Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Brief Contents -- Contents -- List of Figures, Tables and Boxes -- Preface -- Chapter 1 Introduction -- What Is Research? -- What Is Science? -- Why Research Design? -- What Is Political Science? -- The Purposes of This Text -- The Way Ahead -- Chapter 2 Types of Research and Research Questions -- Normative and Positive Research -- Theoretical and Empirical Research -- Descriptive, Predictive, and Explanatory Research -- Theory Generation, Theory Testing, and Theory Application -- Alternative Approaches -- Choosing a Topic -- Sharpening the Research Question -- Further Reading -- Chapter 3 Theory in the Research Process -- Paradigms, Theories, Models, and Interpretations -- The Functions of Theory -- The Structure of Theory -- Developing Explanatory Theory -- What Makes a Good Theory? -- Practical Considerations about Theory -- Further Reading -- Chapter 4 Concepts and Operationalization -- Concepts -- Conceptualization -- Operationalization -- Pitfalls of Conceptualization -- Summing Up -- Further Reading -- Chapter 5 Measurement and Description -- Preliminaries -- A Glossary of Research Terms -- Measurement Reliability and Validity -- Measurement Strategies in Political Science -- Descriptive Inference -- Goals of Descriptive Research -- Describing Populations -- Describing Individual Cases -- Further Reading -- Chapter 6 Explanation and Causality -- Types of Explanation -- Notions of Causality -- Causal Inference -- Further Reading -- Chapter 7 Experimental Designs -- The Basics of Experimental Research -- The Design of Experimental Research -- Complications -- The Analysis of Experimental Data -- Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy Research -- Limits to Experimental Research -- Further Reading -- Chapter 8 Large-N Designs -- The Logic of Large-N Research -- Pitfalls on the Way from Association to Causation.

This text reports the results of an evaluation of the performance of multilevel regression modeling and poststratication (MRP) in reconstructing state-level estimates from federal-level data. The evaluation makes use of Eurobarometer data and relies on the fact that Eurobarometer provides representative survey data for each European Union state to further explore the performance of MRP. I repeatedly draw subsets of the entire Eurobarometer sample, then I compute adjusted country means using MRP with census data, and I compare the resulting estimates to the true country means from the full sample. I do that for ten survey items from various Eurobarometer waves. The results show that MRP is generally successful in producing estimates that are highly correlated with the true values (mean of 0.90). But the approach is less capable of reconstructing the relative rankings of the country means and hitting the range of plausible values of the individual state means. I also show that the great part of the adjustment comes from the modeling of the state means and not from poststratification, and that population-weighted samples perform no worse than samples in which countries have equal shares of the pool of respondents.