Oxford University Press's Blog, page 812
May 14, 2014
Sam sells
It is rare for a seventh round National Football League (NFL) draft pick to be at the center of the sports world. Then again, Michael Sam is not an average draft pick. Sam is trying to become the first openly gay player to compete for a NFL team.
While it is not clear that Sam will make the St. Louis Rams’ final roster, what is certain is the impact that Sam has already had without playing a down in the NFL. Sam’s story and the conversation it has sparked on sexuality in the NFL has been well documented. What has received less attention is the economic impact Sam could have in helping the NFL reach out to an often non-targeted customer demographic.
Organizations should more heavily seek out lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) sports audiences as customers. Not only do LGBT demographics have estimated annual buying power of $790 billion, but they are often highly engaged sports fans who are looking to become more involved with leagues and teams. Yet, sports organizations rarely target LGBT audiences in effort to grow revenues. Even as leagues and teams increasingly target new demographics such as women, Latin, African American, and international audiences among other groups, LGBT fans often do not receive the same amount of attention.
Fans flock senior defensive end Michael Sam as he carries his souvenir (a rock from the rock ‘M’ at Memorial Stadium) after the win vs Texas A&M, 30 November 2013. Photo by Mark Schierbecker (Marcus Qwertyus). CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Sam’s jersey sales are one example of why this could be a mistake. As Outsports’ Cyd Zeigler first reported, Sam’s jerseys sales were the second highest among the NFL’s most recent draft class. His jersey has outsold number one overall pick Jadeveon Clowney and number three pick Blake Bortles, the first quarterback taken in the draft. Only Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel has more jersey sales than Sam.
Sam’s jersey success is similar to that of NBA Brooklyn Nets center Jason Collins. When he announced he was gay after completing his season playing for the Washington Wizards, Collins jersey became the highest selling jersey for the team. In addition, thousands of orders were placed for Collins jersey when he signed his first 10-day contract with the Nets.
We recognize that not every jersey sale for Sam and Collins was purchased by an LGBT audience member nor is it required to have an openly gay player to target these fans. Yet, Sam and Collins show there is an appetite for products marketed to and by LGBT audiences. For example, sports sponsors have already made significant efforts to pursue the LGBT demographic. During the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Chevrolet produced two commercials featuring gay couples. In addition, Nike has launched the Be True Campaign with products, advertising, and events specifically targeting LGBT demographics throughout the United States.
To the credit many sports organization across the world, there have been significant efforts to encourage equality and tolerance for LGBT athletes, fans, media, and sponsors. The NHL’s combined efforts with the You Can Play Project are a particularly notable example of how sports leagues are trying to take a leadership role in ending homophobia with internal and external audiences.
However, Sam and others demonstrate that sports organizations now have an opportunity to include LGBT audiences as their customers. By targeting LGBT fans, media, sponsors, and supporters now, sports organizations can grow their customer base and gain a competitive advantage.
Adam Grossman is the Founder and President of Block Six Analytics (B6A). He has worked with a number of sports organizations, including the Minnesota Timberwolves, Washington Capitals, and SMG @ Solider Field, to enhance their corporate sponsorship and enterprise marketing capabilities. He is the co-author of The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry with Irving Rein and Ben Shields.
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Development theories and economic miracles
Development thinking in the second half of the twentieth century can hardly be credited for “manufacturing” development success stories. It is difficult, if not impossible, to claim that either the early structuralist models of the Big Push (financing gap and basic needs of the 1950-70s), or neoliberal ideas of Washington consensus (that dominated the field since the 1980s), have provided crucial inputs to economic miracles in East Asia or elsewhere. On the contrary, it appears that development ideas, either misinterpreted or not, contributed to a number of development failures. The USSR and Latin America of the 1960s-80s demonstrated the inadequacy of import-substitutions model. Later every region of developing world that became the experimental ground for Washington consensus type theories, from Latin America to Sub-Sahara Africa to former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, revealed the flaws of neoliberal doctrine by experiencing a slowdown, a recession or even a severe depression in the 1980s-90s.
Neither development theories nor policies of multilateral institutions can be held responsible for engineering development successes. Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, South East Asia, and China achieved high growth rates without much advise and credits from International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Economic miracles were manufactured in East Asia without much reliance on development thinking and theoretical background — just by experimentation of the strong hand politicians. The 1993 World Development Report “East Asian Miracle” admitted that non-selective industrial policy aimed at providing better business environment (education, infrastructure, coordination, etc.) can promote growth, but the issue is still controversial. Structuralists claim that industrial policy in East Asia was much more than creating better business environment, whereas neoliberals believe that liberalization and deregulation should be largely credited for the success.
It is said that failure is always an orphan, whereas success has many parents. No wonder, both neoclassical and structuralist economists claimed that East Asian success stories prove what they were saying all along, but it is obvious that both schools of thought cannot be right at the same time. There is a lack of understanding why government intervention sometimes results in spectacular failures and what particular kind of government intervention is needed for manufacturing fast growth (2000 – onwards).
