Exercise 1: Other Works
The Idea: Most students who major in a given field will not become professionals in it. But there is pedagogical utility in having students identify professional strategies.
The Question: How do different individuals examine and interpret the same data in varied ways?
A Note: This exercise (ZIP 10K) offers a tentative set of steps and questions instructors might use to direct students in exploiting the resources offered by ICPSR’s Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Instructors might prefer to rearrange steps and append or eliminate questions, depending upon the goals and unanticipated turns of class discussion. Instructors are welcome to download the directions and questions, edit them to suit their teaching purposes and distribute them at will.
The Entry Article
The proposed article for this exercise is:
Schuman, Howard; Rieger, Cheryl, “Historical Analogies, Generational Effects, and Attitudes Toward War.” American Sociological Review. Jun 1992, 57, (3), 315 – 326. (https://doi.org/10.2307/2096238)
This article is suitable for undergraduates because:
- It expands upon a major sociological concept: cohort effects.
- It addresses a timely issue: individuals’ opinions about war.
- Its question is of general disciplinary import: how do individuals use memories of past events to form opinions about present ones?
- It contains vivid line graphs and percentage tables emphasizing effective data visualization.
- It mentions a number of methodological concepts upon which the instructor might expound: “negative findings,” “operationalized,” “sampling error,” and “control variables.”
This article is useful for an exercise drawing on ICPSR’s Bibliography of Data-related Literature:
- It analyzes data from the Detroit Area Study, 1991: Collective Memories. The Bibliography lists eight other scholarly works that also analyze the dataset.
- Howard Schuman authored or coauthored seven of these works. Schuman’s varied exploitation of the dataset encourages students to think about how one scholar can exploit a dataset in many ways.
- Furthermore, Schuman’s publications listed in the Bibliography cover both substantive and methodological issues.
Guiding Questions
General
- What are the authors’ main research questions?
- How do they reframe these questions as hypotheses?
- How do the authors specify their independent and dependent variables?
- How do the authors describe the dataset they use to answer their research question?
- What are the authors’ main findings and conclusions?
- Is the article’s argument convincing? Why or why not?
Specific
- What is a “cohort effect”? What do the authors conclude about cohort effects?
- What do the two graphs demonstrate? How do these two graphs contribute to the authors’ overall argument?
- How might what the authors learn about the use of analogies be of interest to researchers interested in general public opinion?
- How do the authors use the following terms: “negative findings” (p. 315), “operationalized” (p. 320), “sampling error” (p. 320), and “control variables” (p. 324)?
The Data
Student Action Items
- Find the dataset, the Detroit Area Study, 1991: Collective Memories, in ICPSR’s general archive. Students can either type the dataset’s title or its study number (2160) in ICPSR’s main search box.
- Read about the dataset. In addition to the project description, read the “Scope of Study” and “Methodology” sections.
- To examine the dataset’s codebook, use the “Data and Documentation” tab. Click on the arrow icon under download and choose “Codebook [PDF]” from the options. (If you use the large “download” rather than the tab, choose “Documentation Only.”)
Guiding Questions
- Who collected the data (i.e. who is the principal investigator)? Is this is a dataset composed of primary or secondary data? Why? How does one usually know?
- How does the description of the dataset compare to how the authors describe it in the entry article?
- Which items listed in the “Scope of Study” might the principal investigator have intended to be independent variables? Dependent variables? Why? How does one usually know?
- How would one describe the sample for this dataset? How does the dataset hold up under the criteria for external validity? What might the authors say about this issue?
- What other research questions could the data from this dataset possibly answer? What research questions could this dataset probably not answer?
The Related Literature
Student Action Items
- Find the “browse by author” option in ICPSR’s Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Locate the entry article’s first author, Howard Schuman, and review what else he has written.
- Find the citation for the entry article in the author’s list of publications and click on the “related data” link under this title.
- Click on the “related literature” link for the first dataset associated with this article (Detroit Area Study, 1991: Collective Memories).
- Review the other scholarly works that have analyzed this dataset. Use the “sort” function on the top, right-hand corner of the page to sort the list by author, title, or year.
Guiding Questions
- How many other works has the author published using quantitative datasets housed at ICPSR? Has the author of the entry article written other works that analyze the same dataset? Different datasets?
- Judging from the titles of his works, how has the author used the same dataset in multiple ways? How do these same titles suggest a different angle than the argument presented in the entry article?
- In comparison to the entry article, are there articles by this scholar using this dataset that: (a) Use the same variables? (b) Answer the same research question? (c) Discuss the same theories? (d) Contradict the findings of the entry article?
- How would one characterize the general research interests of this scholar?
The Exit Article
Student Action Items
- Identify another article that the author of the entry article (Howard Schuman) has also written and in which he analyzed the same dataset (Detroit Area Study, 1991: Collective Memories).
- Locate a copy of the article.
Guiding Questions
- Why is the exit article a good one for comparison with the entry article?
- How do the descriptions of the dataset in each article differ? What can one learn about the dataset from the exit article that was unknowable from the entry article (or vice versa)?
- How do the research questions and conclusions for each article differ?
- Do the entry and exit articles use the same independent and dependent variables? If not, how do they specify them differently?
- Do(es) the author(s) mention theoretical or methodological concepts in the exit article similar to concepts that appeared in the entry article? Do(es) the author(s) introduce new concepts? What might these mean?
- Was the exit article published before or after the entry article? Does the knowledge produced in one of the articles contribute to the knowledge produced in the other?
- Does the author cite his previous work in either article? In what way does his previous research appear to support his current research?