No Hawthorne effect at Hawthorne? June 9, 2009
Posted by sverrebm in Methods in political science.Tags: Freakonomics, Hawthorne, methods, Political Science
add a comment
Is nothing holy? Must I throw out my introduction textbook in methods now? The guys over at the Freakonomics blog have dug up and reexamined the original Hawthorne data and concluded that there actually was no Hawthorne effect in the original Hawthorne study! I’m disappointed right to the very core of my post-graduate student soul. What should i believe in now?
Picking apart a quantitative analysis October 3, 2008
Posted by sverrebm in Methods in political science, Political behavior.Tags: France, Front Nationale, methods, Political behavior, Political Science, quantitative
1 comment so far
Kai Arzheimer posted on his blog a not yet published paper he wrote along with Elizabeth Carter of Keele University. The paper picks apart another paper on effects that contribute and don’t contribute to the electoral support of Le Pen’s Front Nationale in France, especially the volume of immigration.
My interest in the paper is not so much the substantial content as the nice reminder it was to me as an aspiring political scientist to still keep a critical eye towards papers that at first eyesight appear to have a thorough empirical basis. I don’t think I’d have noticed the flaws these two scientists did.
The paper is well worth a read for anyone interested in quantitative methods.
Read Kai Arzheimer’s post and both papers here.
