Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a relatively new website that contains the major elements required to conduct research: an integrated participant compensation system; a large participant pool; and a streamlined process of study design, participant recruitment, and data collection. In this article, we describe and evaluate the potential contributions of MTurk to psychology and other social sciences. Findings indicate that (a) MTurk participants are slightly more demographically diverse than are standard Internet samples and are significantly more diverse than typical American college samples; (b) participation is affected by compensation rate and task length, but participants can still be recruited rapidly and inexpensively; (c) realistic compensation rates do not affect data quality; and (d) the data obtained are at least as reliable as those obtained via traditional methods. Overall, MTurk can be used to obtain high-quality data inexpensively and rapidly.

http://www.gruberpeplab.com/teaching/psych231_fall2013/documents/231_Buhrmester2011.pdf

Amazon's Mechanical Turk A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data?

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

Social Network Analysis

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

The newest “new institutionalism,” discursive institutionalism, lends insight into the role of ideas and discourse in politics while providing a more dynamic approach to institutional change than the older three new institutionalisms. Ideas are the substantive content of discourse. They exist at three levels—policies, programs, and philosophies—and can be categorized into two types, cognitive and normative. Discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas. It comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. These forms differ in two formal institutional contexts; simple polities have a stronger communicative discourse and compound polities a stronger coordinative discourse. The institutions of discursive institutionalism, moreover, are not external-rule-following structures but rather are simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents whose “background ideational abilities” within a given “meanin...

/pdf/discursive-institutionalism-the-explanatory-power-of-ideas-2x76ola04b.pdf

Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse

* The Study of Public Policy Processes Hank C Jenkins-Smith and Paul A Sabatier The Advocacy Coalition Framework * Policy Change over a Decade or More P A Sabatier * The Dynamics of Policy-Oriented Learning H C Jenkins-Smith and P A Sabatier Qualitative Case Studies Of Policy Change And Learning * An Advocacy Coalition Approach to Change in Canadian Education Hanne B Mawhinney * Competing Advocacy Coalitions, Policy Evolution, and Airline Deregulation Anthony E Brown and Joseph Stewart Jr * California Water Politics: Explaining Policy Change in a Cognitively Polarized Subsystem John F Munro * Managing Technological Change in Federal Communications Policy: The Role of Industry Advisory Groups Richard P Barke Quantitative Analyses Of Policy Change * The Politics of Offshore Energy: Empirically Testing the Advocacy Coalition Framework H C Jenkins-Smith and Gilbert K St Clair * From Vague Consensus to Clearly Differentiated Coalitions: Environmental Policy at Lake Tahoe, 19641985 P A Sabatier and Anne M Brasher Conclusion * The Advocacy Coalition Framework: Assessment, Revisions, and Implications for Scholars and Practitioners P A Sabatier and H C Jenkins-Smith Methodological Appendix * Measuring Longitudinal Change in Elite Beliefs Using Content Analysis of Public Documents H C Jenkins-Smith and P A Sabatier *

Policy Change And Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach

Why do members of the public disagree – sharply and persistently – about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The ‘cultural cognition of risk’ refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy‐making are discussed.

/pdf/cultural-cognition-of-scientific-consensus-p9ulvwvv9w.pdf

Cultural cognition of scientific consensus

Why do members of the public disagree - sharply and persistently - about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The "cultural cognition of risk" refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals' beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.

/pdf/cultural-cognition-of-scientific-consensus-1flcd4vhws.pdf

Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) was developed to provide a causal theory of the policy process which would serve as one of several alternatives to the familiar stages heuristic, with its recognized limitations. This paper first summarizes the central features of the ACF, including a set of underlying assumptions and specific hypotheses. We next review the implications for the framework of six case studies by various authors dealing with Canadian education and with American transportation, telecommunications, water, environmental, and energy policy. While generally supportive of the ACF, the case studies also suggest several revisions.

Evaluating the Advocacy Coalition Framework

The Internet offers a number of advantages as a survey mode: low marginal cost per completed response, capabilities for providing respondents with large quantities of information, speed, and elimination of interviewer bias. Those seeking these advantages confront the problem of representativeness both in terms of coverage of the population and capabilities for drawing random samples. Two major strategies have been pursued commercially to develop the Internet as a survey mode. One strategy, used by Harris Interactive, involves assembling a large panel of willing respondents who can be sampled. Another strategy, used by Knowledge Networks, involves using random digit dialing (RDD) telephone methods to recruit households to a panel of Web-TV enabled respondents. Do these panels adequately deal with the problem of representativeness to be useful in political science research? The authors address this question with results from parallel surveys on global climate change and the Kyoto Protocol administered by telephone to a national probability sample and by Internet to samples of the Harris Interactive and Knowledge Networks panels. Knowledge and opinion questions generally show statistically significant but substantively modest difference across the modes. With inclusion of standard demographic controls, typical relational models of interest to political scientists produce similar estimates of parameters across modes. It thus appears that, with appropriate weighting, samples from these panels are sufficiently representative of the U.S. population to be reasonable alternatives in many applications to samples gathered through RDD telephone surveys.

Hank C. Jenkins-Smith

Papers

Policy Change And Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach

Cultural cognition of scientific consensus

Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus

Evaluating the Advocacy Coalition Framework

The Advent of Internet Surveys for Political Research: A Comparison of Telephone and Internet Samples