Promises promises....

Interesting developments over at Stratification & Culture Research Network. Mike Savage has posted a statement outlining the future research agenda of the Great British Class Survey research group. I'm looking forward to the article he promises that will deal with (refute?) the arguments of the GBCS's critics. In fact I'm wondering how they are going to manage it within the constraints of the 8000 word limit that Sociology insists on. There is just so much to say in order to do justice to the points the critics raise. Still, I've made it easy for him to address my particular criticisms by listing them in the form of questions at the end of my critique and it will be easy for the interested reader to keep a tally of how many are actually seriously addressed.

Also of interest is more information about the archiving of the GBCS survey data. This will eventually be deposited at the UK Data Archive though we are asked to be patient because of the large amount to work that will have to be put into cleaning it. Fair enough, my guess is that there are lots of issues to do with data format and coding and half a million cases is quite a lot to chew on even if there aren't that many variables.

What is less understandable is the delay in archiving the GfK survey. This has only 1026 cases and (I assume, though we are not told this) about the same number of variables as the GBCS. There surely can't be any complex issues involved in archiving a data-set of this size and no reason to delay depositing it. I think I know a little about archiving data from a depositor point of view and quite a lot from a user point of view. To clean, document and archive a data-set of this size, even if it just consists of columns of asci  number, is about the work of a weekend for someone that knows what they are doing: let's be generous and say a week to allow for the unforeseen.

And the point is this. The class schema generated by the GBCS team is entirely dependent on the data from the GfK survey, not the data in the GBCS survey which plays no effective role in defining the GBCS class categories. The GfK survey is the foundation of the whole enterprise. Why delay in disseminating these data? The GBCS team may prefer us to believe that it is the GBCS data that people should be interested in, but these are, as I pointed out elsewhere, just the mountain of bad data sitting on the molehill of (relatively) good GfK data.

I can see the slightly ludicrous prospect of the GBCS team getting into print to "refute" the claims of the as yet unpublished critics who will have had no chance to actually examine the data on which the original set of claims was made. It seems to me that there is a serious disproportion between the amount of effort put into puffing the GBCS and the amount of effort put into facilitating the assessment of the science. I find it difficult to think of any reasons why the GfK data should not already be in the public domain.

Origins of musical taste

I've been thinking  about how I came to like the music I do. Despite being classified by the GBCS as a cultural univore, my tastes are, I think, quite omnivorous. I even like country and western, well, at least Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Of course I know nothing whatsoever about the music that  young people, say under the age of  30, listen to, but then again life is short and choices have to be made. I guess my knowledge will improve a bit in 6 or 7 years time when my daughter becomes a teenager and realizes that a great way to annoy her parents is to play whatever she happens to be into at ear splitting, fight provoking, levels.

The musical consumption technology in my family home was, by the standard of the time, quite good. Round about 1972 my dad bought a hi-fi: Keltron speakers, Amstrad IC 2000 amplifier and Garrad SP25 Mk. IV deck. What was played on it was not high culture, it wasn't even contemporary popular culture - as I've mentioned before, my parents' tastes were really formed before the the sixties pop revolution. So we had a diet of maudlin ballads about old shep, bagpipe bands marching through the heather to scare the shit out of Johnny English (though as Billy Connolly once observed, you can't march through heather without falling on your arse), Mantovani, James Last, Val Doonican, Jim Reeves (my mother's favourite), Andy Stewart and non-cast recordings of family musicals like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music picked up from the Woolworths bargain bin. I think we had two LPs of classical music. One was a Classics for Pleasure 1812/ William Tell overture combo. The other was Grieg's piano concerto. Why those? I have no idea. 

As a child I  had an overdose of Grieg. At primary school an ancient crackly recording of the Peer Gynt Suite was played every morning  as we filed into  assembly. I guess educational theorists recommended it as soothing. It is in fact one of the few things I can remember about my primary education, the others being  taking a penny for the "Boot Fund" box so that poor children could have shoes (amazingly this still exists) and my dad racing up to the school in his lunch hour to give the headmistress a row because another child had scribbled in my writing book and I had got the blame. After that the teacher hated me and shortly afterwards I was moved to another class.

