It is common for social scientists to use formal quantitative methods to compare ecological units such as towns, schools, or nations. In many cases, the size of these units in terms of the number of individuals subsumed in each differs substantially. When the variables in question are counts, there is generally some attempt to neutralize…

Discrete-time survival analysis (DTSA) models are a popular way of modeling events in the social sciences. However, the analysis of discrete-time survival data is challenged by missing data in one or more covariates. Negative consequences of missing covariate data include efficiency losses and possible bias. A popular approach to circumventing…

Numerous articles and textbooks advise qualitative researchers on accessing "hard-to-reach" or "hidden" populations. In this article, I compare two studies that I conducted with justice-involved women in the United States: a yearlong ethnography inside a state women's prison and an interview study with formerly incarcerated…

Indirect questioning techniques such as the randomized response technique aim to control social desirability bias in surveys of sensitive topics. To improve upon previous indirect questioning techniques, we propose the new Cheating Detection Triangular Model. Similar to the Cheating Detection Model, it includes a mechanism for detecting…

Address-based sampling (ABS) refers to the use a list of addresses derived from the U.S. Postal Service's Computerized Delivery Sequence File as a sampling frame. While most residential addresses are included on an ABS frame, it still suffers from undercoverage. Undercoverage is problematic only if the uncovered units have different attributes…

In the field of disparities research, there has been growing interest in developing a counterfactual-based decomposition analysis to identify underlying mediating mechanisms that help reduce disparities in populations. Despite rapid development in the area, most prior studies have been limited to regression-based methods, undermining the…

In Goffman's terms, qualitative interviews are social encounters with their own realities. Hence, the 'situational critique' holds that interviews cannot produce knowledge about the world beyond these encounters, and that other methods, ethnography in particular, render lived life more accurately. The situational critique cannot be dismissed; yet…

Scholars study representative international surveys to understand cross-cultural differences in mentality patterns, which are measured via complex multi-item constructs. Methodologists in this field insist with increasing vigor that detecting "non-invariance" in how a construct's items associate with each other in different national…

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are useful survey tools for estimating the prevalence of sensitive issues, such as the prevalence of doping in elite sports. One type of RRT, the unrelated question model (UQM), has become widely used because of its psychological acceptability for study participants and its favorable statistical properties.…

Measuring the existence and patterning of white flight (WF) using aggregate data has a long history in the social sciences. In this article, we assess past measurement approaches and identify several technical and conceptual limitations. To address these shortcomings, we propose a new multicomponent approach to detecting WF that requires tracts to…

This article examines an important and thorny problem in interview research: How to assess whether what people say motivated their actions actually did so? We ask three questions: What specific challenges are at play? How have researchers addressed them? And how should those strategies be evaluated? We argue that such research faces at least five…

Scholars who conduct process tracing often face the problem of missing data. The inability to document key steps in their causal chains makes it difficult to validate theoretical models. In this article, we conceptualize "missingness" as it relates to process tracing, describe different scenarios in which it is pervasive, and present…

This article details the challenges we faced in collecting sensitive information in an ethnically and religiously divided community that has experienced recent violence. The discussion is based on a summer 2016 survey experiment we conducted in Jos, Nigeria, to gather information regarding residents' perceptions of local communal violence. We…

Meta-analysis is a statistical method that combines quantitative findings from previous studies. It has been increasingly used to obtain more credible results in a wide range of scientific fields. Combining the results of relevant studies allows researchers to leverage study similarities while modeling potential sources of between-study…

While conflict event data sets are increasingly used in contemporary conflict research, important concerns persist regarding the quality of the collected data. Such concerns are not necessarily new. Yet, because the methodological debate and evidence on potential errors remains scattered across different subdisciplines of social sciences, there is…