George Argyrous

• PhD
• Paul Ramsay Foundatrion

Among the various evaluation capacity building strategies, there is an important opportunity to enhance the evidence on the effectiveness of communities of practice (CoPs). We argue that evaluation CoPs have great potential to develop evaluative thinking among nonevaluation specialists and build the foundations of a sustainable organizational evalu...

Previous research into Australian convict transportation has concluded that a significant downturn in mortality rates occurred with the appointment of naval surgeons as superintendents in 1815. Statistical analysis of convict ships sent to New South Wales between 1787 and 1849 shows a more significant downturn occurred in 1800, following the introd...

This paper uses Australian data from a national representative sample of Australian couples having their first child. Using data from before and after the birth of the child on a range of variables, including economic resources, gender attitudes, workplace flexibility, and availability of non-parental childcare, we first model the factors are assoc...

The transportation of convicts to the British penal colony at New South Wales in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was largely undertaken by private merchants under contract to government. In the early years, the outcomes of this system, as measured by mortality rates, were mixed, but by the turn of the century, public officials had refined it...

http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/australia-and-new-zealand-school-of-government-anzsog-2/social-cost-benefit-analysis-in-australia-and-new-zealand/

This paper illustrates the use of a quality assessment tool for regression analysis. It is designed for non-specialist 'consumers' of evidence, such as policy makers. The tool provides a series of questions such consumers of evidence can ask to interrogate regression analysis, and is illustrated with reference to a recent study published in a peer-...

This paper analyzes the effect of paid work by coupled parents of young children on the joint decisions to spend time engaged in childcare. We explore this using Australian Time-Use Survey data from 2006. We examine the effect of paid work in terms of the effect that total work time on a given day has on the amount of time spent on childcare; the a...

This paper surveys the teaching of pluralist economics in Australian universities with a particular focus on explaining growth and decline. The paper also presents the results of a survey of staff teaching pluralist economics to assess their background and views on the state of economics teaching. The key finding of our survey is that the most prom...

Both neoclassical and post-Keynesian growth theory fails to explain the determinants of the growth of demand. Historically, the growth of demand has depended on the changing structure of social classes, which in turn is also a key to the growth of productivity. Understanding this makes it possible to develop a simple theory in which the growth of d...

This article provides a practical guide for improving the quality of evidence-based policy. Rather than adopting an approach that gives priority to particular types of research methodologies, this paper argues that evidence drawn from any methodology will improve if standards of transparency and accountability are followed in the process of gatheri...

This paper investigates the extent to which unemployment, particularly among older males, is hidden by the welfare system. It is argued that the official unemployment rate has fallen because of a decline in participation rates among older males since 1972, and a significant proportion of these can be accounted for by the increase in the percentage...

Australia Governments since the late 1970's have attempted to eliminate the fiscal deficit through reductions in expenditure. These efforts have failed. With each successive business cycle the Federal Government's budget outcome has been an ever growing deficit. This paper explains the failure of the government to achieve its balanced budget object...

The choice of tests for dependent samples, as with tests for independent samples, is affected by the level at which the test variable is measured. For interval/ratio data, in Chapter 17, we used a t-test for the mean difference. This chapter will consider non-parametric tests that can be applied to dependent samples compared in terms of nominal or...

The previous two chapters discussed situations where two or more samples were compared in terms of a variable measured at the interval/ratio level. However, in social science we often do not work with interval/ratio data but ordinal-level data instead. Sometimes this ordinal-level data looks like interval/ratio, especially with attitude scales that...

Chapter 3 looked at the options available for displaying a distribution of results in the form of a graph. A researcher will encounter many distributions when collecting data on different variables, each of which will probably have a unique shape when graphed.

This chapter concentrates on measures of association for variables measured at the ordinal level. These are PRE measures of association that are similar to lambda. With ordinal data, though, we have more information than with nominal data; in particular we know the ranking of cases. Ordinal measures of association take advantage of this extra infor...

We have previously made the general point that statistical significance and theoretical or practical significance are not the same. We may, for example, find a relationship between age and exam grades. However, the mere fact that there is a difference in exam scores between age groups gives no guidance as to whether the relationship between these v...

The previous chapters discussed situations where we made an hypothesis about a population parameter. We hypothesize that the population mean or proportion is a specific value and then determine the likelihood of drawing from this population a sample with a different mean or proportion. We do this by calculating a z-score or a t-score and looking up...

In Chapter 7 we looked at the properties of a sampling distribution of sample means. This sampling distribution has three very important properties: The mean of the sampling distribution is equal to the population mean: $$ {\mu _{\bar X}} = \mu

In Chapter 13 we considered the t-test for two independent samples, and tested the assumption that the samples came from populations with the same mean: $$ {H_0}:{\mu _1} = {\mu _2}

This chapter will look at the most popular technique for hypothesis testing of categorical data. This is the chi-square test of independence. The earlier chapters emphasized that the choice of inference test is mainly affected by two considerations: the number of samples to be compared (i.e. one sample, two samples, or more than two samples); the l...