I didn't pay much attention to popular music until I was 12 or 13. By that time I had my own transistor radio and could lie in bed at night listening to Radio Luxembourg. This was not terribly conducive to the development of any sort of musical appreciation. The reception was awful,  the earphone hurt, the music was crap and anyway I was more interested in listening to football commentary than pop music. I wasn't even interested in Top of the Pops, let alone the Old Grey Whistle Test which I don't think I saw until around 1976. 

My epiphany was listening to Alan "Fluff" Freeman's Saturday afternoon Radio 1 show while I was supposed to be doing my homework.  In fact I was mostly recording the music on a reel-to-reel tape-recorder my dad had bought off a work-mate for a couple of quid. That's where I first heard Free, Derek and the Dominoes, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Bee Bop Deluxe, Barclay James Harvest, Pink Floyd, Renaissance, Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers, Black Sabbath, Focus and so forth. That's what I liked until I was 16 or so. All pretty standard white-boy prog rock. 

Was there any social basis to this taste? To some degree there was, but it was very heavily restricted by  social homogeneity of my peer group.  There simply weren't many middle-class kids to interact with. At my school there may have been the odd son or daughter of a professional say a secondary teacher, a dentist or a solicitor, but I can't actually remember any. The axes of distinction were more along the lines of rough/respectable working class, grammar school stream/others, boys/girls, age-group and to a limited extent white/ethnic (though actually there were very few ethnic minorities unless you counted the Scots, Irish and Welsh). 

If you were a lad in a grammar school stream it was social death not to like some form of progressive rock. For reasons that were and are still quite obscure to me it was not possible to like both Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, you had to choose. Pink Floyd was compulsory whatever your other preferences. Genesis and Yes were permissible, but considered a bit wet. Liking Faust, Hawkwind or Barclay James Harvest put you amongst the cultural avant garde.  Clearly this was all about tribal identity and your membership of the tribe was announced by reproducing in acrylic on the back of your army surplus haversack an album cover of one of the clan totems. I don't remember which particular groups you professed to like was particularly important for friendship choices as long as they fell within the approved set. Though I claimed to like Led Zeppelin, most of my friends belonged to the Deep Purple faction and one even liked The Who.

Certain preferences were marginal but accepted because of the charisma of the individuals holding them. Elton John and Sparks were regarded as potentially a bit poofy but OK because one of the year's  football stars liked them. Similarly Queen was within the pale because they were the favourites of the year's outstanding rugby player (I think camp was not a word in his or our vocabulary). Other preferences were tolerated without being endorsed. There was a group of "Soul Boys" in the non grammar school stream, but we wouldn't have anything to do with them. There was also a small group of reggae/funk fans who were into Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, War and that kind of thing.They were tolerated on a live and let live basis mostly because they tended to be tough black kids who commanded a certain amount of wary respect. Popular amongst some of the  art-crowd, a little older than us, were The Faces, Roxy Music and David Bowie.

What was on the other side of the cultural divide was commercial pop, the sort of thing that  girls liked: The Bay City Rollers, The Osmonds, disco, Sheena Easton, the stuff you could see on Top of the Pops. To say you liked that was social death.

What strikes me now about all this is its arbitrariness. For all I know a mile down the road at a neighbouring school the lines of division could have been  and probably were quite different. There might have been some generic similarity but the details, and it was the details that were important for us, were purely local. I doubt if there was anyone of my age in my social milieu that liked or knew anything about classical music, jazz, folk or world music. I learned about them much later. Over the past week I've relaxed in the evening to Bix Beiderbecke, Wayne Shorter, Oscar Peterson, Benjamin Britten, Arnold Bax and Gil Scott-Heron. Cultural omnivore or cultural univore? High on cultural capital or low on cultural capital?