Why did a gap emerge between development thinking and development practice? Why were development successes engineered without development theories? Why did development theoreticians fail to learn from real successes and failures in the global South? It appears that development thinking in the postwar period went through a full evolutionary cycle — from dirigiste theories of Big Push, to neoliberal deregulation wisdom of “Washington consensus” (1980-90s), to the understanding that catch up development does not happen by itself in a free market environment.
The confusion in development thinking of the past decade may be a starting point for the formation of new paradigm. Without mobilization of domestic savings and industrial policies there may be no successful catch up development. National development strategies for countries at a lower level of development should not copy economic policies used by developed countries; in fact, it was shown more than once that Western countries themselves did not use liberal policies that they are advocating today for less developed countries when they were at similar stages of development.
Most development economists share the general principle that good policies are context dependent and there is no universal set of policy prescriptions for all countries at all stages of development. But when it comes to particular policies, there is no consensus. The future of development economics may be a theory, explaining why at particular stages of development (depending on per capita GDP, institutional capacity, human capital, resource abundance, etc.) one set of policies (tariff protectionism, accumulation of reserves, control over capital flows, nationalization of resource enterprises, etc.) is superior to another. The art of the policymakers then is to switch the gears at the appropriate time not to get into the development trap. The art of the development theoretician is to fill the cells of “periodic table of economic policies” at different stages of development.
The emerging theory of stages of development would hopefully put the pieces of our knowledge together and will reveal the interaction and subordination of growth ingredients. A successful export-oriented growth model à la East Asian tigers seems to include, but is not limited to:
Building strong state institutions capable of delivering public goods (law and order, education, infrastructure, health care) needed for development
Mobilization of domestic savings for increased investment
Gradual market type reforms
Export-oriented industrial policy, including such tools as tariff protectionism and subsidies
Appropriate macroeconomic policy – not only in traditional sense (prudent, but not excessively restrictive fiscal and monetary policy), but also exchange rate policy (undervaluation of the exchange rate via rapid accumulation of foreign exchange reserves).
If this interpretation of development experience is correct, the next large regions of successful catch up development would be MENA Islamic countries and South Asia – these regions seem to be most prepared to accept the Chinese model. Eventually Latin America, Sub-Sahara Africa and Russia would be catching up as well. If so, it would become obvious in the process of successful catch up development that the previous policies that the West recommended and prescribed to the South (deregulation, downsizing the state, privatization, free trade and capital movements) were in fact hindering rather than promoting their development.
Vladimir Popov is an adviser in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations and professor emeritus at the New Economic School in Moscow. He is the author and editor of 12 books and numerous articles that have been published in the Journal of Comparative Economics, Comparative Economic Studies, World Development, Post-Communist Economies, New Left Review, and other academic journals, as well as many essays in the media. His most recent book is Mixed Fortunes: An Economic History of China, Russia, and the West.
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Image credit: “Money coins currency metal old historically pay” by Weinstock. Public domain via pixabay.
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Looking forward to the Hay Festival 2014
I look forward to the last week of May every year and 2014 is no exception. To what am I referring? My annual pilgrimage to Hay-on-Wye of course.
Every year since I can remember, I find myself in England’s famous book town for the excellent Hay Festival. Now in its 27th year the eponymous book festival can be found nestling under canvass for 11 days in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons National Park. Due to the breadth of our publishing at OUP we are lucky enough to field a great ‘team’ of authors every year at this internationally renowned festival and this year is no exception.
Sharing the Green Room with the likes of Stephen Fry, Ruby Wax, Monty Don, and James Lovelock, this year, will be Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalization and Development and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, who will be speaking about ‘Meeting Global Challenges’. This talk kicks off a series of three talks inspired by the new book Is the Planet Full? Edited by Goldin, the book has 10 contributors and later in the week talks will also pull out some of the books’ major themes such as ‘The End of Population Growth?’ addressed by Professor Sarah Harper, Co-Director, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, ‘Can the World Feed 10 Billion People (Sustainably & Equitably)’ discussed by Charles Godfrey and with Yavinder Malhi who will be looking at the question ‘Bigger than the Biosphere? A metabolic perspective on our human-dominated planet’.
The Hay Festival site. Photo by Finn Beales.
A specialist in ancient Greek history, Professor Paul Cartledge will be talking about his latest book After Thermopylae. Illustrating the diversity of the OUP’s contribution to the festival this year and offering something for everyone, the week continues with Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones discussing spies and spying; John van Wyhe, who is flying in from Singapore, will talk about Alfred Russell Wallace of whom last year saw the 100 year anniversary of his death; Justin Gregg, who knows a thing or two about dolphins, asks Are Dolphins Really Smart? For the scientists among us Professor Peter Atkins will surely answer the question What is Chemistry? in a fully illustrated talk on the subject.
Frequent visitors to Hay will be familiar with David & Hilary Crystal who have entertained many a festival goer over the years and this year they plan to take us on a literary tour through the UK looking at how the language was shaped by Wordsmiths and Warriors in history.
There is not much Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, doesn’t know about Strategy. And his latest book on the topic gives us a panoramic synthesis of the role of strategy throughout world civilization, from ancient Greece through the nuclear age. He was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997 and more recently, in June 2009, served as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War.
