May 6, 13
What causes economic inequality?
Word of the Day
Probity
o
“The quality or condition of having strong moral principles; integrity, good
character; honesty, decency”
Measuring IQ in
The Bell Curve
Hernnstein and Murray use AFQT (armed forces qualifying test) scores to
measure intelligence
o
The questions aren’t too hard but there’s definitely an aspect of school
achievement rather than innate intelligence (you can definitely do better if
you learned a lot in school)
AFQT scores are converted into
Z-scores
to facilitate comparison; they are
standardized
o
A number that ranges roughly from -3 to 3 and it represents how many
standard deviations a particular score is above or below the mean
Measuring socioeconomic status
Hernnstein and Murray measure SES by constructing a SES index comprised of
four variables (each weighted equally, resulting score standardized):
o
Mother’s education
o
Father’s education
o
Parental occupation
o
Family income
To assess the relative influence of intelligence and SES on the probability that a
NLSY respondents would be poor, Hernnstein and Murray use a method of
statistical analysis called
logistic regression
o
The dependent variable in a logistic regression is a binary variable, unlike
OLS regression, where the dependent variable is continuous
Dependent variable in this particular analysis is whether a respondent reported a
household income that was below the poverty line in 1989
Types of variables
Continuous variables
: can take on a large range of values
o
E.g. income or age. Are measured on an interval scale
o
Is used in orderly squares regression (ex: Y = AX + B)
Categorical variables
: can take on only a limited number of values. E.g.
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- Spring '08
- Moskos
- Sociology, Regression Analysis, Poverty, Bell Curve, Hernnstein
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