Changing Sociocultural Dynamics and Implications for National Security Proceedings of a Workshop (2018) / Chapter Skim
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4 The Challenge of Multiple Levels of Analysis
4 The Challenge of Multiple Levels of Analysis
Pages 37-52
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From page 37... ...
These presentations were followed by discussion and concluding remarks for the workshop. LEVELS OF INFLUENCE Gwyneth Sutherlin, Geographic Services, Inc., suggested that methods ranging from ethnographic fieldwork to the use of artificial intelligence could allow social science research to provide significant advances in under standing patterns of human behavior and culture.
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From page 38... ...
The technology uses interactive graph databases with multiple variables, she explained, enabling her and other researchers to scale rich, robustly validated data from the neighborhood level to the country and regional levels. According to Sutherlin, this capability can provide a diverse picture of a particular scenario, and, she added, these rich sociocultural data can also provide a training set for machine learning.
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From page 39... ...
She cited the example of Iraq, where three separate Kurdish dialects are used, yet many groups working to understand Iraq remain unaware of such differences. She believes that ultimately, interactive, culturally based models aided by technology can help address such gaps in understanding of different cultures around the world.
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Gelfand has studied this phenomenon of tightness and looseness at the level of the individual, within social classes, in organizations, and across modern nations and states. Ecological factors and historical events influence the social organization of a country, she observed, which in turn affects the characteristics of social situations and associated psychological processes.1 She suggested that this is one way of modeling culture across different levels of analysis.
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. Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study.
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Gross domestic product, common religion, language, and geographic location do not serve this purpose, she stated. One the other hand, common threats experienced by countries and groups -- such as territorial invasions, natural disasters, food scarcity, dense population, and prevalent pathogens -- can serve as a strong impetus for coordination and organization that help societies survive.
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From page 43... ...
Gelfand and her collaborator, Jesse Harrington, have also examined differences in tightness and looseness among people from different social classes. In this research, they were seeking to determine whether members of a lower social class perceived themselves to be under threat in a pattern similar to that of people in countries threatened by conflict or natural d isasters.
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Theory predicts, she explained, that people who perceive a threat develop strong norms needed to coordinate social action. In this research, she and her team measured the coordination of brain waves of pairs of subjects under three different conditions representing ingroup threat, outgroup threat, and no threat.
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LEVELS OF ANALYSIS AND LINGUISTICS Computer algorithms provide an important way to learn about language, explained Jesse Egbert, Northern Arizona University, but they must remain interpretable. At times, he observed, maintaining interpretability means omitting variables he cannot explain, which reduces to some extent the ability to predict outcomes of interest.
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From page 46... ...
are an ideal unit of observation in corpus research because they preserve explanatory information, such as the purpose and function of the text. He described these texts as fundamental units of discourse that constitute meaningful and valid social constructs and have integrity as a unit both situationally and linguistically.6,7 Egbert further explained that he seeks meaningful levels of analysis that fall between the individual text level and the complete body of language he is analyzing to enable classifying texts in useful ways.
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From page 47... ...
on 33 subregister categories. According to Egbert, the results of this research indicate that by using a bottom-up approach to identify registers in Internet language, one can detect variation in language use in register and subregister categories (e.g., use of first-person pronouns)
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Egbert reiterated that he views register as an important "signal" amid the "noise" of online linguistic information, and asserted that its use improves the usefulness and accuracy of computer algorithms employed in examining texts. "I think that we need to keep the linguistics in computational linguistics," he said.
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Gelfand explained that "I do not trust any of my research until I see it with another method." In addition, she observed, polling can be problematic in cultures other than the United States where there is less openness and trust in talking to people conducting surveys. She also noted another limitation of public opinion polls that she has observed in her research.
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Another participant suggested that it is also important to understand the context and factors in the environment that may improve the prediction or understanding of outlier cases rather than waiting for outlier cases to occur. Despite these concerns about relying on public opinion polls to achieve some of the analysis goals of the IC, Susan Weller, University of Texas Medical Branch, observed that it is important to distinguish such polls from federal surveys, which can be very useful data sources.
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Sutherlin noted that she often seeks to avoid using the term "prediction," instead preferring to use such terminology as "to infer" or "to anticipate possibilities." WRAP-UP Asked by Matsumoto to convey how the social science community could help the IC over the next decade, a participant from the IC explained that the most important advance would be establishing a two-way dialogue between the two communities, which would allow the social science community to better understand the practicalities facing the IC. Another participant observed that the IC has an important deliberative process for weighing the evidence and alternative explanations provided by analysts.
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From page 52... ...
He emphasized the value of drawing on the different methodologies across many social science disciplines for that understanding.
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