During the final weekend of the festival Thomas Weber will bring insight and detail on Hitler’s formative experiences as a soldier on the Western Front when discussing Hitler’s First War and Julian Thomas will discuss ‘The Dorstone Dig‘ where over the last couple of summers, the archaeological team have uncovered two 6,000-year-old burial mounds and the remains of two huge halls that appear to have been ritually burned down.
I, for one, will be looking forward to being entertained and educated during my week at Hay and I hope you are too!
Kate Farquhar-Thomson is Head of Publicity at OUP in Oxford.
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Image credit: Hay Festival site. Photo by Finn Beales.
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May 13, 2014
A conversation on economic democracy with Tom Malleson
How do we address the problem of inequality in capitalist societies? Tom Malleson, the author of After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century, argues that by making sure that democracy exists in both our economy and in our government, we may be able to achieve meaningful equality throughout society. We recently spoke to him about how economic democracy works and how viable it can be.
To start, give us a bare-bones description of what economic democracy is.
Economic democracy is the idea that democracy belongs not just in politics, but in the economy as well. There’s a paradox at the very center of our society: we call ourselves a democracy and yet a central part of society, the economy, has very little democracy in it at all. Workers do not elect the managers of their firms. Bankers do not allocate finance with any accountability to their communities. Investment decisions are not made with any citizen participation. That’s the philosophical paradox that After Occupy investigates. There are real, concrete examples of democratic alternatives in the economy out there, such as worker cooperatives in Spain and Italy, public banks in India, participatory budgeting in Brazil, capital controls in Malaysia, and so on. Ultimately, these alternative practices might be woven together to constitute a fundamentally different kind of society – a truly democratic one.
What exactly is a worker cooperative?
Worker co-ops are businesses that are owned and controlled entirely by the workers themselves. Workers elect the management on a one-person one-vote basis, just like we elect politicians into government. Probably the most famous co-op in the world is Mondragon in Spain. It started in 1956 with only five workers, and today employs over 80,000 people, with assets of over €35 billion. In addition to being far more democratic than conventional corporations, co-ops have two other important advantages. First, they have far less inequality of wages. In the United States, the average CEO makes 300 times the average employee of his or her company. For co-ops the ratio rarely exceeds 3:1. If co-ops spread, society as a whole would become significantly more equal too. In addition, co-ops also have far better job security. Instead of simply firing people in a recession, co-ops act in a much more humane way, usually by collectively agreeing to reduce their hours or take a pay cut across the board, instead of laying people off. That’s why in this last recession Mondragon has fired far fewer people than other Spanish firms. So if we had more co-ops here in the United States, the recession would have been far less devastating.
Are co-ops economically viable?
Absolutely. Economists have now been studying co-ops for over 30 years, and the conclusion is that worker co-ops operate with similar levels of efficiency to conventional firms. These results have been found again and again, in the United States, Uruguay, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of viability is Northern Italy, where co-ops are more prevalent than in any other part of the world. In Emilia Romagna, for instance, they represent a substantial 12% of the region’s GDP, many co-ops have been around for decades, and the co-op sector dominates in a number of industries including construction, wine making, and food processing.
In After Occupy you argue that the current system of investment is undemocratic. What exactly do you mean?
The investment decisions that are made today — building highways or high-speed trains, condos or social housing, tar sands or green businesses — fundamentally determine the kind of society we will end up with tomorrow. Investment determines our future, which is why it must be accountable to us, the public. How could this happen? One important example is participatory budgeting, where local neighborhoods get to decide themselves on the kind of public infrastructure spending they want to see. In terms of finance, bank regulation is an obviously important first step. But over the long term, what is needed is a public banking system so that finances are allocated according to public need, not just according to private profit. Just like we have an electricity system and a post office that serves public needs, we need finance to do so as well (so that banks invest in poor communities or into green businesses – things that private banks will never do). At the end of the day, finance is simply too important for our future to be left to the banks.
Is having a true economic democracy feasible or is it simply a utopian?
Every proposal that is made in this book is based on real concrete examples. Worker co-ops already exist, as do public banks, participatory budgeting, etc. So we know there is absolutely nothing impossible about any of them – the institutions work. The difficult part, of course, is expanding them and bringing successful examples over from other countries. Some reforms (such as regulating the banks), are possible in the short-term; others, like building a large co-op movement, are the project of a generation. But the fact that we can see real-world examples of these things means that they are not at all utopian. With sufficient political will, a democratic economy is entirely within our reach.
Tom Malleson is the author of After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century and is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice and Peace Studies program at King’s University College at Western University, Canada. He is the co-editor of Whose Streets? The Toronto G20 and the Challenges of Summit Protest and the author of Stand Up Against Capitalism (forthcoming).
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Announcing the winners of the street photography competition
This year, in honor of World Art Day, Oxford invited photographers of all levels to submit their best street photography. Thank you to all of you who submitted! We received many thought-provoking, original entries, and are now happy to announce the winners.
Street photography is, according to Grove Art Online, a “genre of photography that can be understood as the product of an artistic interaction between a photographer and an urban public space.”
