerous areas of major significance in public policy, and other academic disciplines, ranging from epidemiology and marketing to sociology and quantitative history. Although many have attempted to make such cross-level inferences, scholars agree that all existing methods yield very inaccurate conclusions about the world. In this volume, Gary King lays out a unique--and reliable--solution to this venerable problem. King begins with a qualitative overview, readable even by those without a statistical background. He then unifies the apparently diverse findings in the methodological literature, so that only one aggregation problem



remains to be solved. He then presents his solution, as well as empirical evaluations of the solution that include over 16,000 comparisons of his estimates from real aggregate data to the known individual-level answer. The method works in practice. King's solution to the ecological inference problem will enable empirical researchers to investigate substantive questions that have heretofore proved unanswerable, and move forward fields of inquiry in which progress has been stifled by this problem.