I’m super excited to be giving a talk on Wednesday at the One Earth Future Foundation, a local, homegrown, interdisciplinary think tank here in Colorado working on all sorts of issues related to sustainability and making sure that we can keep living on this planet.
Because I don’t get to give talks very often, I may have gotten a bit excited and planned to talk about, well, basically everything I have done the past few years (and frankly a lot that I’m hoping to do in the next few!). The abstract is below. Really looking forward to a fun discussion!
Measuring Difficult Things
Social norms, unobserved characteristics, and hidden statuses can exert significant effects on outcomes ranging from domestic violence to armed group participation to social capital and network formation. In quantitative analysis, not being able to account for these factors can lead to biases in our estimation and thus incorrect or incomplete policy prescriptions. Even when we are able to see that these factors exist, finding a way to include them in our estimation is often limited by issues of measurement. In this talk, I give an overview of some my research on how to measure difficult things, beginning with social norms and intergenerational effects in a study of refugees, list experiments, and how to generate representative samples of hidden populations. I explore challenges in measurement, offer lessons from the field, and describe prospective work that aims to continue deepening our understanding of how to approach measuring difficult things.
ERIN K. FLETCHER 