My Favorite Social Science Podcasts

Has anyone else driven the long way to work just to catch a few minutes more of a really good podcast?  I know, I could just sit in my car in the parking lot and finish it there, but that just feels weird.  

Just a few years ago, I had not heard of podcasts…

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Sexual Assault Survey Now Available for Multi-institutional Enrollment

Sexual Assault Survey Now Available for Multi-institutional Enrollment

A collaborative partnership between the University of Michigan and SoundRocket now offers colleges and universities across the nation affordable access to a national campus climate survey measuring sexual assault. Piloted at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during the Winter 2015 term, the NCCS successfully measured what was previously thought of as unattainable in college student surveys.  The survey achieved a final response rate of approximately 67%, demonstrating how a comprehensive and responsive survey design can be implemented to achieve a more balanced and representative collection of responses.

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Peer Review as a Necessary but Unscientific Process – Can we just do some iterative science already?

Peer review is wonderful in theory.  Scientists reviewing other scientists’ work to evaluate whether the science was applied thoroughly, implemented well, and interpreted effectively can be a wonderful way to allow the best science through.  But the Reproducibility Project clearly demonstrated that something is broken – when over a quarter of the published studies reviewed could not be replicated. 

It is not a surprise to most.  Humans are involved.  We make mistakes…

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Research Wonder: Response Motivation – Important for Interpretation

Most agree that people have numerous motivations to participate in research.  In a recent article, Florian Keusch thoroughly details the various reasons why people participate in web surveys.  It is clear that there is no single reason — societal characteristics, individual characteristics, and survey characteristics all play a role.  But like most strong literature reviews do, it left me with this…

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