Into the mystic - Bourdieu and MCA

What is it with Bourdieusians and multiple correspondence analysis? Why do they place  so much faith in one modest little data reduction tool. Why don't they love other ways of projecting points into  low dimensional sub-spaces - PCA, factor analysis and MDS  - quite as much? And why do they feel the need to denigrate other ways of summarizing  and smoothing data - let's not even get on to causality -  often with "arguments" (I use the term loosely) that are so spurious and/or muddled one wonders whether the purveyor actually understands what they are writing about? 

You can find a new example of this woeful tendency here complete with the usual approving nod towards the great Chicago General Linear Reality Dragon Slayer and obeisance to Wuggenig. Pity the author didn't care to cite Chan and Goldthorpe's utter demolition of Wuggenig's folly - you can read it here. Really a bit naughty to ignore it. Must have slipped by on the referees' blind side.

The only explanation I can come up with is a primitive psychological need to see magical  connections between substantive objects of interest - cultural tastes, practices, consumption and the scientific tools we use to learn about them. Which is a good excuse to listen to Van Morrison getting into the mystic.

What's the point of Critical Realism?

Just in case you missed it, over at orgtheory.net there is a great calling out by Kieran Healey of the  sociological adherents of Critical Realism. Predictably the CR true believers and fellow-travellers resort to the tactic of the spectacular dive, rolling over clutching their ankles crying foul beloved of certain Southern European football teams in the 1970s before they decided to actually play football and thus wipe the floor with the rest of us. My gut instinct is that the latter outcome is not one that the CR groupies are likely to realize.

 I should say that my own engagement with CR has been limited to  asking myself whether there was anything as a sociologist that I would do differently if I took  CR seriously. Being unable to find a single thing I decided that I could safely ignore Bhaskar, Harre & Co and carry on as normal. I haven't discovered anything in the storm of words provoked by Healey's intervention that makes me think I was mistaken.

Also worth an honourable mention amongst the supporting gallery of commentators is Cornell's Stephen Morgan who has some nice remarks on the brain-dead parrots who repeat stuff about "general linear-reality" "variable sociology and its ontological assumptions" etc. We need more people in the discipline like Professors Healey  and Morgan who are prepared to stand up and call it the way that they see it. There is far too much seriously intellectually weak drivel in sociology that only survives because the purveyors of it won't or are unable to survive outside of their climate controlled ecological niche. They need to be smoked out and their arguments exposed to the cold light of reason and evaluated empirically (if there are any actual empirical claims). If this leads to frayed tempers, bruised egos and tears before bed-time so be it. The argument, which I've heard a lot recently, that sociologists shouldn't air their dirty linen in public is so much hog-wash. Unaired linen rots and produces rank odours. How are you going to build a discipline with that kind of foundation?

How do you get people to use a new method?

The always stimulating Edmund Chattoe-Brown has a new article out at Sociological Review Online called: Why Sociology Should Use Agent Based Modelling. Well worth reading (if you have institutional access). A minor quibble (wouldn't a better title substitute Sociologists for Sociology?) set me thinking. 

Proselytizing is fine up to a point, but what is it that really makes a methodological innovation take off? After all ABM has been around for quite a while - I remember attending Nigel Gilbert's inaugural in 1992(?) which was an advertisement for the promise of ABM (does anyone else remember Ig and Ug?) - yet within sociology, even amongst open minded and broadly sympathetic people like myself, it still seems to be lumbering down the runway without achieving lift-off.

If I think about methodological innovations that - for good or ill - changed the things that people routinely did in their research it seems to me that a common circumstance is that they appeared to provide an answer to, a clarification of, or a way of dealing with, a problem that was generally regarded as of substantive importance but which heretofore had no satisfactory solution. In other words there was already a conversation about subject matter substance that  a critical mass of people cared about.