First place goes to Emily Huang for her photo “One Direction” taken in Taipei, Taiwan. Both of our judges were immediately drawn to this photograph, with Dr. Lisa Hostetler (Curator-in-Charge at George Eastman House) explaining: “This is a witty image that speaks volumes about the ubiquity of cameras on urban streets today, a situation that has fundamentally altered the nature and practice of street photography. It also recalls precedents in the history of photography, such as Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore.”
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“One Direction,” Taipei, Taiwan. ©Emily Huang.
Emily will receive $100 worth of OUP books.
Second place goes to Leanne Staples for her photo “Life Goes One” taken in New York City. Dr. Hostetler explains: “An allusion to classic street photography, this photograph gives the viewer the sense of participating in the experience of the street alongside the photographer.”
“Life Goes On,” New York, NY. ©Leanne Staples.
Leanne will take home a copy of our Photography: A Very Short Introduction.
Congratulations to both of our winners!
Victoria Davis works in marketing for Oxford University Press, including Grove Art and Oxford Art Online.
Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access — and simultaneously cross-search — an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.
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“There Is Hope for Europe” – The ESC 2014 and the return to Europe
4–10 May 2014. The annual Eurovision week offers Europeans a chance to put aside their differences and celebrate, nation against nation, the many ways in which music unites them. Each nation has the same opportunity—a “Eurosong” of exactly three minutes, performed by no more than six musicians or dancers, in the language of their choice, national or international—to represent Europe for a year. Since its founding in 1956, one of the deepest moments of the Cold War, as Soviet tanks prepared to enter Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has provided a counterpoint to European politics, providing a moment when Europeans witnessed claims to a common Europeanness.
In early spring 2014, however, as the Ukraine crisis unfolded, the ESC seemed deaf to the deterioration of European politics. A few songs expressed soft nationalism; hardly any made more than a mild gesture toward human rights. Granted, the competitive run of most national entries—through local, regional, and then national competitions—began before the Ukraine crisis, before the occupation of the Maidan in Kyiv, the Russian annexation of the Crimea, and the violent turn of separatism in Eastern Ukraine. The Eurovision Song Contest, nonetheless, had lost its moral compass. It was veering dangerously close to irrelevance for a Europe in crisis.
The Trophy of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest. Photo by Thomas Hanses (EBU). 10 May 2014 . © European Broadcasting Union.
All that changed during Eurovision week. Though Austria’s Conchita Wurst, the female persona of 25-year-old singer Tom Neuwirth, had captured the attention of many with her sincere flamboyance, she was favored by few and shunned by many, particularly the countries of Eastern Europe. As the evening of the Grand Finale arrived, however, few doubted that Conchita Wurst would emerge victorious, and many realized that their worst fears were about to be realized. Europe had found Conchita’s voice, and she truly did “Rise Like a Phoenix” from the stage of the Copenhagen Eurovision stage.
As I write this blogpost in the immediate wake of the Grand Finale, the explanations and evaluations of Conchita Wurst’s victory at the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest spread across the European media and beyond. Standing on stage in a gown bathed in golden glitter, the bearded Conchita sang powerfully and with full conviction that there was more at stake than finding the right formula for the winning song. “This night is dedicated to all who believe in peace and freedom,” she proclaimed upon receiving the trophy. Supporters and detractors alike saw the moment as evidence that the queering of the ESC had finally and fully come of age. Eurovision historian, Jan Feddersen, had predicted as much in the Berlin liberal newspaper, tageszeitung, the day before. The queering of the ESC had given common meaning to Europe. Feddersen writes: “One communicates throughout the year. What could be a greater cultural flow of Europeanness, even independent of the borders of the European Union” (taz.europa, 9 May 2014, p. 9).
The political and aesthetic trajectory of queering, of course, is precisely not to come of age, rather to engender and regender critical questions of identity and ideology. It is this moving with and beyond queering that Conchita Wurst’s victory signals. The winning song, “Rise Like a Phoenix,” provides, thus, an anthem of a Europe of post-queerness. The Eurosong and the tens of millions who embrace it as their own enter a European space opened by diversity.
Click here to view the embedded video.
In the months and years before Conchita Wurst’s victory on Saturday night, there were probably few grounds that would lead one to predict a winning song for Austria. The self-styled “Land of Music,” Austria simply could not figure out the Eurovision Song Contest. In recent years, it had sent wacky folk-like music and banal power ballads, only occasionally passing beyond the semi-final competitions. For much of the 2000s, Austria sent no entry at all. If Austria was perplexed about its musical presence in the ESC, Conchita Wurst was not. Born in Styria, Tom Neuwirth dedicated himself to a music of difference, a music that provoked, and a music that did political work. As the drag queen, Conchita Wurst (most readers will recognize “Wurst” as the German word for sausage, but in Austria, it is also commonly used in the phrase, “es ist mir wurst,” meaning “it’s all the same to me”), performs songs of action, directed against prejudice and mustered for diversity. There is no contradiction when queerness and nationalism occupy common ground, all the more in an Austria that provides shelter to a higher percentage of refugees than any other European nation. When Conchita remarked upon qualifying after the second semi-final on May 8, announcing proudly that “I’m going to do all I can for my country,” there was no irony.
