This series offers concise, hands-on introductions to cutting-edge methodologies within the social sciences. It focuses on innovative techniques that may not yet have extensive textbook treatments, providing readers with access to the latest advancements. The collection is ideal for researchers and graduate students eager to enhance their methodological toolkit and stay current with rapid developments. Each volume emphasizes practical application and serves as a valuable resource for both learning new tools and supplementing existing coursework.
Twitter presents an ideal combination of size, international reach, and data accessibility that make it a useful data source. Acquiring, cleaning, and analyzing these data, however, require new tools and processes. This Element introduces these methods and provides scripts and examples for downloading, processing, and analyzing Twitter data.
Simple, elegant, and powerful, tools are available in user-friendly, free software to help design, build, and run models of social interactions, even on the most basic laptop. Focusing on a well-known model of housing segregation, this Element sets out the fundamentals of what is now known as 'agent based modeling'.
An accessible and practical guide for the analysis and interpretation of regression discontinuity (RD) designs. The focus is on the canonical sharp RD setup that has the following features: (i) the score is continuously distributed and has only one dimension, (ii) there is only one cutoff, and (iii) compliance with the treatment assignment is perfect.
In this Element we develop: stochastic models, which add a crucial element of uncertainty to human interaction; models of human interactions structured by social networks; and 'evolutionary' models in which agents using more effective decision rules are more likely to survive and prosper than others.