Think about log-linear models. People had been struggling with how to make sense of social mobility data in circumstances where you wanted to compare 2 or more populations in which the observed marginal distributions of the populations were known to differ and in which the detail of the pattern of association was important (ie a single correlation coefficient was for various reasons inadequate). Cometh the hour, cometh the method. Regarding this as a problem in the modelling of odds-ratios revolutionized the way people thought about a substantive issue (sweeping away dead end ideas about "structural" and "exchange" mobility).

The word appeared, is important here: I'm not claiming that succesful innovations  actually did what people thought they did or would do (good examples of  cases where the over-enthusiastic adoption completely obscured the very careful and cautious claims of the pioneers are structural equation modelling and multi-level modelling) but simply that they seemed to help answer questions that enough people at the time found important for substantive reasons.

The lesson I take from this is that what will determine whether ABM ever takes off in sociology will be the publication in mainstream journals of a few articles reporting  realistic applications  to substantive problems that enough sociologists care about that tell us something believable and important that we didn't know already. When methods give us, or appear to give us, the insights we crave then they will be taken up.

We shouldn't forget though that sometimes it takes a long period of promise before delivery can happen. I first learned something about network analysis in 1989 by going to a course given by Martin Everett (and very good it was too). Sociology is only now, at least in the UK, getting beyond the "social network as metaphor" phase, but progress is being made. For a long time, it seems to me, methods of network analysis spiraled upwards in sophistication and complexity mostly within a substantive vacuum. The object of inquiry was network analysis itself. Now things are changing, largely because of the greater availability of data. We simply have more data about more or less complete networks relating to things that we care about for reasons that are central to the substance of the discipline. When network tools are seen to give answers to sociological questions, then they get taken up. I think there is a lesson here for ABM.

Bayes, Religion and academic politics

Over at Error Statistics there is an interesting post  reblogging a piece by Normal Deviate on the question of whether Bayesian inference is a religion? This is something that I  have no opinion about whatsoever, even when taken within the rather measured and circumscribed terms in which Normal Deviate frames it. There is a link though to a fascinating Youtube interview with Dennis Lindley that gives you a lot of  insight into one particular Bayesian mind. 

Starting around 10:28 Lindley, talking of the time when he was HoD at UCL makes the following extraordinary admission: "...there were two members of the department who weren't playing the Bayesian line at all and I didn't think they were very good, so I went to the administration of University College and asked if there was any chance of being able to sack them?" 

Well, I suppose that plotting to get rid of people that don't agree with you - let's leave aside the question of whether that is the reason you judge them to be no good - is perfectly coherent... Being quite untroubled in confessing it is, to my mind, quite chilling. Tenure, which we gave away without much of a fight, was invented for a reason.

Fighting the Good Fight

I took a break from posting for a few weeks while having a much needed internet free vacation - Algarve and then London. Now I'm back in harness and catching up. For those that  missed it here is a link to an interview with John Goldthorpe in which he sets out the case for paying serious attention to ALL the relevant evidence about social mobility in the UK. The argument is pretty unanswerable unless you have no interest in evidence based science and policy. At the end he also has a few choice comments on the Great British Class Survey. I'm actually impressed that an LSE site  hosted the interview given that it draws attention to the inadequacies of some of the work produced by the School's own faculty. It will be interesting to see how long this open minded policy survives in the era of impact spin.

As I mentioned before I submitted my own thoughts on the GBCS to Sociology and promised to keep you informed about the outcome. I didn't have long to wait (only about half the time it took from submission to acceptance of  Savage et al.'s original article). My effort received a flat desk reject - ie not sent out to referees - which increased my respect for the rapidity with which the referees of the original article acted if not for the soundness of their judgement. A radically shortened version will be going back. 

Those that are interested in the full length version  can find it here. It's not just a simple rehash of my original blog post and has some new material which I think is quite important (well I would wouldn't I?).

Undeterred, the fight against all sorts of Bad Social Science will continue, with or without the help of the conventional print journals.