The Eurovision Song Contest 2014 had found its voice. The ESC had returned to Europe. At a critical moment of struggle in Ukraine, when right-wing European political parties on the eve of European parliamentary elections are calling for their nations to retreat from Europe, the ESC has reclaimed its relevance, and it has done so by recognizing its historical foundations. In many ways, Conchita Wurst, performing as a transvestite, offers a less provocative stage presence than the transsexual Dana International, who won for Israel in 1998 and competed again in 2011. ESC queerness begins to demonstrate the attributes of a historical longue durée, and it is for these reasons that it elevates a music competition to a European level on which it is one of the most visible targets for official Russian homophobia and the violation of human rights elsewhere in Europe. It is a return to that history that “Rise Like a Phoenix” so powerfully signifies.
On Saturday night, there were other entries that took their place in the more diverse, post-queer Europe given new and different meaning by Conchita Wurst. Political meaning accrued to songs in which it had previously remained neutral (e.g., Pollapönk’s “No Prejudice” for Iceland, and Molly’s “Children of the Universe” for the United Kingdom). Several quite outstanding songs came to envoice a fragile Europe in need of change (e.g., Elaiza’s mixture of cabaret and klezmer in “Is It Right” for Germany, and András Kállay-Saunders’s “Running” for Hungary). Kállay-Saunders transformed the narrative of an abused child to a call for action in European human rights. The son of Fernando Saunders, Kállay-Saunders is a stunning presence on stage, an African American Hungarian, calling attention to the violation of human rights while representing a nation sliding to the right, so much so that many Hungarian artists, musicians, and intellectuals (e.g., András Schiff) will not enter their homeland.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to view the embedded video.
On Sunday morning, 11 May, the Berlin tageszeitung opened its lead article on the Eurovision Song Contest with the celebratory claim, “there is hope for Europe.” It is perhaps too early to claim that we are witnessing music and nationalism in a new key. From early April until the Grand Finale, I gave a regular series of newspaper, radio, and television interviews in Germany, where I currently teach as Franz Rosenzweig Professor at the University of Kassel, and I realize only now that my own observations about nationalism and the ESC underwent radical change, all the more as Conchita Wurst brought a new Europe into focus (see, e.g., the interview with the Austrian-German-Swiss network, 3sat, just before the Grand Finale). The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) itself had predicted 120 million viewers, but estimates the day after the Grand Finale raised the number to 180 million, a fifty-percent increase. Nationalisms proliferate often; rarely do they subside. In the Ukraine crisis, each side accuses the other of being nationalistic, laying claim to their own right to be nationalistic. These are the nationalisms in the old key, collapsing in upon themselves. In contrast it may be a quality of a post-queer Eurovision Song Contest that it can foster a nationalism of tolerance and diversity, and that its song for Europe truly rises like a phoenix, enjoining the many rather than the few to join the chorus.
Philip V. Bohlman is Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Currently, he serves as Franz Rosenzweig Professor at the University of Kassel, and on the editorial board of Grove Music Online. He writes widely on music and nationalism, most recently Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (Routledge 2011). He is writing the book, Music after Nationalism, for Oxford University Press, a project for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
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May 12, 2014
Improving the quality of surveys: a Q&A with Daniel Oberski
Empirical work in political science must be based on strong scientifically-accurate measurements. However, the problem of measurement error hasn’t been sufficiently addressed. Recently, Willem Saris and Daniel Oberski’s Survey Quality Prediction software was developed to better predict reliability and method variance, and is receiving the 2014 Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research. I sat down with Political Analysis-contributor Daniel Oberski, a postdoctoral researcher in latent variable modeling and survey methodology at Tilburg University’s department of methodology and statistics, to discuss the software, surveys, latent variables, and interdisciplinary research.
Your “Survey Quality Prediction” (SQP) software (developed with Willem Saris of Pompeu Fabra University in Spain) is receiving the 2014 Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research. What motivated you and Willem to develop this software?
Survey questions are important measurement instruments, whose design and use we need to approach scientifically. After all, even though nowadays we have “big data” and neuroimaging, one of the most effective ways of finding things out about people remains to just ask them (see also this keynote lecture by Mick Couper). But survey questions are not perfect: we must recognize and account for measurement error. That is the main motivation for SQP.
Willem started working on estimating measurement error together with the University of Michigan’s Frank Andrews in the late 1980s and has made it his life’s work to gather as much information as possible about the quality of different types of survey questions. In physics, it is quite customary to dedicate one’s career to measurement; my father, for example, spent the better part of his measuring how background radiation might interfere with CERN experiments – just so this interference could later be corrected for. In the social sciences, this kind of project is rare. Thanks to Willem’s decades of effort, however, we were able to perform a meta-analysis over the results of his experiments, linking questions’ characteristics to their reliability so that this could be accounted for.
We then created a web application that allows the user to predict reliability and method variance from a question’s characteristics, based on a meta-analysis of over 3000 questions. The goal is to allow researchers to recognize measurement error, choose the best measurement instruments for their purpose, and account for the effects of errors in their analyses of interest.
