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Emerging Trends and Methods in International Security Proceedings of a Workshop (2018) / Chapter Skim
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5 Trends in Social Science Methods
Pages 47-50

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From page 47...
... First, Bennett highlighted the replication crisis -- the inability to reproduce published scientific findings -- as a trend that has affected disciplines across the social, physical, and medical sciences. This bias, he suggested, is likely due to such bad practices as p-hacking, or mining data to uncover statistically significant results not included in the original study hypothesis, and publication bias, or only publishing statistically significant findings.
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From page 48...
... He noted that researchers have further benefited from advances in audio and visual data processing. However, he cautioned, these advances also give people the ability to create false audio and video clips, similar to the recent Obama lip syncing video,1 helping to make fake news appear more convincing.
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From page 49...
... Currently, group superforecastering methods achieve 80–85 percent accuracy, whereas an individual forecaster is able to achieve 50–60 percent accuracy. Although it is hoped that the project will improve prediction accuracy by coupling human analysis with computer algorithms, Bennett suggested that research should also be initiated to identify the best methods for training superforecasters.
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From page 50...
... Bennett then introduced the second new case study method, typological theorizing, which involves "trying to theorize about how different mechanisms and variables interact in different combinations." He explained that cases are categorized as either theoretical types or combinations of variables to address "high-order interaction effects." In process tracing, typological theorizing can help with case selection, he noted. He described the method as similar to statistical matching, except that it uses "coarsened exact matching" to identify good analogies for current policy cases and cast doubt on bad historical analogies to current events.
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Key Terms

  • process tracing
  • bayesian process
  • explicit bayesian
  • publication bias
  • big data

  • content analysis
  • natural experiments
  • random forest
  • typological theorizing
  • learning techniques

  • bayesian analysis
  • bennett suggested
  • obama lip
  • significant results
  • social movements

  • bennett elaborated
  • study hypothesis
  • incorporating bayesian
  • predict events
  • false audio

  • create false
  • media mentions
  • major trend
  • combine machine
  • bad historical

  • including natural
  • puter algorithms
  • logistic regression
  • methodological advances
  • research incorporating


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