Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2021
This session is jointly sponsored by the Statistics department and the Research
Methods, Measurement, and Evaluation program, University of Connecticut
(UCONN), New England Statistical Society (NESS) and Statistical and Applied
Mathematical Institute (SAMSI) as part of online interdisciplinary seminar
series on statistical methodology for social and behavior research.
Speaker: Jon Krosnick, Stanford University
Date and Time: FRIDAY, 6/18/2021, 12PM
Topic: The Collapse of Scientific Standards in the World of High Visibility
Survey Research
Abstract:
In parallel to the explosion of the replication crisis across the sciences,
survey research has experienced its own crisis of credibility – and very
publicly. Election after election, pre-election polls in recent years in the
U.S., Britain, Israel, and elsewhere have been widely viewed as inaccurate.
After each failure to accurately predict election outcomes, the survey research
profession has implemented a self-study to try to explain its inaccuracies,
presumably in order to learn useful lessons for improving practices. And yet
inaccuracies have continued unabated. This talk will review the evidence of
inaccuracy and propose and test an explanation that has received little
attention: that leading survey researchers have all but abandoned
well-validated scientific procedures for data collection and data analysis and
have misrepresented their procedures as having more scientific integrity than
they in fact have. Interestingly, the lessons learned have implications for
academic research in the social sciences, in medicine, and in other fields.
Bio:
Dr. Jon Krosnick is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social
Sciences, Professor of Communication, Political Science and Psychology at
Stanford University. He also directs the Political Psychology Research Group
and the Summer Institute in Political Psychology. Author of four books and more
than 140 articles and chapters, Dr. Krosnick conducts research in three primary
areas: (1) attitude formation, change, and effects, (2) the psychology of
political behavior, and (3) the optimal design of questionnaires used for
laboratory experiments and surveys, and survey research methodology more
generally. His attitude research has focused primarily on the notion of
attitude strength, seeking to differentiate attitudes that are firmly
crystallized and powerfully influential on thinking and action from attitudes
that are flexible and inconsequential. Dr. Krosnick is a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. He earned: the Erik Erikson Early Career Award for Excellence and
Creativity in the Field of Political Psychology from the International Society
of Political Psychology; a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences; the Phillip Brickman Memorial Prize for Research in Social
Psychology; the American Political Science Association’s Best Paper Award; the
American Association for Public Opinion Research Student Paper Award; the
Midwest Political Science Association’s Pi Sigma Alpha Award; and the
University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham Visiting Scholar Position.
For inquiry, please contact Dr. Xiaojing Wang at xiaojing.wang@uconn.edu
