Stephen L. Morgan’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

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Publications (66)


Figure 1. Proportion of Students Identified as Black or African American in Regular Elementary
Figure 4. The Persistence of de Facto Segregation for Regular Elementary Schools in the Four School
Figure 5. The Proportion of Students Who Fell Below the Reading Proficiency Cutoff in Third Grade
Figure 6. The Proportion of Students Who Fell Below the Mathematics Proficiency Cutoff in Third
Figure 7. Locations of Regular Elementary Schools in the Baltimore Metropolitan Area, Colored with

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The Coleman Report at Fifty: Its Legacy and Implications for Future Research on Equality of Opportunity
  • Article
  • Full-text available

September 2016

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373 Reads

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18 Citations

RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Karl Alexander

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Stephen L. Morgan
Download

Still No Effect of Resources, Even in the New Gilded Age?

September 2016

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33 Reads

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10 Citations

RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

The Coleman Report argued that family background is a fundamental cause of educational outcomes, while demonstrating the weak predictive power of variation in expenditures and facilities. This paper investigates the effects of family background, expenditures, and the conditions of school facilities for the public high school class of 2004, first sampled in 2002 for the Education Longitudinal Study and then followed up in 2004, 2006, and 2012. The results demonstrate that expenditures and related school inputs have very weak associations not only with test scores in the sophomore and senior years of high school but also with high school graduation and subsequent college entry. Only for postsecondary educational attainment do we find any meaningful predictive power for expenditures, and here half of the association can be adjusted away by school-level differences in average family background. Altogether, expenditures and facilities have much smaller associations with secondary and postsecondary outcomes than many scholars and policy advocates assume. The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report—that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment—is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago.


A New Conservative Cold Front? Democrat and Republican Responsiveness to the Passage of the Affordable Care Act

September 2015

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80 Reads

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13 Citations

Sociological Science

Through an analysis of the 2004 through 2014 General Social Survey (GSS), this article demonstrates that the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) decreased support for spending on health among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, contrary to the conjecture that a rigid partisanship equilibrium has taken hold among voters in the United States. Instead, only a partisan deflection is present, with spending preferences declining more for Republicans than for Democrats, and with Independents in between. Through supplemental analysis of the GSS panel data, as well as comparative analysis of other GSS items on national spending preferences, government responsibility, and confidence in leaders, this article also undermines support for an alternative explanation that cannot be entirely eliminated from plausibility, which is that the identified period effect that emerged in 2010 and persisted through 2014 is a response to the Great Recession and resulting deficit spending by the federal government. Implications for public opinion research are discussed, lending support to current models of thermostat effects and policy-specific political mood from the political science literature, which are informed by an older literature on weather fronts in public opinion that originated in the sociology literature.


A Design and a Model for Investigating the Heterogeneity of Context Effects in Public Opinion Surveys

April 2015

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18 Reads

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2 Citations

Sociological Methodology

Context effects on survey response, caused by the unobserved interaction between beliefs stored in personal memory and triggers generated by the structure of the survey instrument, are a pervasive challenge to survey research. The authors argue that randomized survey experiments on representative samples, when paired with facilitative primes, can enable researchers to model selection into variable context effects, revealing heterogeneity at the population level. The value of the design, and its associated modeling strategy, is demonstrated by its ability to deepen the interpretation of a treatment effect of international competitiveness framing on long-used items drawn from the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll and the General Social Survey about the quality of schooling in the United States, confidence in the leaders running public education, and support for spending to improve schools.


Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research

December 2014

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40 Reads

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378 Citations

In this second edition of Counterfactuals and Causal Inference, completely revised and expanded, the essential features of the counterfactual approach to observational data analysis are presented with examples from the social, demographic, and health sciences. Alternative estimation techniques are first introduced using both the potential outcome model and causal graphs; after which, conditioning techniques, such as matching and regression, are presented from a potential outcomes perspective. For research scenarios in which important determinants of causal exposure are unobserved, alternative techniques, such as instrumental variable estimators, longitudinal methods, and estimation via causal mechanisms, are then presented. The importance of causal effect heterogeneity is stressed throughout the book, and the need for deep causal explanation via mechanisms is discussed.


