Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • Margaret Mead and the Experimental Template

    Via Savage Minds, I came across a full text open access link to Margaret Mead’s classic text Coming of Age in Samoa. Never having read it before, I thought to check it out. Imagine my surprise when I read the following, from page 7:

    What method then is open to us who wish to conduct a human experiment but who lack the power either to construct the experimental conditions or to find controlled examples of those conditions here and there throughout our own civilisation? The only method is that of the anthropologist, to go to a different civilisation and make a study of human beings under different cultural conditions in some other part of the world.

    Here is Margaret Mead letting us know in classic, positivist terms that true experiments are the gold standard, and that “natural experiments” (“controlled examples of those conditions here and there”) can work too.

    Now, Mead does go somewhat off the rails in the subsequent sentences:

    For such studies the anthropologist chooses quite simple peoples, primitive peoples, whose society has never attained the complexity of our own. In this choice of primitive peoples like the Eskimo, the Australian, the South Sea islander, or the Pueblo Indian, the anthropologist is guided by the knowledge that the analysis of a simpler civilisation is more possible of attainment. In complicated civilisation like those of Europe, or the higher civilisations of the East, years of study are necessary before the student can begin to understand the forces at work within them….Furthermore, we do not choose a simple peasant community in Europe or an isolated group of mountain whites in the American South, for these people’s ways of life, though simple, belong essentially to the historical tradition to which the complex parts of European or American civilisation belong…

    Cringeworthy in two ways. First, we no longer think it proper to say that such societies as those found in Samoa are “simple” (heck, we don’t even say Eskimo or Indian anymore). The idea that it would take too long to do such a study in France, but nine months will suffice to figure out the Samoans, is just wrong.

    But more importantly, what she is describing is a bad experiment. Rather than isolate one causal variable and manipulate it, she proposes what appears to be a strategy of varying all sorts of variables at the same time (geography, “civilizational complexity,” culture, language, history, the list goes on). Her emphasis on education as a key difference between Samoa and the West is provocative, perhaps, but not something discovered through anything approaching the experimental template that she herself seemed to find so compelling.

  • The Social Media Data Generating Process

    I had the opportunity to serve as a discussant for a panel on big data in Asian studies (abstracts in PDF) at the most recent meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. As it turns out, social media is one of the central sources of data for this rapidly developing new field (the other is machine coding of text). As I was thinking about how to discuss the various opportunities and challenges that come from using social media to study politics—and everyone involved was a political scientist of some sort—I found myself trying to sketch out a data generating process for social media data. I came up with four basic challenges that follow as a result of how I conceptualize this DGP.

    The basic idea is that social media is a form of political participation. When you think about it that way, though, it’s immediately clear that it is only one of many forms of participation. We might share a link on Facebook, or retweet a hashtagged tweet, and that generates social media data. But we might also vote, or protest, or send a letter to a representative, which is also a form of participation, but one that is not observed in the social media data. There are lots of forms of political participation, and denote the collection of them as \mathbf{D}. Each social media datum from individual i is then D_{i} \in \mathbf{D}_{i}.

    The first challenge, then, is characterizing the relationship between D_{i} and \mathbf{D}_{i}.

    There is then a technology that censors some fraction of D_{i}. As a result of the censoring rule r(\cdot ), we actually observe r(D_{i}). In some cases the censoring rule is “no censoring,” so that r(D_{i}) = D_{i}. But in the interesting cases which animate many recent studies of social media and political participation in illiberal states, r(\cdot ) effectively deletes some fraction of the social media data. We especially worry about the possibility that the probability that D_{i} is observed in r(D_{i}) is correlated with the content of D_{i}.

    So the second challenge is characterizing r(\cdot ), and then knowing what to do about it.

    Next, recall that social media is social. That means that we care about other actors j who participate too, and we suspect that they in reaction both to social media and to offline events. So we have D_j\left ( r(D_i), \mathbf{D}_i \right ) \in \mathbf{D}_j\left ( r(D_i), \mathbf{D}_i \right ) .

    Third challenge is to characterize this recursive system in which actors participate in response to both online participation and offline participation, and the online participation is potentially censored.

    And finally, we suspect that governments choose r(\cdot ) based on how they observe people to be responding to others’ participation. When participation is not threatening to the government, perhaps there is no censoring, but this may change as social media has effects on actual politics (think Turkey and Twitter). So r(\cdot ) is itself a function of \mathbf{D}_{j}, generating another kind of recursion in this process: D_j\left ( r_{\mathbf{D}_j}(D_i), \mathbf{D}_i \right ) \in \mathbf{D}_j\left ( r_{\mathbf{D}_j}(D_i), \mathbf{D}_i \right ) .

    This fourth challenge is to characterize how governments deploy censorship in response to the anticipated consequences of social media as a form of political participation. Note in the final expression above that offline participation may change as a response to online censorship.

    Put together this way, I find it much easier to think about the opportunities and challenges from using social media. It’s also useful to see important new contributions in terms of how they make sense of each of these challenges. King, Pan, and Roberts (2013), for example, addresses the fourth challenge particularly well.