Bourdieu versus Bourdieu

My last post was a sideways observation on a little spat that is going on among the Bourdieusians. As I expected there is now a reply to the original comment. My reading of the whole thing is that Flemmen and Hjellbrekke wipe the floor with Atkinson and Deeming and that Atkinson's reply simply avoids the issues and throws in a few nasty ad hominem remarks to boot.

It's perhaps worth remembering that what they are arguing about, when it comes down to it, is little more than the correct way to interpret a few crosstabs. The fact that this is an issue at all tells you why an initiative like the UK's Q-Step is so important and why the paranoia in some quarters about the supposed dominance of quantitative methods in sociology research training is so completely bonkers. If we are still producing people who are shaky on crosstabs then we really are doomed.

I've nothing to contribute to the argument about which interpretation of Bourdieu on homologies is canonical; that's something for the fan-boys (and girls) to pursue. What I can do though is correct a few howlers that crept into the exchange.

Firstly, pace Atkinson, Benzécri did not invent correspondence analysis (I'd expect a diligent Bourdieusian to know that). Priority is generally ceded to H. O. Hirschfeld (1935) 'A connection between correlation and contingency' Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. with notable contributions by Ronald Fisher (1940) 'The precision of discriminant functions' Ann. Eugen. and K. Maung (1941) 'Measurement of association in a contingency table with special reference to a pigmentation of hair and eye colours of Scottish school children' Ann. Eugen.

Secondly, and again pace Atkinson, it is simply not the case that multiple responses from the same individual 'may make CA an inappropriate method' (pp 195). There is no computational reason for this to be so and no formal inferential reason - typically inference of a formal kind is eschewed by CA practitioners so this can hardly be relevant. It may make a difference to how you interpret the numbers you get from the procedure, but that is another matter entirely.

All in all then, another lamentable so called debate that on closer examination turns out not to be a debate at all, but more of an unedifying squabble about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. I'm off for lunch.

Problems with inertia

This is  hilarious (paywalled but you can get the gist from the abstract). One lot of Bourdieusian fellow travellers sticking it to another lot. The issue? The first lot can't interpret a correspondence analysis correctly. 

Let's face it, if you are a Bourdieusian and you can't read a correspondence analysis bi-plot properly then what the Hell can you do? I'm looking forward to the reply to the reply. Pure sociology as soap opera. 

Here's a piece of advice to the hapless Bristolians. If you are a bit shaky on data interpretation follow the lead of the acknowledged masters. Collect loads and loads of data; add almost as many co-authors; write a short book; print it in a large font to make it a long book; try to use as little of the data as possible; cover your tracks by mislabelling as many tables and figures as possible; deposit the data in the public domain in a form that renders it useless to other users.  All boxes ticked. Job done.

Oxbridge, admissions, ethnicity and all that

The annual round of Oxbridge bashing has begun. This year, irony of irony,  David Cameron is leading the pack. If nothing else that  should give you pause for thought. Tories are very good at getting heavy with soft targets. The usual suspects  have been quick to jump on the bandwagon. Some making reasonable points, others just badly informed or seemingly incapable of rational argument. One particular focus has been on Oxford's record on ethnic minority admissions.

Now, as it happens, this is something I know a little about. In fact I've actually seen some of the evidence on ethnic admissions  that the critics would  have the university put in the public domain.  I too would like it to be in the public domain, but  at the moment it isn't and  the documents that contain it are headed Strictly Confidential. No doubt if I were to reveal the detail of the secrets therein I would be sacked for gross misconduct.

I would possibly also be prosecuted under the UK's data protection laws because in order to carry out a proper statistical analysis of the Oxford admission process one really has to condition on all of the information that is relevant to the selectors' decisions (not actual A level results which are normally unknown at the point an offer is made) but course choice, college choice, GCSE results and whatever additional entrance tests are applicable. Once one drills this far down into the data, identifying individuals would be comparatively easy if anyone was so minded.  This doesn't mean that data should not be available to bona fide researchers but it does imply that, under the current legal framework,  it should be subject to the same kinds of secure access restrictions that apply to all data  that are potentially disclosive of the identity of living persons.

Without giving away anything that couldn't be worked out from publicly available information the scope for ethnic bias in the internal processes is almost certainly ruled out at the point of selection for interview.  The numbers simply confirm this. It could hardly be otherwise because in most cases these decisions are made on an algorithmic basis combining information on existing academic performance and whatever entrance tests are required. At this stage human judgement doesn't really enter into it. There is a threshold; if you pass over it you move on to interview; if you don't you get a "wishing you every success" letter.