How can survey researchers use the SQP software package, and why is it an important tool for survey researchers?
People who use surveys are often (usually?) interested in relationships between different variables, and measurement error can wreak havoc on such estimates. There are two possible reactions to this problem.
The first is hope: maybe measurement error is not that bad, or perhaps bias will be in some known direction, for example towards zero. Unfortunately, we see in our experiments that this hope is, on average, unfounded.
The second possibility is to estimate measurement error so that it can be accounted for. Accounting for measurement error can be done using any of a number of well-known and easily available methods, such as structural equation modeling or Bayesian priors. The tricky part lies in estimating the amount of measurement error. Not every researcher will have the resources and opportunity to conduct a multitrait-multimethod experiment, for example. Another issue is how to properly account for the additional uncertainties involved with the measurement error correction itself.
This is where SQP comes in.
Anybody can code the survey question they wish to analyze on a range of characteristics and obtain an estimate of the reliability and amount of common method bias in that question. An estimate of the prediction uncertainty is also given. This information can then be used to correct estimates of relationships between variables for measurement error.
The SQP software package seems to be part of a general trend, where survey researchers are developing tools and technologies to automate and improve aspects of survey design and implementation. What other aspects of survey research do you see being improved by other tools in the near future?
SQP deals with measurement error, but there is also nonresponse error, coverage error, editing/processing error, etc. Official statistics agencies as well as commercial survey companies have been developing automated tools for survey implementation since the advent of computer-assisted data collection. More recent is the incorporation of survey experiments to aid decisions on survey design. This is at least partly driven by more easily accessible technology, by the growth of survey methodology as it is being discovered by other fields, and by some US institutions’ insistence on survey experiments. All of this means that we are gathering evidence at a fast rate on a wide range of quality issues in surveys, even if that evidence is not always as accessible as we would like it to be.
I can very well imagine that meta-analyses over this kind of information are eventually encoded into expert systems. These would be like SQP, but for nonresponse, noncoverage, and so on. This could allow for the kind of quality evaluations and predictions on all aspects of survey research that is necessary for social science. It would be a large project, but it is doable.
Political Analysis has published two of your papers that focus on “latent variables.” What is the connection between your survey methodology research and your work on latent variables?
I have heard it claimed that all variables of interest are observed and latent variables are useful as an intermediary tool at best. I think the opposite is true. Social science is so difficult because the variables we observe are almost never the variables of actual interest: there is always measurement error. That is why we need latent variable models to model relationships between the variables of actual interest.
On the one hand, latent variable models have been mostly developed within fields that traditionally were not overly concerned with representativeness, although that could be changing now. On the other hand, after some developments in the early 1960s at the US Census Bureau, the survey methodology field has some catching up to do on advances in measurement error modeling since those times. Part of what I do involves “introducing” different fields’ methods to each other so both are improved. Another part, which concerns the papers in PA, is about solving some of the unique, new problems that come up when you do that.
For example, when correcting measurement error (misclassification) by fixing an estimate of the error rates in maximum likelihood analysis, how does one properly account for the fact that this error rate is itself only an estimate, as it would be when obtained from SQP? We dealt with this for linear models in a paper with Albert Satorra in the journal Structural Equation Modeling, while a PA paper, on which Jeroen Vermunt and I are co-authors with our PhD student Zsuzsa Bakk, deals with categorical latent and observed variables. Another problem in survey methodology is how to decide that groups are “comparable enough” for the purposes at hand (a.k.a. “comparability”, “equivalence”, or “invariance”). I introduced a tool for looking at this problem using latent variable models in this PA paper.
Your research is quite interdisciplinary. What advice would you give to graduate students who are interested in work on interdisciplinary topics like you have? Any tips for how they might seek to publish their work?
I never really set out to be interdisciplinary on purpose. To some extent it is because I am interested in everything, and to another it is all part of being a statistician. Tukey supposedly said, “you get to play in everyone’s backyard,” and whether or not he really said it, that is also what I love about it.
I am only in the beginning of my career (I hope!) and not sure I am in a position to hand out any sage advice. But one tip might be: don’t assume something is not related to what you know about just because it sounds different. Ask yourself, “how would what this person is saying translate into my terms?” It helps to master, as much as possible, some general tool for thinking about these things. Mine is structural equation models, latent variable models. But any framework should work just as well: hierarchical Bayesian inference, counterfactuals, missing data, experimental design, randomization inference, graphical models, etc. Each of these frameworks, when understood thoroughly, can serve as a general language for understanding what is being said, and once you get something down in your own language, you usually have some immediate insights about the problem or at least the tools to get them.
As for publishing, I imagine my experience is rather limited relative to a typical graduate student’s advisors’. From what I can tell so far it is mostly about putting yourself in the place of your audience and understanding what makes your work interesting or useful for them specifically. An “interdisciplinary” researcher is by definition a bit of an outsider. That makes it all the more important to familiarize yourself intimately with the journal and with the wider literature in that field on the topic and closely related topics, and show how your work connects with that literature. This way you do not just “barge in” but can make a real contribution to the discussion being held in that field. At Political Analysis I received some help from the reviewers and editor in doing that and I am grateful for it; this ability to welcome work that borrows from “outside” and see its potential for the field is a real strength of the journal.