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a very long book. It would not be possible to do such a book justice in any way other than to read it from cover to cover. However, this takes a lot of time and concentration, each of which may not be readily available. If we want to simply get a gist of the story, a shorter summary is adequate. A summary reduces the thou...

The previous chapter analysed the process of estimating an unknown population parameter from a sample result. The general problem addressed in that chapter can be illustrated as shown in Figure 9.1.

As with two variables measured on ordinal scales that have many values, when working with two variables measured at the interval/ratio level we no longer talk about association. Instead we talk about correlation. For our purposes though, the two concepts are synonymous: we are interested in whether a change in the value of one variable goes hand-in...

The previous chapter looked at ways of summarizing data by producing frequency tables. However, often the most striking way of summarizing information is with a graph. A graph provides a quick visual sense of the main features of the data. The particular graphs that can be constructed in any given context are determined largely by the level of meas...

The previous two chapters looked at ways of describing data in tabular and graphical form. These forms of describing data give some sense of the overall distribution of cases. However, we sometimes want to capture something a little more specific about the data: what does the ‘typical’ or ‘average’ case look like? Similarly, we might ask how much v...

The previous chapters looked at z-tests and t-tests for a single mean. However, social research is not always interested in investigating the mean of a distribution. We might be interested in other aspects of the population under investigation. For example, we might not be interested in the average height of people studying statistics, but rather t...

This book is concerned with the analysis of data, which we will simply define as measurements of a variable. To gain a deeper understanding of data analysis, though, we must first define some key terms and look at the process of measurement a little more closely. The starting point is the notion of a variable.

The previous chapters raised some of the conceptual issues involved in defining and measuring variables, and then describing the results using graphs, tables, and summary statistics. To illustrate the issues involved, we made use of the data from a hypothetical survey of 20 statistics students.

So far, we have looked at ways of summarizing information; we collect measurements from a set of cases and then reduce these hundreds (sometimes thousands) of numbers into one or two descriptive statistics such as the mean and standard deviation. We have seen how such descriptive statistics provide a useful summary of the overall picture, saving us...

The previous chapters introduced the logic of statistical inference. The examples used to illustrate the hypothesis testing procedure provided us with a great deal of information to make an inference, in particular, the mean and standard deviation of the population are known. With this information we are able to draw up the sampling distribution. B...

This chapter discusses measures of association for two variables when at least one of the variables is measured at the nominal level. It will concentrate on two frequently used measures for such data: Cramer’s V and lambda.

All the tests covered thus far have been dealing with the one-sample case. That is, they all involve making an inference about one population only: we don’t have information about the population, so we infer it from the sample result. We make this inference so that we can compare the result with another population for which we do have information....

In Chapters 13–16 we looked at inference tests for two or more independent samples.

From the Publisher: This text offers a clear introduction to statistics for social science students. This is achieved by a user friendly exposition of the concepts and techniques in general, supported by definitions in boxes and worked practical examples. Statistics for Social Research introduces the basic statistical concepts of data description,...

This paper explores the conditions under which a specialist machine tool industry emerges during the course of development. It uses Kaldors four stages of development and cumulative causation as a theoretical framework for studying these conditions in the context of the Australian industry. The paper analyses the links between the development of a...

Kaldor, who built on the work of Allyn Young. 1 Kaldor argued that industrialization is a cumulative process in which the development of industries producing consumer goods precedes the development of those producing capital goods, and where production for sale precedes production for export. Kaldor's theory has had an important influence on other...

This paper traces recent developments in economic theory from the perspective of Thorstein Veblen's methodological distinction between teleological and evolution modes of scientific thought. It is argued that the imposition of rational behavior at the individual level prevents neoclassical theory from exhibiting genuine evolutionary processes since...

Thirty years after its publication, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is still the source of much discussion in economics. Its rel-ativistic tone has often been used to fuel the claims of dissident traditions against the prevailing orthodoxy, or at least to plead the case for intellectual pluralism (Dow, 1985). Through his argum...

Poor economic performance and the Bougainville mine closure have focused attention in PNG on the appropriate stabilization package and micro policies necessary to improve the country's economic prospects. A package of structural adjustment “reforms”, strongly supported by the IMF and World Bank, have been introduced. This paper examines the applica...

Poor economic performances and the Bougainville mine closure have focused attention in PNG on the appropriate stabilization package and micropolicies necessary to improve the country's economic prospects. A package of structural adjustment "reforms', strongly supported by the IMF and World Bank, have been introduced. This paper examines the applica...