The lack of ethnic representativeness at Oxford  is mostly attributable to who applies and what their prior academic record is like. Mostly. If there is a smoking gun, and prudence prevents me from confirming or denying it, it can only concern what happens at the interview stage.

There could be several entirely natural reactions to this statement. One is disbelief. If you don't believe me, then there is little I can do at the moment to persuade you except hope that eventually the relevant data will become available for public scrutiny and my story  vindicated. Another is to accept that a large part of what we observe is driven by who turns up at the door and what their academic record shows but then go on to say that Oxford must try harder to persuade the no shows to join the party. 

Fair enough, but the university does actually spend a lot of money on outreach activities. No doubt it could spend more, but it is not obvious that spending more will make that much of a difference. It's also not obvious that anyone really knows what works and what doesn't.

I was once approached to carry out an "evaluation" of outreach activity, but it was immediately obvious that the people I was talking to had no real idea of what evaluation actually involved and were horrified by how much it would cost. It became entirely clear that they were not going to take away any money from their core activities in order to fund a serious evaluation of what they were doing.

A third reaction is to point the finger at the interview. I've got a lot of sympathy for that point of view and I'm not the only one. Oxford is not a monolith. You wouldn't guess that from the shrill condemnations of its critics. People within the walls actually do have different opinions about the interview process. A significant number would be happy to get rid of it. An equally large number of diehards believe the world (as they know it) would come to an end if interviews were abolished. They are right and that would be a good reason for doing it.

But, in my view, this is all fiddling around at the margins. I actually believe that the entire structure of English higher education is warped by the existence of Oxbridge. The problem is that entry to Oxford or Cambridge is viewed as a prize that should go to the swift and that is what turns it into a social club  and finishing school for those that have already done rather well out of the educational system. 

What is needed is radical and rational change. My prescription for the entire HE sector would look like this:

1) A baccalaureate style education up to 18 with all candidates for higher education having to be examined in a range of science and humanities subjects;

2) Post exam selection - none of this predicted grade nonsense;

3) Entry by threshold ie all universities must make publicly available a grade threshold for entry to their programmes. All applicants attaining the threshold must be admitted and in the case of oversubscription places to be allocated by lottery.

4) Special entrance examinations and interviews would be forbidden.

My prediction is that if we were to introduce something along these lines the Oxbridge problem, at least in its present form,  would go away, the talent would be dispersed over a wider range of institutions and teaching standards would be improved. I'm not holding my breath though.

RIP Terry Wogan

So Farewell
Then
Michael Terence Wogan.

Yes. My Mum
liked you.
On Radio Two.

Middle of the road.
That was your style.

But now
It is
Blankety blank.

M. N. Gopaleen (13 ¾)

Cultural hybridity

We're sociologists so we know all about cultural hybridity right? So on a Burns related theme how about this for sheer intercultural weirdness?

I hae been blythe wi' comrades dear;
I hae been merry drinking;
I hae been joyfu' gathe'rin gear;
I hae been happy thinking:
But a' the pleasures e'er I saw,
Tho' three times doubl'd fairly,
That happy night was worth them a',
Amang the rigs o' barley.

Come to think of it, as a weltanschauung it takes some beating.

Scots wha hae

It's the anniversary of Robert Burns' birth today and I'm sure you've laid in a goodly supply of sheep lung and bladder.

To get you in the mood here is a little music. First a song not by Burns  himself but a confection from a 1915 dialect poem by Violet Jacob  called The Wild Geese set to  music by Jimmy Reid. It now gets performed under the title Norland Wind. It's a beautiful song, but perhaps not entirely appropriate for Burns Night as Jacob was part of a scots poetic movement that saw itself as reviving a poetic tradition that was different to Burns' own.

But of course we have to have something by the man himself so here's the late Michael Marra performing Green Grow the Rashes.

Pseudo R-Square

This is just a quick  plug for a good blog post by Brendan Halpin on Pseudo R-Squares. I don't think I've ever had any answer, never mind a good answer, when I've asked paper writers, seminar presenters etc why they have reported a pseudo R -Square measure? Yet still it turns up again and again and ritual dummheit builds on ritual dummheit.

Come to think of it I've not seen much intelligent use of plain vanilla R-Square in the context of linear models unless the problem at hand has a clear prediction flavour to it.