Daniel Oberski is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Methodology and Statistics of Tilburg University in The Netherlands. His current research focuses on applying latent variable models to survey methodology and vice versa. He also works on evaluating and predicting measurement error in survey questions, on variance estimation and model fit evaluation for latent class (LCM) and structural equation models (SEM), and is interested in the substantive applications of SEM and latent class modeling, for example to the prediction of the decision to vote in elections. His two Political Analysis papers will be available for free downloading 12-19 May 2014 to honor his AAPOR award. They are “Evaluating Sensitivity of Parameters of Interest to Measurement Invariance in Latent Variable Models” (2014), and “Relating Latent Class Assignments to External Variables: Standard Errors for Correct Inference” (2014).
R. Michael Alvarez is a professor of Political Science at Caltech. His research and teaching focuses on elections, voting behavior, and election technologies. He is editor-in-chief of Political Analysis with Jonathan N. Katz.
Political Analysis chronicles the exciting developments in the field of political methodology, with contributions to empirical and methodological scholarship outside the diffuse borders of political science. It is published on behalf of The Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association. Political Analysis is ranked #5 out of 157 journals in Political Science by 5-year impact factor, according to the 2012 ISI Journal Citation Reports. Like Political Analysis on Facebook and follow @PolAnalysis on Twitter.
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Rethinking domestic violence: learning to see past the stereotypes
The common stereotypes about battered women are wrong and not based on up-to-date science. Here are five common myths about battered women and the real truths about the realities and complexities of domestic violence.
Myth #1
Battered women keep domestic violence a secret.
Reality: Countless research studies show that most battered women disclose their partner’s violence to at least one person—about 80% to 90% of victims in many studies. Victims not only tell, they often tell multiple people and agencies. The problem is not that women don’t tell, it is that they do not receive useful help when they do disclose.
Myth #2
Victims just need to call the police.
Reality: Police officers cannot offer a cure-all for domestic violence. Police arrest perpetrators less than half the time when they are called to the scene of domestic violence incidents, according to the most recently available national data. Worse, arrested perpetrators seldom go to jail—approximately five out of six perpetrators arrested for domestic violence never serve any jail time.
Myth #3
Battered women don’t seek professional help.
Reality: Despite the limitations of police and victim services in many communities, battered women seek help at rates that are similar to people facing other problems. Battered women report to the police at rates that are similar to many other crime victims, and also similar to the helpseeking of people with psychological problems such as depression and anxiety.
Myth #4
Battered women just need to leave.
Reality: All sorts of dangers can increase when women try to leave, including separation violence, stalking, and increased homicide risk. Further, custody battles and other risks can, in some ways, pose even greater threats to women’s well-being and that of their children. We all wish that there was a simple solution like walking out, but the reality is far more complex.
Myth #5
Most women need professional help to cope with domestic violence.
Reality: Most women cope with the problem of domestic violence with informal helpseeking. In nationally representative data, it was ten times more common for women to go to a friend or family’s house than to a domestic violence shelter.
If you want to help women who have been victims of domestic violence, listen to their assessments of what is important, respect their values, and help them come up with a plan or seek resources that address all of the complexities and realities of domestic violence.
Sherry Hamby, Ph.D., is Research Professor of Psychology and Director of the Life Paths Research Program at the University of the South. She is author of Battered Women’s Protective Strategies: Stronger Than You Know.
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Image Credit: Violencia de género. Photo by Concha García Hernández. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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Multiculturalism and international human rights law
When, in 1935, the Permanent Court of International Justice was requested by the Council of the League of Nations to provide an advisory opinion on the Minority Schools in Albania, it emphasized that “the application of the same regime to a majority as to a minority, whose needs are quite different, would only create an apparent equality.” The Court also added that the rationale of the protection of minorities is to allow them to “preserving the characteristics which distinguish them from the majority, and satisfying the ensuing special needs” (ibid., at 48). The well-known Aristotelian formula — according to which equality consists in treating like cases alike and unlike cases differently — implies that the metaphysical “idea of equality of men as persons and equal treatment” should be handled in a flexible manner, to allow “different treatment of persons [when it is justified by] the consideration of the differences of factual circumstances such as sex, age, language, religion, economic condition, education, etc.”
International Court of Justice, The Hague, Netherlands. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
If one were asked to choose one word to embrace all factual — but also spiritual, intellectual and emotional — circumstances (rectius: ”elements”) determining the existence of differences among individuals and communities, this word would certainly be culture, intended as “the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or social group [including] not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs” (1982 UNESCO Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies).
Culture is indeed the element determining the uniqueness, identity, and distinctiveness of each human being (as an individual) and community (as a collectivity). Ultimately, the cultural specificity of each person or community determines their life aspirations, expectations, and choices. Since human rights are one of the main “tools” available to human beings to pursue their life expectations and dreams, their strict interconnection with culture is beyond question. Therefore, conceiving human rights in terms of a monolithic system of inflexible rules destined to be applied according to pre-determined and standardized criteria wouldn’t help much in ensuring their effectiveness in pursuing the well-being and happiness of human beings.