Table 2 : Commitment and Beliefs about the Educational Requirements of Expected Jobs for Six Focal Groups Defined by Race-Ethnicity and Immigrant Generation
Mexican Ancestry, Immigrant Generation, and Educational Attainment in the United States

September 2014

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63 Reads

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8 Citations

Sociological Science

After introducing alternative perspectives on assimilation and acculturation, we use the 2002-2012 waves of the Education Longitudinal Study to model differences in educational attainment for students sampled as high school sophomores in 2002. We focus on patterns observed for the growing Mexican immigrant population, analyzing separately the trajectories of 1 st , 1.5 th , 2 nd , and 3 rd + generation Mexican immigrant students, in comparison to 3 rd + generation students who self-identify as non-Hispanic whites and students who self-identify as non-Hispanic blacks or African Americans. The results suggest that the dissonant acculturation mechanism associated with the segmented assimilation perspective is mostly unhelpful for explaining patterns of educational attainment, especially for the crucial groups of 1.5 th and 2 nd generation Mexican immigrant students. Instead, standard measures of family background can account for large portions of group differences in bachelor's degree attainment, with or without additional adjustments for behavioral commitment to schooling, occupational plans, and educational expectations. The broad structure of inequality in the United States, as well as the rising costs of bachelor's degrees, should be the primary source of concern when considering the prospects for the incorporation of the children of recent Mexican immigrants into the mainstream.



Feeding the Pipeline: Gender, Occupational Plans, and College Major Selection

July 2013

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171 Reads

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256 Citations

Social Science Research

In this article, we analyze gender differences in college major selection for respondents to the Education Longitudinal Study (2002-2006), focusing on educational pathways through college that lead to science, engineering, or doctoral-track medicine occupations and to non-doctoral track clinical and health sciences occupations. We show that gender differences in college major selection remain substantial, even for a cohort in which rates of enrollment in postsecondary education are more than ten percent higher for young women than for young men. Consistent with other recent research, we demonstrate that neither gender differences in work-family goals nor in academic preparation explain a substantial portion of these differences. However, the occupational plans of high school seniors are strong predictors of initial college major selection, a finding that is revealed only when occupational plans are measured with sufficient detail, here by using the verbatim responses of students. We also find that the association between occupational plans and college major selection is not attributable to work-family orientation or academic preparation. Finally, we find gender differences in the associations between occupational plans and college major selection that are consistent with prior research on STEM attrition, as well as with the claim that attrition also affects the selection of majors that are gateways into doctoral-track medicine. We discuss the implications of the predictive power of occupational plans formed in adolescence for understanding sex segregation and for policies intended to create a gender-balanced STEM and doctoral-level medical workforce.


Occupational Plans, Beliefs About Educational Requirements, and Patterns of College Entry

July 2013

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66 Reads

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48 Citations

Sociology of Education

In this article, a measure of students’ beliefs is constructed from three sources of information on 12,509 high school seniors from the Education Longitudinal Study (2002 to 2006). First, verbatim responses to questions on occupational plans, drawn from restricted-access data records, are coded into 1,220 categories to capture detailed information (specific job titles), extended information (the listing of multiple jobs), and contradictory information (the listing of multiple jobs with divergent characteristics). Second, the educational requirements of detailed jobs, as specified in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network database, are matched to all jobs that students list within their verbatim occupational plans. Third, student perceptions of the educational requirements of their planned jobs, which were revealed in response to a follow-up question posed immediately after they provided their verbatim occupational plans, are used to identify students with puzzling beliefs about their educational and occupational trajectories. The authors then show that (1) students who are categorized as having uncertain and/or inaccurate beliefs about the educational requirements of their expected jobs have lower rates of college entry than those with certain and accurate beliefs, and (2) among entrants, these same students have lower rates of immediate college enrollment and lower attendance at four-year colleges.


Stutter-Step Models of Performance in School--Stutter-Step Models of Performance in School

May 2013

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17 Reads

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7 Citations

Social Forces

To evaluate a stutter-step model of academic performance in high school, this article adopts a unique measure of the beliefs of 12,591 high school sophomores from the Education Longitudinal Study, 2002-2006. Verbatim responses to questions on occupational plans are coded to capture specific job titles, the listing of multiple jobs, and the listing of multiple jobs with divergent characteristics. The educational requirements of detailed jobs, as specified in the Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network database, are then matched to all jobs that students list within their plans. Students with uncertain beliefs about their occupational futures are then shown to have lower levels of commitment to and performance in school. These results support the conjecture that uncertainty about the future has consequences for the short-run behavior that determines important educational outcomes, beyond the effects that are commonly attributed to existing models of performance.


Citations (54)


... The PO framework defines a causal effect based on a set of potential outcomes that could be observed in alternative states of the world (Rubin 1972(Rubin , 2005: the causal effect is the difference in potential outcomes across two states of nature ( Figure 1). The unobserved potential outcomes are counterfactuals (Morgan and Winship 2014). Counterfactuals, or well-defined alternatives to the outcomes that we observe in the world, are central to causal inference (Ferraro 2009). ...

