Sociologists increasingly face choices among competing algorithms that represent reasonable approaches to the same task, with little guidance in choosing among them. We develop a strategy that uses simulated data to identify the conditions under which different methods perform well and applies what is learned from the simulations to predict which…

Multilevel models are increasingly used in sociology and other social sciences to analyze variation of tie outcomes in egocentrically sampled network data, particularly in studies of social support. Existing research assumes that the personal networks in the data do not overlap (i.e., they do not have actors in common), which makes standard…

Most social scientists agree that case studies are useful for "theory building," but ethnographic methods papers often look to survey research for case selection strategies. This is due to a common but untenable distinction between theoretical and empirical generalization, which obscures how theoretically inclined ethnographers make…

Given the questionnaire design and the nature of the problem, partially ordered data that are neither completely ordered nor completely unordered are frequently encountered in social, behavioral, and medical studies. However, early developments in partially ordered data analysis are very limited and restricted only to cross-sectional data. In this…

Questions on voluntary association memberships have been used extensively in social scientific research for decades. Researchers generally assume that these respondent self-reports are accurate, but their measurement has never been assessed. Respondent characteristics are known to influence the accuracy of other self-report variables such as…

Multifactorial survey experiments such as stated choice experiments are used more and more frequently in social science research. In this article, based on an experimental study on ethical and political consumption, we explore the potential of hybrid choice models to explicitly model latent psychological factors such as attitudes, overcoming a…

Periodic changes in occupational classifications make it difficult to obtain consistent measures of social class over time, potentially jeopardizing research on class-based trends. The severity of this problem depends, in part, on the measurement strategies used to address those changes. The authors propose that when a sample has been coded partly…

Recently, both sociology of science and policy research have shown increased interest in scientific uncertainty. To contribute to these debates and create an empirical measure of scientific uncertainty, we inductively devised two systems of classification or ontologies to describe scientific uncertainty in a large corpus of food safety risk…

This article develops a set-theoretic approach to Bayes's theorem and Bayesian process tracing. In the approach, hypothesis testing is the procedure whereby one updates beliefs by narrowing the range of states of the world that are regarded as possible, thus diminishing the domain in which the actual world can reside. By explicitly connecting…

Radical social movements are broadly engaged in, and dedicated to, promoting change in their social environment. In their corresponding efforts to call attention to various causes, communicate with like-minded groups, and mobilize support for their activities, radical social movements also produce an enormous amount of text. These texts, like…

Adjacent category logit models are ordered regression models that focus on comparisons of adjacent categories. These models are particularly useful for ordinal response variables with categories that are of substantive interest. In this article, we consider unconstrained and constrained versions of the partial adjacent category logit model, which…

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing…

Recently, sociologists have expended much effort in attempts to define social mechanisms. We intervene in these debates by proposing that sociologists in fact have a choice to make between three standards of what constitutes a good mechanistic explanation: substantial, formal, and metaphorical mechanistic explanation. All three standards are…

Survey data are often subject to various types of errors such as misclassification. In this article, we consider a model where interest is simultaneously in two correlated response variables and one is potentially subject to misclassification. A motivating example of a recent study of the impact of a sexual education course for adolescents is…

Large-scale surveys typically exhibit data structures characterized by rich mutual dependencies between surveyed variables and individual-specific skip patterns. Despite high efforts in fieldwork and questionnaire design, missing values inevitably occur. One approach for handling missing values is to provide multiply imputed data sets, thus…