On the contrary, the correct approach to international human rights law–in terms of understanding, interpretation, adjudication and redress for breaches–should be centered on the idea of multiculturalism, so as that in each concrete case the specific needs of the people specifically concerned should be taken into primary account. In the most recent decades such an approach has actually been adopted in the context of relevant international practice, which, through promoting the process of culturalization of human rights law, is making human rights standards much more responsive to the real needs of human beings and, a fortiori, much more effective.
The specific situation of indigenous peoples–who, due to their cultural specificity and vision of life, actually need a differentiated treatment in the context of human rights adjudication and enforcement–offers a very clear idea of how such a process works. Human rights monitoring bodies have developed a marked sensibility for their needs, carving in stone a noticeably evolutionary piece of culturally-responsive jurisprudence. In particular, they have “adapted” human rights standards of individual character to the collectively-driven understanding of life and social relationships of indigenous peoples. In this respect, for example, the Human Rights Committee has affirmed that, although the rights of the members of ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language, contemplated by Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, “are individual rights, they depend in turn on the ability of the minority group to maintain its culture, language, or religion. Accordingly, positive measures by States may also be necessary to protect the identity of a minority” (General comment No. 23(50) (art. 27)).
To a similar extent, most monitoring bodies have extended the scope of human rights treaty provisions defending the individual right to property to cover the collective property of ancestral lands by indigenous peoples. A similar hermeneutic approach has been followed with respect to the interpretation of other human rights standards, through adapting them to the cultural needs and views of indigenous communities. This happens, for instance, with respect to the right to humane treatment, which includes the right of every person to have their physical, mental, and moral integrity respected and, consequently, the prohibition of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. So, for example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has equated a community that is denied the possibility of burying its dead according to its own traditions to inhuman treatment. This is because such a situation is perceived by the community members–in light of their own culture–as a severe offence, leading “to a number of ‘spiritually-caused illnesses’ that become manifest as actual physical maladies and can potentially affect the entire natural lineage” of the community itself (e.g. Case of Moiwana Community v. Suriname). This practice is certainly to be welcomed, and its extension to the specific needs of all diverse cultural groups inhabiting the world promises to represent a huge step forward towards maximizing the effectiveness of human rights standards in the life of people.
Federico Lenzerini is Professor of International Law and European Union Law at the University of Siena (Italy). He is also Professor at the LLM programme in Intercultural Human Rights of the St. Thomas University School of Law, Miami (FL), USA. He is the author of the book The Culturalization of Human Rights Law, published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Federico Lenzerini can be found on LinkedIn.
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The best and worst things about journalists
Journalists are heroes to some and scumbags to others but the truth is that most are somewhere in the middle, trying to do as good a job as they can, often in difficult circumstances. That, at least, is the view of Tony Harcup, author of A Dictionary of Journalism. We asked him to tell us about some of the good – and not so good – things that journalists do. Do you agree with the below?
The nine best things about journalists:
We tell you things that you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
Our default position is healthy scepticism.
We know that there’s no such thing as a stupid question.
Our way with words translates jargon into language that actual people use.
We juggle complex intellectual, legal, commercial and ethical issues every day, simultaneously and at high speed, all while giving the impression of being little deeper than a puddle.
Our lateral thinking spots the significance of the dog that didn’t bark (noting in the process that Sherlock Holmes was created by a journalist).
We speak truth to power (or, at least, we say boo to a goose).
Our gallows humour keeps us going despite the grim stories we cover and the even grimmer people we work with (perhaps the most literal exponent of the art was journalist Ben Hecht who wrote the movies His Girl Friday and The Front Page about hacks covering a hanging).
We identify with other journalists as fellow members of society’s awkward squad (which is why even those of us who have left the frontline of reporting and become “hackademics” still can’t stop saying “we”).
The nine worst things about journalists:
We have a tendency to tell young hopefuls that all the quality has vanished from journalism compared to when we started out (journalists have been harking back to a mythical golden age for well over a century).
Our scepticism can sometimes become cynicism.
We routinely demand public apologies or resignations from anyone accused of misbehaviour (except ourselves).
Our way with words is too often used to reduce individuals or communities to stereotypes.
We have been known to conflate a popular touch with boorish anti-intellectualism.
Our collective memory lets us down surprisingly often. (We won’t get fooled again? Don’t bet on it.)
We are in danger of viewing the world through the eyes of whoever employs us, forgetting that, while they might hire us, they don’t own us.
Our insistence that we are something of a special breed is a bit rich given that most journalistic jobs have more in common with The Office than with All The President’s Men.
We eviscerate politicians for fiddling their expenses while celebrating hacks from the golden age (see no. 1) for doing exactly the same.
Tony Harcup is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield. A Dictionary of Journalism, first edition, will be published 15 May 2014. It covers over 1,400 wide-ranging entries on the terms that are likely to be encountered by students of the subject, and aims to offer a broad, accessible point of reference on an ever-topical and constantly-changing field that affects everyone’s knowledge and perception of the world.
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Image credit: Meet the press. By stocksnapper, via iStockphoto.
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