Reference:

Foundations and Future Directions for Causal Inference in Ecological Research
Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research
  • Citing Book
  • December 2014

... In other words, by design, the APC-I method does not estimate the kind of linear or nonlinear cohort effects in traditional APC models because the latter's assumption that cohort effects can occur independently and additively of age and period effects lacks theoretical grounding and is thus arbitrary and questionable. 2 Our questioning of the validity of the accounting framework is not new (Hobcraft et al., 1982;Holford, 1983) and has been echoed in recent methodological work (see, e.g., Morgan, 2022;Morgan & Lee, 2021;Neil & Sampson, 2021). ...

A double-diamond retrospective on modeling change in attitudes and opinions
  • Citing Article
  • October 2022

Social Science Research

... Although there is clearly a relationship between political party and orientation, they are different con- cepts as both the Republican and the Democratic Party are composed of a variety of ideological camps and coalitions (Noel, 2016). 2 All models include controls for factors commonly associated with views of capital punishment. We operationalize racial animus with a measure of symbolic racism (see Morgan, 2022). Respondents were prompted with the following: "Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. ...

Prejudice, Bigotry, and Support for Compensatory Interventions to Address Black–White Inequalities: Evidence from the General Social Survey, 2006 to 2020

Sociological Science

... In other words, by design, the APC-I method does not estimate the kind of linear or nonlinear cohort effects in traditional APC models because the latter's assumption that cohort effects can occur independently and additively of age and period effects lacks theoretical grounding and is thus arbitrary and questionable. 2 Our questioning of the validity of the accounting framework is not new (Hobcraft et al., 1982;Holford, 1983) and has been echoed in recent methodological work (see, e.g., Morgan, 2022;Morgan & Lee, 2021;Neil & Sampson, 2021). ...

A Rolling Panel Model of Cohort, Period, and Aging Effects for the Analysis of the General Social Survey
  • Citing Article
  • November 2021

Sociological Methods & Research

... Although previous studies showed that the STEM attrition rates were higher among women than among men (Bieri Buschor et al., 2014;Weeden et al., 2020), we did not find that STEM workforces shrank more among women than men. Our results show that among the LEHMS and the white-collar STEM careers, there were comparable shrinkages in both gender groups, and that the women bluecollar STEM workforce maintained its size. ...

Pipeline Dreams: Occupational Plans and Gender Differences in STEM Major Persistence and Completion
  • Citing Article
  • June 2020

Sociology of Education

... Moreover, a substantial part of the literature has highlighted that conspiracy beliefs and mentality is favoured by pathological factors such as anxiety, paranoia and schizotypy as well as political factors such as perceived powerlessness and anomie (see Goreis & Voracek, 2019). Political science research conducted in the United States even points at specific elements of local cultures that favour the emergence of conspiracy beliefs, such as a paranoid style among mass opinion (Oliver & Wood, 2014) or ethnic prejudice (Morgan & Lee, 2019). ...

Economic Populism and Bandwagon Bigotry: Obama-to-Trump Voters and the Cross Pressures of the 2016 Election

Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

... However, the empirical disentanglement of the relative importance of the factors behind these two hypotheses is not easy, as witnessed by the sharp confrontation between Mug and Morgan in 2018 about the possible explanation of Trump's victory (Morgan, 2018b(Morgan, , 2018aMutz, 2018aMutz, , 2018b, and more generally by the series of works by Colantone and Stanig (2018c. This study aims to investigate the reasons for the rise of abstention and the success of left-wing and rightwing populist parties in Italy, relating electoral results to demographic and socio-economic factors. ...

Correct Interpretations of Fixed-effects Models, Specification Decisions, and Self-reports of Intended Votes: A Response to Mutz

Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

... Political speeches in various settings were the subject of this research. Some have examined the US presidential speeches in the context of the "War on Terror" narrative (Rashidi and Souzandehfar 2010;Sarfo and Krampa, 2012;Morgan, 2018) and the US election campaign speeches (Rahimi et al., 2010;Wang, 2010). Other studies have examined political speeches in Pakistan (Memon et al. 2014;Iqbal, 2013) and Africa (Alo, 2012). ...

Status Threat, Material Interests, and the 2016 Presidential Vote

Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

... Although a significance threshold of p < 0.05 has long been used in the social sciences and education research, there has long been disagreement about what the most appropriate significance level is (Benjamin et al., 2017). In the present study, a significance threshold of p < 0.01 was used for the regressions to obtain a better balance of Type I and Type II errors given the number of predictor variables being tested, the moderately large sample size (Murphy et al., 2014), and the exploratory nature of the current study. ...

Redefine statistical significance
Daniel Jacob Benjamin

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James Berger

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... Among our controls are five demographic characteristics. Support for Trump is often shown to be higher among voters who are White, male, older, religious, and less educated (e.g., Morgan & Lee, 2018;Tyson & Maniam, 2016). Race and gender are potentially as fundamental to shaping world view as personality. ...

Trump Voters and the White Working Class

Sociological Science